CYBERTERRORISM fears are through the roof. Ransomware is wreaking havoc on corporations, hospitals and individuals. Printers can be hacked to take down the world’s largest websites. Put simply, the internet is a mess.

You’re probably familiar with all this hand-wringing. What you might not know is that a solution has been around for decades, and in principle we could apply it tomorrow. Do so, and in one fell swoop we could get rid of ransomware, DDOS attacks and possibly nation state cyberattacks. You might even get rid of trolls.

Even now, this next-generation internet plan is being talked up in the obscure back rooms of internet governance. It is touted as a way of guarding against the potential apocalypse of putting your fridge, your toaster and a billion other gadgets online. There’s just one tiny problem: if it’s adopted globally, the new regime might just destroy the online world as we know it.

Breaking point

That’s a high price to pay, but it seems we have to do something. The existing internet was never meant to cope with billions of users and abusers – though its underlying technology, known as TCP/IP, was designed to survive cold war nuclear annihilation.

Rather than sending data across static network paths, which could be destroyed, TCP/IP will do everything it can to get packets of information from point A to point B via any viable route. It doesn’t care who you are, what you’re sending or who you’re sending it to: all that matters is the internet addresses that need connecting.

This attitude was fine in the 1970s when you could map the entire internet on a . These days, it is a disaster, making it tough to figure out who people on the internet actually are and stop them doing bad things.

But what if you could assign a unique, permanent and traceable identifier to every phone, laptop, identity or document? Robert Kahn, co-developer of TCP/IP, created just such a system in the . As the modern internet struggles, it is starting to get attention.

Rather than dealing with anonymous packets of data, Kahn’s system is based on digital objects – each a specific sequence of bits with its own unique identifier, or handle. This “handle system” is already in limited use on today’s internet. Academic journals use a form of handle called a , aka, DOI, to give research papers a citable and unchanging identity, even if it moves to a new website.

“It’s one identifier for the material that gets you to the material, no matter where it is,” says Kahn. Research papers are just one example. “It can be a movie, a book or chapters of a book,” he says. And using handles to identify parts of a digital object, like a chapter, would provide a massive online security update.

Take medical records, for example. You could tag individual lab results with their own identifier that determines who can look at each set. This would let you decide exactly what to disclose, so a doctor could treat your heart disease while being unable to access anything related to your sexual health.

As more information goes online, the need for such fine-grained protection grows. While putting your fridge on the internet could help you stock up on groceries, an explosion of insecure networked devices creates the potential for hackers to enlist a vast botnet army.

That’s why countries including Russia, China and Saudi Arabia banded together to ensure the UN adopted the handle system for such devices, ostensibly to close these glaring security holes.

Greater control over data, better security and a way to trace troublemakers – so far the handle system sounds perfect. But there is a downside.

Authoritarian regime

“It has become a poster-child for more centralised control, something that many governments are attracted to,” says , an internet policy consultant based in London. “It’s vulnerable to capture by governments who are likely to want it run in a way that solves political, not technical, problems.”

Robert McDowell, a former commissioner for the US Federal Communications Commission, has graver concerns. He has said the handle system could become an ““. That’s because it doesn’t just regulate devices and documents – anything can be a digital object, including people. McDowell warns that this could lead to “real-time surveillance and tracking of each device and individual connected to the web”. Just as a medical record would be subdivided, you too could become a “super identifier” whose various devices and internet activities all link back to you.

The handle system allows the creation of master databases where every digital object is uniquely tagged, and where information is added, tracked and queried. Anyone who controls this registry becomes the gatekeeper to all the information, resources and devices on their patch of the internet. As of last month, have created such registries.

So what happens when the gatekeeper shuts you out? The handle system lets them deny access to any device without a valid identifier. That doesn’t have to be a smart light bulb. It could also be your laptop, your smartphone, your twitter account – or even you. And who decides whether an identifier is valid? Your government, with all its potential authoritarian foibles.

Many governments have already demonstrated their desire to take down bits of the internet they don’t like. China’s “Great Firewall” heavily restricts what its citizens can do online. Russia, Turkey and Egypt have all temporarily switched off access to certain sites. Even in the UK, most ISPs block file-sharing sites ruled illegal by the High Court.

“Greater control over data, better security and a way to trace troublemakers. But there’s a downside”

At the moment this is done by blocking access to certain internet addresses at a national level – removing your online destination for everyone in a country. Under the handle system, a government could just single you out personally, revoking access to pages it didn’t want you seeing.

Kahn points out that it is already possible to control the internet. “Governments can do repressive things, and technology isn’t a stumbling block. Every government could cut off communications into its country through normal channels.”

But it’s the specificity of the handle system that has people worried. “Censorship regimes can rely on the handle system to more easily control the flow of information,” says of online expression charity Article 19. “The ultimate effect would be to place greater control in the hands of states and corporations that seek to restrict the internet’s capacity as a space for discourse, protest and the free exchange of information.”

Right now, there’s a kind of internet-governance cold war over the handle system. After winning the fight for UN recognition as an international standard, some Arab states, Russia and China want to start rolling it out. On the other side, Western countries are generally against the handle system, happy to stick with plain TCP/IP, whether out of precedent or principle.

But this is a cold war that TCP/IP may not survive unscathed. If the handle system is widely adopted, we could see the lowering of a new, digital Iron Curtain, with geo-political blocs defined by the way it is used. If China, Russia and their allies crack down on super identifiers they don’t like, while the US, Europe and others do not, your smartphone may stop working at the border.

That’s not even the worst of it. How long before the handle system is discovered by UK prime minister Theresa May, who earlier in the summer ? Or by Donald Trump, who suggested on the presidential campaign trail that Bill Gates should ““.

So yes, we could fix the internet, and do away with all the crooks, trolls and general troublemakers. But perhaps these malcontents are the price we pay for a free and open online society.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Weaving a new web”

BARACK OBAMA’S success in the 2008 US presidential race – dubbed the Facebook election – is credited with persuading politicians around the globe that they couldn’t ignore the digital world. His re-election in 2012 was a powerful reminder. That campaign built a huge digital presence: 45 million Facebook likes, 23 million Twitter followers and 1 million downloads of its Facebook app. Crucially, Obama converted this into offline gains: 358,000 events were organised online, and – over half of his total.

Similarly, in the 2014 Indian election, Narendra Modi became prime minister after enlisting 2.2 million volunteers via online tools, and engaging with hundreds of thousands to crowdsource his BJP party’s manifesto.

How decisive social media was in those outcomes is an open question. In 2009, the , but not the election result. During the Scottish independence referendum, the Yes campaign was ahead on social media throughout – and lost. Campaigners know online support matters, but the key is to convert it into volunteers, money and votes.

All eyes are now on the UK general election in May. As the campaign heats up, politicians are, often reluctantly, dragging themselves onto digital platforms, especially Twitter. A record 80 per cent of MPs standing for re-election have done so, sending a total of 10,000 tweets a week. And the Conservatives reportedly .

There’s no doubt that social media is changing politics. Social networks spell the end of . For decades, central party machines tightened their grip on what politicians said in public. This was a world of central planning that aimed to shape the news agenda, pager prompts to enforce a unified message and carefully briefed spokespeople.

All of that is being washed away in a wave of tweets. Backbench MPs are quietly dropping the party sound bites and slogans as they use Twitter to engage with constituents. They’re even dropping almost all mention of their own party leader. Of 15,000 recent tweets sent by Conservative MPs, just 69 mentioned David Cameron. Party hierarchies are trapped: they either accept this, or impose a draconian digital order on what MPs say and risk alienating the very group they seek to woo, those who value genuine online engagement.

Social media has also dissolved the barriers that used to bar entry into public life and political debate. An enormous digital commons has been created and the UK public fires 300,000 tweets a week back at politicians – a barrage of insults, questions, support and jokes. Every major moment of a campaign, the gaffes, controversies, clashes and announcements, provoke enormous spasms of digital reaction. People flock to popular hashtags to boo, cheer, check facts or just to collectively experience political life.

As people step into this novel arena, they form different kinds of connections to politics. Parties now have more unique Twitter followers than they have formal party members. Likes, follows, retweets and favourites are new kinds of political identity, and a new way of expressing support. This connection is more casual and transient than formal membership. As these weaker ties become more dominant, party followership and loyalty become more volatile.

“Political parties now have more unique Twitter followers than they have formal members”

The digital campaign is also changing which voices dominate. Mainstream parties now have to compete with a much larger and more diverse group vying for digital attention, and in general they are not winning.

Comedian-turned-activist Russell Brand has three times as many Twitter followers as every British MP put together, and powerful protest voices have emerged on digital platforms, that – like Brand – dwarf the influence of politicians in this space. Groups, too, from left wing Occupy and Anonymous to the far right and English Defence League, have sprung up, relying on social media to recruit, coordinate and keep members.

This trend could eventually change who enters formal politics. By 2020, individuals and groups will have emerged from the digital commons to contest the mainstream election – and they could win.

Recall the rise of Beppe Grillo, a grizzled, angry Italian comedian with no history in politics. He built millions of social media followers and the most popular in Italy. From that, he created the Five Star Movement, a furious, insurgent, anti-corruption groundswell. He refused to talk to mainstream media and had no big business funders. It didn’t matter. Using Meetup – an online network facilitating offline gatherings – he built an army of volunteers, spoke to Italy through his blog and crowdfunded his campaign. In a year, he had come from nowhere to win 1 in 4 votes at the 2013 election.

The backdrop today is a crisis in politics for the mainstream, as anti-establishment parties spring up. When this trend and the rise of social media fully come together, the result will be a decisive transformation of the British political landscape. A chorus of charismatic, angry, insurgent and anti-incumbent voices will emerge to take on the mainstream parties, using digital platforms to organise, raise money and engage directly with the electorate. It is likely that will be more inclined to vote.

Make no mistake, underneath the trivial, ephemeral and the banal on social media, seismic changes are under way. Maybe the tremors won’t be fully felt in 2015, but by 2020 the ground will be well and truly shaking.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Tweet victory?”