The party is officially over for the InternetÕs communication facility known as the World Wide Web. Once the bringer of knowledge, fun, wealth and cooperation to Mother Earth, the WWW has been shown to be AFU. A large portion of the Web is devoted to porn, failed dot-com businesses have forced the world economy into a recession, hackers routinely steal credit card numbers from private citizens Õ computers and evil terrorists like Osama bin Laden are using the WWW to send marching orders to their zombie operatives around the globe.

The Internet was initially developed for the United States military as a communication tool in the 1960s. Slowly, the Internet gradually moved into the private sector as the US government opened the formerly restricted government communications network up to academic and commercial research facilities. The explosive growth of the World Wide Web we know today is attributable to the advent of pages of information posted on the Internet linked together via the hypermedia text markup language (HTML). Commercial enterprises like AOL, CompuServe and Netscape all built up the World Wide Web through a healthy amount of competition, cooperation and open technology standards. The WWW was so successful for AOL that they eventually bought CompuServe and Netscape to have total cooperation from their competition on those open technology standards.

Now, the WWW that sits atop the once glorious Internet is broken and tarnished. What should link and unite the world has become a rumor mill offering nearly untraceable anonymity for technologically savvy terrorists and thieves. Although the U.S. National Science Foundation maintains a major part of the InternetÕ s communication backbone, hackers and activists rule the World Wide WebÕs flow of information through terrorist-style virus attacks and intimidation through web page defacement. To many, such attacks are viewed as a necessary evil for enjoying the "freedom" of the Internet. The Internet and WWW is now the premier free speech/moral relativism juggernaut. Neo-Nazi scum cannot sell HitlerÕs dinner plates on eBay because it would glorify intolerance but if you try to keep a thief or a terrorist from communicating on the Internet you are violating a cyber-citizenÕs civil rights to free speech.

On October 9, 2001, White House cyberspace security advisor Richard Clarke put forth a challenge for the high-tech sector that would take the Internet back to its roots. Called GOVNET, the proposal is a simple one: create a separate wide area secure turnkey networking solution for government and military agencies that would carry Voice-over-IP (VoIP), data and video traffic basically an updated version of what the Internet originally was for. According to the proposal released by the General Services Administration (GSA), GOVNET will be a private Internet Protocol (IP) network shared by government agencies and other authorized users only with no interconnections or gateways to the Internet or other public or private networks. The idea being that it would be impossible for hackers and their viruses to disrupt GOVNET from any network external to GOVNET.

All data on this separate and secure Internet would be encrypted and all sites would have the equivalent of armed guards at the doors with no anonymous users. The GSAÕs proposal requires scalability for GOVNET to meet future requirements, maintain technology and service levels equivalent to the "maximum extent practical" and should be functional with full IP connectivity to all locations after six months of winning the contract. ItÕ s a tall order for the company or companies that win contract for GOVNET. Mr. Clarke prefers that private companies develop and maintain the system rather than government workers, because then "it might actually work." "I don't think you want civil servants managing a network like this, Clarke said. "And I don't think you want taxpayers to own it."

Mr. Clarke has seen how ineffective government-run Internet projects can be. Clarke was present in the Clinton Administration when in April 1998 then Vice-President Al Gore invented his second Internet called "Internet2." Begun in 1996, the Internet2 project was to be developed by major universities and the government to dramatically speed up the entire Internet and promote cooperative efforts between our institutes of higher learning. Gore projected that the Internet2 network would begin operation before the year's end, with full deployment completed by the end of 1999. Five years, hundreds of millions of your tax dollars and the brainpower from 180 at the United StatesÕ most expensive universities, Internet2 for all practical purposes is still not a reality.

Cyber-security "experts" and left-wing "civil libertarians" have been mulling over the implications of GOVNET. The cyber-security crowd has claimed the size of GOVNET will make it unmanageable and that viruses can still infect systems from floppy disks brought in from outside the network. The leftist civil libertarians say that because it will not be connected the WWW and closed to the general public, citizens who need government services will not get any use out of GOVNET. Did I miss the part of the proposal that said every GOVNET computer had to have a floppy disk and connect welfare recipients to the World Wide Web? If I did, it looks like weÕre going to have another useless Internet2 on our hands.

If you or your company is contemplating a proposal for winning the GOVNET contract, here are common sense tips from World Tech Tribune: