Universities don’t just provide education; they’re also the setting for a lot of the most innovative research being carried out today. The kind of research carried out in universities is rarely done in the private sector because it’s a often long way from anything that can be turned into a product that will make money but it makes a huge contribution to our understanding of science, and some of this research could be important in the future. During its first few decades, computer technology was developed almost exclusively in universities and publicly funded research institutes because there were few commercial uses for early computers, but their successors have had a huge influence on our lives. Some of the things being developed by university researchers today will prove to be very important, but it could be years before we see any of them.

Eventually, knowledge trickles through to companies, which benefits the economy – and it might even improve lives at the same time, for example by providing better medical treatments – so society does benefit from all of the public money that goes into science. It’s also good for the universities, because a department with a reputation for producing good research can attract better staff and more students, and goes on to continue producing useful research. It’s a self-sustaining loop, but it needs government funding to maintain the facilities which make it all possible.

Last month the first cuts were announced, with the government denying funding for several major projects that the Research Councils (the organisations which distribute public money to research projects ) had considered to a high priority. Most of the news coverage focussed on the effect this would have on Physics and Astronomy because the UK has now been forced to withdraw subscriptions to major international facilities, but the effects will be felt across scientific disciplines. Capital expenditure funding, which is used to buy the largest items, is now almost non-existent, and from now on the Research Councils will only pay for half of any item that costing £10k-£100k, leaving universities to find the rest of the money from their general budgets.

This week there was another announcement, this time giving the details of two new “efficiency” initiatives that will allow the Research Councils to save even more money by clawing it back from existing projects, and reducing the amounts that they pay to universities for indirect costs, which help to fund the infrastructure that makes research possible. For the first of these, the “top slice”, universities will be invoiced for the efficiency savings they’re expected to find across all of their grants from each Council. This is the second year that money has been taken back from existing grants: last year individual grants had their budgets reduced, but this time the process has been streamlined to reduce the administrative burden for the Research Councils, shifting it instead to universities.

The other cut affects new grants, and will take a year-on-year percentage of the indirect costs (which contribute towards the university’s general running costs; these are sometimes called overheads) awarded for each project, depending on how efficient the Research Council thinks that particular university is. Those judged to be most efficient will have reductions of 1% or less, but the least efficient will be told to save 5% year-on-year.

This is a significant shift in policy, because the system which has been in place since 2006 has allowed universities to claim indirect costs based on what it actually costs to run their institution. Whereas previously academics would often try to submit grant proposals with unsustainably low budgets because they thought that this would make their applications more likely to succeed, since 2006 universities have been encouraged to set fixed rates for indirect costs which are verified annually through a lengthy auditing process. This means that the government is forcing universities back to a one-size-fits-all view of research costs, and shrinking their general budgets at exactly the same time as those budgets will be expected to cover more of the costs associated with research.

In Higher Education today, the world leaders are determined not by the quality of their teaching, but by the quality of their research, and there’s no way of avoiding the fact that good research is expensive. There has been plenty of debate over whether British universities offer the kind of academic salaries that will attract candidates who will allow them to compete with the top private institutions in the US, but by focussing solely on pay, they’ve ignored the other factors that motivate scientists. Those who make it to the top of their profession are driven by a desire to advance their research, and will choose to work in an environment that gives them the best chance of success, not just the best remuneration. When George W. Bush introduced a policy preventing public funds from being used to support embryonic stem cell research, American scientists working in that area of research dispersed across the globe rather than accept the new limitations. As research budgets are gradually eroded and facilities go downhill, the government risks triggering a similar phenomenon here, but across science as a whole instead of in one small sub-group.

We live in a country which has a great history of scientific discoveries, but if the government continues to under-fund the facilities that make research possible, then the only future for British science is in the history books.

That isn’t to say that governments don’t have an important role to play with regard to the Internet. After all, the Internet grew out of government backed projects: the Internet itself, for example, was spun off the US military ARPANET project, and later on Tim Berners Lee’s invention of the Web was made possible through some enlightened decisions at CERN. We still need government today to defend and uphold the basic principles that make the Internet what it is: net neutrality, for example. It’s also true that, realistically, we sometimes need governments to decide when certain kinds of activity which basically didn’t exist before the Internet should be considered a crime. The case that is always cited as an example of this is the I LOVE YOU virus, whose Filipino creator apparently couldn’t be prosecuted, because that country had no laws about virus writing at the time. So when – as the FCO statement on Obama and Cameron’s joint policy does – the attention turns to actual concrete meaningful things like the Budapest Convention, then my ears start to prick up again. The Budapest Convention, also called the Convention on Cybercrime is the Council of Europe’s attempt to produce a single framework for international cybercrime law. It has its critics. Some say its provisions are overly broad and lacking in adequate safeguards. But it is at least an example of the kind of thing which governments ought to be doing in relation to the Internet.

Nor is it the case that cybersecurity is a non-issue as such. It is perfectly reasonable to governments not to want hackers from anywhere in the world to be able to access their computer systems – though again, that doesn’t mean that accidentally deleting some documents on a Pentagon server makes you a ‘cyberterrorist’ (is it too much to hope that the word ‘cyber’ coming from an American president could possibly have prompted, perhaps behind closed doors, the words ‘Gary MacKinnon‘ from his prime minister?).

So why is it that talk of ‘cyberspace’ from governments makes me tend to glaze over? Or, perhaps better, why is it that the endless plans and programmes and policy papers on the subject (a good example of which is the report that Obama commissioned as one of his first acts in office) seem so often to have so little substance?

The answer to this question is worth setting out I think, not so much because it has anything to do with cybersecurity per se, but rather because it has something important to tell us about politics in a wider sense.

And in order to tell this story, I shall have to go back a few years, to 2008.

It was in that year that, rather unexpectedly, I found myself employed to write a report for the United Nations on the subject of ‘countering the use of the Internet for terrorist purposes’. I was just beginning a PhD, and although I was very flattered to be approached for the job, I hardly felt qualified – particularly for such a potentially large and ambiguous remit. Realising that I knew very little myself, I set myself to talking to anyone who might have something to say on the subject. In retrospect of course this is called ‘research’.

Probably the best single decision I made that year was to attend the 2008 ICANN meeting in Paris. If you Google me, you can see that I still have a caricature on the ICANNwiki to prove it. ICANN is an interesting organisation. It’s a non-profit corporation  which has the job of looking after the relationships between ‘numbers’ (that is, the numerical ‘IP addresses’ which theoretically tell every computer on the Internet where every other computer is), and ‘names’ like http://www.brightgreenscotland.org/ which humans use to find out where the stuff they are looking for is. This is, in essence, the system we call the ‘Domain Name System’, and it underpins the Internet as we know it. So, in so far as anyone does, ICANN runs the Internet. But the thing that really makes ICANN interesting is not so much what it does, as its anomalous situation.

Cutting a very long story short, here is a potted (and outrageously simplified) history of Internet governance. Once upon time, it was suggested to the US defence advanced research projects agency (DARPA), that a decentralised, ‘packet switched’ digital communications network would be much more robust than conventional phone network that existed at the time. In order to turn this idea into a reality, a bunch of brilliant nerds – many of them MIT alumni who had learned about the intricacies of switching technology through that university’s legendary model railway club – were hired. Given relatively free range with the most advanced computer equipment that then existed on the planet, these nerds did what all right thinking employees do. They pissed around. They invented the electronic bulletin board in order to talk about Star Trek. They (well, to give credit where it’s due, Ray Tomlinson) invented email pretty much just for the hell of it. Along the way, they also built ARPAnet – the US military network which became the main tributary of the various early computer networks that flowed together to make the Internet. Indeed, as Wolfgang Kleinwaechter of the University of Aarhus tells us: ‘The domain name system (DNS) was also developed bottom up. It was coordinated by its father, Jon Postel, with one assistant in his California office in Marina del Rey until the early 1990s. He managed the zone files of a database and was not interested in being pulled into policy’.

This basically left a situation in which the US government ‘owned’ the Internet, without really understanding exactly what it owned. Meanwhile, people like Jon Postel simply got on with running it. But while they weren’t interested in being ‘pulled into policy’, that’s just not how politics works. Because, of course, even if you aren’t interested in politics, it is interested in you. And it sure as hell is interested in you if you essentially hold the keys to the most sophisticated communications network ever devised. In practice what happened was that, as the Internet developed in importance, the US military began to take a progressively more proactive interest in the running of the project they had funded. In particular, this meant commercialisation as companies like Network Solutions were given contracts to sell domain names for money. One day in 1998, this all this became too much for Postel, who quietly took over the entire Internet, by writing to eight of its twelve ‘name servers’, asking them to route queries to his own computer at the University of Southern California, making it in effect the ‘root’ for the entire net. As Goldsmith and Wu claim in their brilliant description of this Internet revolt, the people running the servers, who were all colleagues of Postel knew what they were letting themselves in for. One even arranged to have his children looked after, fearing his imminent arrest. But they did as they were asked. In what followed, the conversation between Postel and Clinton policy advisor Ira Magaziner asking the computer genius calmly to ‘put things back as they were’ is priceless.

ICANN was in essence the compromise deal that came out of this power battle. On the one hand, ICANN is, to the chagrin of many, not formally a part of the international system of UN affiliate organisations – although national representatives attend its meetings. Technically indeed, it remains under contract to the US Department of Commerce, although it chafes against this. It is a ‘corporation’, but - as I mentioned – it does not work for profit. The only reason this odd chimera is able to function at all (and, by and large, it actually functions reasonably well) is that it focuses as far as possible on technical matters. When I went there, it had all the trappings of a jet setting international meeting but for one thing. Every now and then amidst all the suits you would come across a bearded guy in a pair of sandals, and the sense was that these people were still running the show – just.

It was into this organisation that I walked, very much suited, utterly ignorant of the workings of the Internet, and with a job that had both the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘United Nations’ in the title. Perhaps surprisingly, some people were still nice enough to actually talk to me. So I started, naively, to ask my questions. My big question was basically this: why, since cybersecurity threats are clearly a global issue, is there no global level institution capable of responding to them? The first answer I got was ‘trust’. The handful of people who actually, when it comes down to it, know how to run the Internet simply will not trust anyone simply because of where they come from. They have to know you personally. They have to know what you can do. And that led on to the second issue: competence. People who know how to run the Internet simply don’t care who you are. They care about what you can do.

Now, that may sound like an absurdly romanticised idea of how the Internet is run. For starters, it glosses over the fact that most of these Internet insiders still tend to be white men from rich countries (and it was, after all, the poorer countries that were least pleased about the UN being shut out of running the Internet). But it still makes quite a lot of sense when one considers what happens when things go wrong. For example, when Estonia’s electronic banks were shut down by a flood of malicious Internet traffic in 2007, they didn’t call Interpol. What happened was this: the head of Estonia’s ‘Cyber Emergency Response Team’ had dinner with a guy called Kurtis Lindqvist, who called in a couple of his mates, who in turn called up the places the traffic was coming from and asked them – one computer geek to another – to kick the rogue computers off the network. Something roughly similar happened a couple of years ago when the evil genius of the conficker worm struck computers around the world. Microsoft and a few other big companies provided the money, but in the end the organisational structure was the same: a handful of people who actually knew what they were talking about (including Rodney Joffe, who very nicely had agreed to talk to me a few months earlier back in Paris) put their heads together, called in favours from friends, and tried their best to fix things.

The point is to all this is that there is something about how the Internet in general works, and Internet security in particular, that just doesn’t institutionalise well. Broad notions like ‘cybersecurity’ which pour forth from the mouths of policymakers tend to crash against the specifics of what these things actually mean. Indeed, I suspect that the tendency of policymakers to talk about ‘cyberspace’ as a ‘space’ that can be ‘defended’ may have a lot to do with just how poor security sometimes seems to be in some big institutions. Our own Gary MacKinnon reportedly got into the Pentagon by scanning for administrators who just hadn’t bothered to put a password on their accounts. Perhaps they had the notion that somewhere out in ‘cyberspace’ they had an invincible cybershield that would protect them, like some Star Trek cloaking device. The problem is that computer hacking and computer security, thus conceived, are simply too different to mutually engage: one is all about innovating, for its own sake if for nothing else. The latter seems all to often to be about building institutions and processes without figuring out what’s going to go in inside them.

But this isn’t really where I’m going with all this. Rather, I think that the moral to this story is something different.

The history of the Internet is sometimes seen as a battle between a kind of rather American spirit of rugged individualism running rings around bureaucratic bean counters, and then an ongoing struggle to protect the spirit of the ‘Internet frontier’ from encroachments of institutional power. Efforts to control the Internet – to regulate encryption, to legislate ‘cybersecurity experts’ out of thin air tend to be sneered and feared in equal measure. But the reality is more complex than that. The Internet grew out of the generosity of governmental institutions which were prepared to pay bright people to do something and then let them get on with it. It grew out of educational institutions which left people the spare time to mess around. None of these governmental decisions were capable of creating the Internet – nowhere near. Nor are they capable of directing its future – except perhaps in a negative sense. But they are capable of providing the conditions in which it can make its own future.

This is a moral that goes well beyond the Internet. Today we often seem to be faced with two equally unpalatable principles: one which would micromanage everything, and another that would monetize everything. By being against both of them one is apt to be seen as naive. And yet neither really explains how much of what works in the world actually does work. The first principle would have us believe, for example, that teachers will only teach children to read if we make them fill out forms explaining how they propose to do so. The second would suppose that teachers will only teach children to read if they stand to lose their jobs if they don’t. The reality is that teachers, in whatever kind of school, will teach children to read if they see themselves as teachers. The same goes for computer security, where professionals can only be as good as they are allowed to be playful. Forget Britain and America. It is the special relationship between a human and the outcomes of her or his own work that really matters.

(Speaking of one’s own work, I’d like to mention that I borrowed some ideas in this piece. Special thanks go to Alasdair Macintyre, Lawrence Lessig, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu).

The basic aim of our Science and Technology policy is to encourage and promote research, development and application of science and technology which will:

• Increase knowledge and understanding
• Help to understand and address the major environmental threats such as climate change, pollution and biodiversity losses.
• Contribute to a better quality of life for all the peoples of the world.

So now reads the introduction to the Green Party of England and Wales’ science and technology policy.

At Spring conference last year we re-worked much of our health policy, removing references to homoeopathy and other ‘alternative medicines’, reversing the, frankly bizarre, opposition to embryonic stem-cell research and supporting an evidence-based approach to funding for treatments on the NHS. Somewhat under the radar, perhaps, we also required all medicines (real or imaginary) to clearly state their effects and ingredients. So that’ll be homoeopathy – ingredients: water. And, of course, we supported a free and properly funded national health service, publicly owned and publicly provided.

This year it was the turn of our science and technology policy section to face review and we made some, really quite substantial, progress, stripping out unnecessary detail and bluster and adding in policy which I think will actually attract us votes from the scientific community.

Long sections of policy on environmental and technology commissions were scrapped where those sections were felt to be too constraining and of too much detail to be of much use to use at this time. Similarly, specific lists of areas of research we support and the working of ethics boards were stripped back revealing a much clearer and leaner explanation of our beliefs. Much of the problem with the old policy was a tendency to give specific details that were often impractical and unnecessary, when the PSS (Policies for a Sustainable Society) should carry principles. (When we enter government we will have civil servants and advice from professional bodies to guide how best to formulate the precise structure of how those principles can be implemented, trying to pre-empt that process is often simply counter-productive.)

The tone of our policy has changed too, focussing on the positive things we belief science adds to our society and the ways government policy can help, rather than the constraints we need on put on the misuse of science, that we previously emphasised.

We recognise the value of science to society, and not just in terms of the narrow economic viewpoint that some other politicians seem to view it.

Research is a worthwhile activity in its own right. Scientific study must not be restricted to only that which is deemed likely to result in narrow short term economic benefit.
We value basic research and will ensure it is properly funded.
We will increase public spending on R&D to at least 1% of GDP.

Funding for science R&D is shockingly low in this country. We spend around .5% of GDP on public research and around 1.8% in total spending. Our total spending is 15th globally and well below both the government’s target of 2.5% and the EU target of 3%. Yet while other countries are investing in science we’re actually going backwards with cuts to revenue and capital spending. If anyone doubted that we are a party that values science and recognises its importance, I think our commitment to nearly double public spending should reassure them where we stand.

In fact, so committed to the importance of scientific knowledge are we, we’re passing policy to free that knowledge and make it available to as wide an audience as possible. Privately funded research at public institutions should be subject to freedom of information just as publicly funded research already is and we’ll encourage publicly funded research to be published in open access journals and offer additional funding to cover any additional costs to do so, so everyone has access to the latest research, not just those at institutions that can afford the subscriptions for the journals in which it is published.

On a similar theme, we’ll require professional bodies to put in place programmes to ensure equal participation from under-represented groups and a correction of any imbalances in their make-up. But unlike before, we no longer talk about “male-dominated hierarchies” and “closed sub-cultures”, taking a more open and positive approach. We’ll encourage the development of educational or promotional resources and activities for young people, and accept that current imbalances, however damaging, cannot be immediately altered by diktat. In the tutorials I teach (in physics), for example, it is normal for only around 30% of the class to be female, until that improves we cannot expect equal gender balance in staff and management.

Finally, we affirmed our support for the Haldane principle (that government can set strategic objectives but should leave which projects are funded to qualified research councils) and independent scientific advice. “We will ensure that scientific advisors to the government work in an environment of academic freedom and are able to always make recommendations free of political interference.” Not for us would be sacking academics because they didn’t tell us what we wanted to hear about drug policy, for example.

Our policy has come a long way, but there are still improvements we can make. Amazingly we have no policy on libel reform anywhere in our policy documents, clearly an oversight which needs addressing. Sadly it was felt that policy proposed to conference this year was not sufficiently clear or well enough written and it was referred back to policy committee for improvement prior to adoption. Hopefully that will be addressed at our next conference in the Autumn.

Policy continues to support “a moratorium on the release of GMOs into the environment and on importation of food and feed containing GMOs” pending further research into the effects on the environment, health and animal welfare. Green party policy does not, however, oppose the use of GM technology in principle or ban lab based research and development. Indeed policy explicitly states that “genetic engineering may be benign and may lead to enhanced quality of life”. While an amendment removing our call for a blanket moratorium on field trials did not pass, our current policy is actually more considered than is sometimes recognised and I’m sure this is a section of policy that will be revisited in future.

But overall, I think we’ve turned a corner, we now have a science policy I’m not scared to show to my friends. In fact it’s yet another area of policy I’ll be actively advertising to them come the next election.

But there are powerful groups much closer to home that want to turn the internet into a very different, and much more restricted, place. And they may be about to get their way.

We’re so used to the internet in its current form that it’s easy to forget how radically open it is. Compare it with Sky TV, where you pay a subscription for a basic set of channels and pay extra for anything else, whether you want music, Six Nations rugby or the latest Hollywood blockbuster. If you have a more niche interest, like Hungarian indie cinema, minor league football or antifolk, you’re out of luck. On the internet you just buy some bandwidth and do what you like with it, whether you want to share something or find a user who’s got what you’re looking for.

Currently all traffic on the internet is treated equally. You get the same speed whether you connect to YouTube, BBC, Wikileaks or Green Wedge. That’s called net neutrality. That data from any source get treated exactly the same by my service provider (ISP) and transfers at the same speed. But internet service providers, the huge corporations that provide broadband access, have realised they’re missing a chance to turn an even bigger profit. Under their proposed new system, wealthy organisations like Sky or Microsoft would pay a premium fee for a faster connection. The rest of us might have to pay to access sites offering the full-speed service. Peer-to-peer sharing, where you connect directly to other users over protocols like BitTorrent, could be effectively shut down.

Last week culture minster Ed Vaizey signalled his support for the corporations who want to end net neutrality: ‘We have got to continue to encourage the market to innovate and experiment with different business models and ways of providing consumers with what they want,’ he said. ‘This could include the evolution of a two-sided market where consumers and content providers could choose to pay for differing levels of quality of service.’

What does this mean? It would destroy the principle of democratic access to the internet, giving power to wealthy corporations at the expense of the rest of us. It would create an unfair playing field between already established companies and new businesses who can’t afford premium access. Consumers won’t pay for services they haven’t heard of, and free trials will offer a hugely reduced service. How likely is it something like Spotify will work if the free service ran at half speed? And without that how would they get paying customers?

Under the new regime, music would be dominated by big labels who could pay for better connections. Smaller acts would lose their access to new audiences and wouldn’t have the bandwidth or exposure to build up a fanbase. Even on sites like YouTube premium accounts could be prioritised to the advantage of big labels over independent artists.

More importantly, access to dissenting and independent media could be restricted. Websites like Indymedia or Wikileaks could have their content slowed, or might require a separate subscription making them much less widely accessible. Below a critical volume these sorts of voices lose their ability to hold power to account. The mainstream media wouldn’t have to report on news like the Wikileaks Afghanistan and Iraq files if ordinary people had no way to access that data for themselves. Governments and media outlets with billionaire owners would be able to get their message across at high speed, with critical voices stifled.

Rather than encouraging innovation and new models of participation, as we are told capitalism is supposed to do, the loss of net neutrality would take us back to a closed, corporate dominated model. Think again of Sky TV, with its limited range of channels, handed down from on high. If Ed Vaizey and the corporate lobbyists get their way, the internet you’re using now could become a two-speed superhighway, with most of us stuck in the slow lane.

Want to do something about it? Sign the petition to keep the UK net neutral. Or join the organisation at the vanguard of protecting the independence of the internet, the Open Rights Group.

A version of this article first appeared on music and politics magazine Green Wedge