The president of AIIP Giovanni Zorzonithe vice president Giuliano Peritore and the Councillor Antonio Baldassarra they met the undersecretary of the Presidency of the Council Alessio Butti as part of the “Telco sector prospects” table.
One of the most important focuses concerned the analyzes that the European Commission is conducting with respect to the market development prospects, preparatory to new regulatory interventions in the telecommunications sector.
Among the topics, in addition to the alleged “benefits” in terms of “consolidation” of the sector which have now become a prevailing theme in the narrative, one of the most important topics addressed has fundamental implications for both national security and the real resilience of the Italian network, as well as very significant impacts in terms of employment, and the implementation of so-called “networks”software-based” and/or “cloud-based”.
There is a very important push, at a time when the West is endemically late in the development of new network technologies, to find shortcuts represented by devices that are no longer autonomously intelligent, which move all the network logic to the cloud over the top (as for example in the case of O2/Telefonica in the cloud Amazon Web Services), “outsourcing” the operation of the networks to these services no longer only “from the outside” (with the de facto control of Internet standards by the web giants), but also from within the access networks
The Association highlighted the enormous risks of the de facto outsourcing of the management skills of the so-called “core networks”, in addition to no longer being able to count on the physical control of the network elements (understood as hardware and software) which also ignores the will of the vendors who placed them initially available, and on the risks deriving from whether or not these systems may continue to function in the event of geopolitical frictions or cyber attacks.
The particular international climate, in which sanctions and duties intersect, does not allow for complete visibility of the complexity, where extra-EU (but, in many cases, extra-national) cloud solutions are used and of the possible unavailability of the services when such solutions should be applied to vital systems that must always function, or contain data in an unalterable and secure manner (such as authentication data, connection traces to the BTS towers, usage logs, etc.) sensitive and very relevant.
There AIIP delegation he explained that although there is a push from vendors to “move to the cloud” even the most fundamental parts of the networks, migrating intelligence to clouds provided by over-the-top, it is instead essential to condition the execution of these cloud software private of the operators present in Italy, carefully avoiding supplier companies outside the Union, to guarantee that for no reason such systems can be turned off, tampered with, limited or made temporarily unavailable at the behest of public or private entities outside our jurisdiction. This is a non-negotiable condition for National Security.
It has also been stigmatized that the same reliability of data subject to mandatory services (e.g. such as wiretaps) cannot be technically guaranteed in the case of the use of network intelligence (and software instantly and transparently modifiable by third parties) in execution in the cloud not under the technical control of the operators.
“As we recently saw in the strange Apple case of the 17.5 update iOS, which revealed photographs in the cloud that were intended to be definitively deleted and years old or in the total and definitive deletion by Google of the data of the 125 billion UniSuper pension fund, the trust that can be placed in an over-the-air cloud provider -top is not enough to suggest migrating the most sensitive data and even the entire network intelligence into extra-national containers. In a recent paper by Cisco we could see how in the future of Web 3.0 hypothesized by many OTTs, through the control of clients/apps and the large part of traffic, a new Internet is promoted that no longer even allows traffic interception or legal blackouts. There is nothing that bodes well in even allowing us to control not only the outside of the networks, but also influencing the inside”, declared the president Giovanni Zorzoni at the end of the meeting.
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