The traditional argument for why the Internet can't/shouldn't be controlled always had a heavy dose of "it's not practical" in it. But ask yourself, when has the impracticality of regulation ever stopped a big government from lumbering in?
Knowing that stuff like what the OP mentions would eventually osmose into the internet, I have often been a critic of things like Net Neutrality and other structures which would effectively subsidize the current model of The Internet as we know it, locking it in place and creating a barrier to entry for any NEW, more free models which are as yet unheard of but may come along in the future!
Typically it has been very hard for me to get people to wrap their head around the idea that the Internet may not be the end-all be-all pinnacle of human achievement most people consider it to be, and that soon alternatives may arise which if given a fair chance could do even better.
Consider the Postal service, A highly regulated platform bound to international agreements that control traffic.
The evolution of the postal service was an important milestone for international communication networks and how they are governed, and like the internet, utterly revolutionary in its day.
The postal service today suffers from many problems, and faces competition from private entities that are faster in delivery, but the very regulation that govern its operation still offer some advantages over FedEx, UPS and the like. the extensive regulation does not seem to have a substantial effect on the success of the alternatives.
the UPU is the second oldest international organization worldwide. and has survived two world wars, not all regulated fields are alike.
I think the idea of Net neutrality is important and should be pursued, ideally as an international agreement similar to the UPU - http://www.upu.int/
You should look into the history of the post office. It didn't revolutionize much. There have been competing businesses throughout history and a few of them were shut down by the government after out competing USPS.
Is it a stretch to imagine that once the government has all their surveillance and control set up on the Internet (actually a lot of it is already in place), they will attempt to shut down competing models in a similar fashion?
There are two simple ways. First you could require a licence to run any kind of wireless network with a range above 20m or so and second, as it is already the case in Germany, hold the operator responsible for any kind of illegal behaviour that is done through his connection ("Störerhaftung" http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%B6rerhaftung). The chilling effect of that law is a big reason why people here don't run open networks or Tor exit nodes.
I bet you could get around that by becoming an ISP. Make sure your network offers public IPs that you don't use (possible if your own ISP offers you an IPv6 range), and you're all set.
In France, doing that would require that you log the connections (who connects when with which IP) for a year, but the "who" part can be a mere MAC address. You also have to declare yourself as an ISP.
If you happen to share your own IP, then it's different. In France as well, you can be considered responsible.
Luckily, such legislation isn't yet enforced in France, and, I guess, most of Europe (though it will come with LOOPSI, ACTA…).
It is rather difficult to hold an ISPs accountable for its users, unlike content providers. The first is akin to snail mail, while the second it akin to journals. No one ever sued FedEx for mailing Anthrax or hate pamphlets. But the one who sent those? You bet he's accountable!
I agree with you, by the way. Just pointing out that a legislation that forces ISPs to filter the net is a Major Screw-up that should flag its country as an active Enemy of the Internet. I have hope (though I wouldn't count on it) that they won't put a Great Firewall of China.
RIAA's statements usually make me sick to my stomach. So are we really going to kill the best of the Internet, and ultimately the Internet itself to "save" the music and movie industries? I think if those industries died tomorrow, we'd still have artists singing songs and movies. Perhaps they won't be as "high-quality" (read: expensive to make) but we'll still have new ideas, new art.
Music has existed ever since a caveman decided that banging a stick against a rock made a cool sound. It'll continue to exist long after EMI, Island Records and the RIAA have gone.
When I look at laws like E-PARASITE that are aimed at "taming" the internet (whatever that means), I do not see a big lumbering government trying to gain control over the internet. What I see are big lumbering corporations trying to keep the money flowing without having to work to keep up with the rapid pace of technology.
From the Wikipedia entry on SOPA/E-PARASITE:
Rogue sites legislation receives broad support from organizations that rely on copyright, including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Macmillan Publishers, Netflix, Viacom, and various other companies and unions in the cable, movie, and music industries. Supporters also include trademark-dependent companies such as Nike, L'Oréal, and Acushnet Company.
I can't imagine what the landscape of the internet will look like in a decade, but it's worrisome that the next generation will grow up in a world that would make even Orwell roll in his grave.
You are also right. One and the same. Those organizations intend to use the muscle of the government to entrench a specific self-serving model. Without a large and powerful government, it would not be possible for such an agenda to succeed.
> Without a large and powerful government, it would not be possible for such an agenda to succeed.
s/large and powerful/corrupt/
The problem is not that our government is large (that is a tangential issue). It's that government is now fully captured and co-opted by the wealthy interests (often large corporations).
Devolution of power into state and local governments is not going to meaningfully help either... often time these entities are much easier to bribe, to bend the law in the favor of the corrupt.
The issue is the concept that "money == speech"; to consider it thus is inherently crooked unless everyone has the same starting point or opportunities.
Geeks are a lot smarter than telcos; we'd win that battle easily. Geeks are a lot smarter than government, too, but they have big sticks to hit with; that battle requires a bit more care.
Any group that is as big as government and as organized would be already on government's radar as a major threat. So you might want to work on your robustness before working too hard on your organization.
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- John Gilmore
I think we need to do some routing work. Attempts at regulation suggests that we haven't made the Internet sufficiently robust.
We can't easily stop countries from regulating the activities of entities which have a legal presence within those countries; anyone who wants to have an online identity tied to their offline identity risks having their online activities regulated through offline coercion. We also can't easily stop infrastructure providers from simply disconnecting all traffic at the infrastructure level, at least not until we have reliable mesh-networking protocols.
However, we can stop countries from regulating the activities of any individual entity which doesn't have a presence in those countries, or which avoids tying their online identity to their offline identity.
The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
The bureaucrats are coming to realize this. That's why part of the bill is to make such routing illegal. So, unsatisfied with just chilling our right to free speech, they also want to break the robustness of Internet itself.
A bit more complex than that, but yeah, it doesn't really require funds so much as hacker labor.
A few examples of technologies that would help:
- Pervasive use of end-to-end encryption by default, at the host level in addition to any application-level security.
- Virtual Ring Routing: layer-2 mesh networking that scales to Internet-sized networks and never needs to floodfill the network with packets. Use encryption key fingerprints as the host addresses, so that this works well with end-to-end encryption.
- Tor-like onion routing.
- Key-fingerprint-based host naming, making DNS an optional (and selectable) directory service rather than a required core component. Of course, having end-to-end encryption means you can easily select a DNS server which gives you correct results, rather than one with various entries redirected to governmental agencies.
With all of the above, you have a network where you can't prevent or intercept any communication, without pulling the plug on the entire infrastructure at the hardware level. And even then, the pervasive availability of mesh networking means that packets can find and use any available egress, which includes satellites, cell towers, and long-distance wifi.
Sounds a lot like D. J. Bernstein's DNSCurve[1] and CurveCP[2]. CurveCP in particular seems like a good idea and supports some cool stuff like connections transparently moving across different IP addresses.
When you look at the internet from the protocol level, it seems borderless, but - as we saw during the Arab Spring - at the infrastructure level it really isn't. You have to get traffic into and out of a country somehow, and for the majority of users (excepting satellite and long range wireless) that means traffic flowing through a telco/ISP. That also means physical networks with physical peering points and traffic exchange contracts, all of which fall under local laws. For many smaller countries the number of 'border checkpoints' exactly equals the number of telcos/ISPs operating there. In the case of Egypt, all it took to shutdown ~100% of traffic[1] was a phonecall to the 4 biggest ISPs. Whether that shutdown was legal in Egypt or not is a matter of local law. Until there are international conventions governing traffic exchange, the internet is not borderless.
One can hope that our judiciary would toss out the more egregious parts of this effort at censorship and control as they did with the CDA. However, given that the Internet is seen as the proximate cause of governmental overthrow in some places I suspect fear will over come common sense.
But in Egypt, the shutting down of the internet was an even more proximate cause.
The US is not like China where this massive firewall infrastructure is practical for two simple reasons.
1. There are people who will compromise for the sake of protecting children or "property", but just about any voter will laugh at the idea of a government-run morality enforcement service. Particularly given the cost involved.
2. Other censorship-minded countries seem to be able to concentrate their resources on border firewalls to keep the inharmonious concepts out. This requires a big infrastructure even in a little place like Iran or Syria.
But the US has a healthy mix of users and controversial servers. Any given router may have users and websites on either side. There simply isn't enough rack space in the world to do deep inspection and blocking at every node. Instead you'd end up with prohibition-era like raids on some small random sample of servers and users. That would be simultaneously one of the most expensive and unpopular government projects ever.
My guess is the DoJ is going to stick to "takedowns" of small video streaming and fake handbag sites for a while yet.
His entire argument - if you could call this boatload of FUD one - fell apart at the moment he implied that anarchy is equivalent to chaos. I can't take anyone serious who does this. It showcases ignorance.
Anarchy is only a state of political confusion or disorder if you believe that a central authority is a requirement for a political system. Anarchists believe and participate in non-hierarchical social structures, which does not inherently lead to chaos, confusion, or disorder.
People do colloquially use anarchy to mean confusion and disorder, but that has a lot to do with societal acceptance and condition in regards to central authority and power structures. In a piece directly about government, to use the word anarchy is this fashion is dishonest and in poor taste.
Edit: Woops, this was supposed to be an answer to your parent (zecho), not you.
A common definition must not necessarily be a correct definition - ask any scientist, there's probably a number of terms that are misused by the general populace in every field. As a very general example, theory and hypothesis come to mind. When most people say "theory", they mean what in a scientific context would be referred to as a hypothesis - an unproven claim that requires verification.
Now, we can argue whether or not evolution of language justifies using wrong definitions of a term, but technically, defining "anarchy" as "chaos" is - in my opinion - not correct. The term denotes a state of society where there is no governing authority, but does not imply the absence of rules, laws or values.
The major problem I have with these two definitions is that people who assume the negative one (anarchy == chaos) are, for the most part, not aware of the other meaning, and that quickly leads to confusion - which is sometimes used intentionally to defame opponents in an argument. I personally try to make it clear upfront which definition I am using (anarchy == absence of government or authority), but it's sometimes still hard to escape the negative association of the term.
It's always going to be true that it's far more expensive to educate oneself to choose the most correct choice in an election, than to actually cast that vote. It seems to me that as the difference in cost between these two things increases, we risk an increase in reckless, uninformed voting.
Perhaps we should make it even more difficult to vote. People who are voting on a whim would be less likely to make a frivolous vote. But people who had already invested significant time in understanding the issues would still feel motivated to use their knowledge. I'm not sure I'd really advocate a measure like this, but I think it's an interesting thought experiment.
After pondering it a bit, I'm coming to the same old libertarian conclusion that the apparent dichotomy is caused by giving the government too much power. We only need to be experts when voting because the government is dictating so much of our own lives. If we didn't try to achieve Plato's ideal of experts running everything, but limited the government's power to policing right and wrong, the only expertise necessary for voting would be introspection into one's own value system.
As for your question, I don't see a way to enact a plan to weed out "uninformed" voters.
It'd be nice if all votes were cast on a rational basis, but current impediments to voting seem to tilt the system in favor of highly-opinionated, partisan voters over more laid-back voters. While some partisan voters may have arrived at their convictions through reason and analysis, many more are of the "angry voter" mentality.
A voting system such as Australia's, which encourages everyone to vote, seems in principle less susceptible to hacking by special-interests. It is inevitable and sometimes good that highly-opinionated minorities gain outsize political weight relative to a passive majority, but we do not need the election system to make it too easy to do so.
In effect, maximizing voter participation should align government more closely to the actual will of the governed. (It's worth noting that a statistically random sample would work just as well, with the additional benefit of encouraging gravitas in the selected voters, but explaining statstics to the general public may be a challenge in itself.)
Also, while you may be right, I wouldn't jump too quickly to the conclusion that the best way to solve a problem with an important issue (governance) is to make it unimportant. Certainly one may try to reduce the government's power, but that is orthogonal to the issue of making sure elections are well run.
voting exposes lives, rights and property of others to danger, the same way like driving on public roads. Thus one is[must be] allowed to drive or to vote or to perform other potentially damaging activity only after meeting the minimally necessary threshold of related education/skills/etc..
I think most agree that 'balance' is necessary, but many people have different definitions of what this means. In relation to Internet regulation how do we keep security, functionality, and economic/social liberty in a perfect balance? The answer is that you can't. Too much of one thing allows for not enough of the other. On the whole, I think it has done much more good in its current state, but people will always attempt to balance these things out based on their own justifications. Their is no true perfect state of the Internet, just a constant strive to reach it.
Given how many people use the internet, I think it is a miracle it survived mostly unregulated for so long. I personally do not doubt it will slowly be assimilated by society and progressively get locked down, but it is in my opinion a testament to the first real users of the internet, and to 'geeks' worldwide that they fostered a culture that made it possible to call the internet a modern-day Wild West for a time.
The only loonies in support of an unregulated internet is the same crazies in support of unregulated markets. Americans need to be free from the tyranny of an open internet, for the same reasons Americans need to be free from the tyranny of an unregulated markets -- that is, man left to his own devices will destroy himself. Unless you want nut jobs to be able to post whatever they want online, we should be honored the government is making the internet safe for us to use. /satire
Knowing that stuff like what the OP mentions would eventually osmose into the internet, I have often been a critic of things like Net Neutrality and other structures which would effectively subsidize the current model of The Internet as we know it, locking it in place and creating a barrier to entry for any NEW, more free models which are as yet unheard of but may come along in the future!
Typically it has been very hard for me to get people to wrap their head around the idea that the Internet may not be the end-all be-all pinnacle of human achievement most people consider it to be, and that soon alternatives may arise which if given a fair chance could do even better.