The Second Generation Internet

The first generation Internet promoted certain concepts of freedom that didn't exist elsewhere. This wasn't by accident. Internet protocols were designed to be open and accessible. As the Net enters its second generation, growing numbers worry whether it can stay as free. Net architecture becomes critical. Programmers are no longer technicians working on the margins, but are the principal designers of the world's most ascendant culture, the ones who will determine its future. So here's a series on that topic alternating between columns, your e-mail and your posts on Threads -- as long, short and useful a discussion as you want it to be.

Yo: This is the first of a series which will alternate between my columns and your responses. The talk will also go on in Threads. The duration of this topic can be as long - or as brief - as you want, entirely up to you. I'll post a column of representative e-mail responses. If you don't want to be quoted or ID'd, please say so in your messages.

For a generation of believers -- hackers, open-source programmers, MP3 and DVD adherents -- the Internet's most central ideology has been promoting a certain kind of freedom.

The Net has never been quite as accessible as many of its most passionate residents would like to believe. Many people can't afford it, others don't have the technological skills to use it well. Still, it is unquestionably freer than any other element of American culture.

In fact, the Net is so free it threatens, even traumatizes, institutions that have long clung to their prerogatives and to political and cultural power - journalism, industry, education, politics, the law, medicine.

This freedom is, to an enormous degree, a matter of accident and architecture rather than politics or ideology. The founders of the Net-a coalition of academics, engineers, early hackers and researchers - designed the Net and its protocols to be equally open to anyone with the right technology.

No medium had ever been designed so generously, casually or freely. In fact, the Net's architecture and protocols, as currently constructed and used, may be the most important model of free speech and equal access to information in history, certainly since the U.S. Constitution was adopted. (As a point of comparison, consider television, a medium intended to be open but quickly commercialized, and almost completely co-opted, by a handful of greedy media moguls, working the full co-operation of federal legislators and regulators.)

There is no Constitution for the Net, no bylaws or widely agreed-upon system or Constitution to protect widely agreed upon system to protect such rights as privacy, openness, and property.

Programmers are no longer technicians working at the margins of society. Like engineers before them, they are now, like it or not, among the principal architects of the world's most ascendant subculture. Issues like the Net's freedom, intellectual property and the flow of information and ideas rest in their hands, rather than in politicians or pundits.? The Net is well into its second generation, and it's changing.

Computing analysts and legal scholars increasingly believe that despite revolutionary advances like OS, the Net is moving away from its founders' vision. Although there's no single unifying architecture for cyberspace, the first-generation Internet more than fulfilled the early hackers insistence that information wants to be free. More information wants to be freer than anybody imagined.

But this has triggered growing political, cultural and economic conflicts, all likely to worsen in the coming years. Government is moving to establish Internet law, as in the Microsoft trial -- something it never bothered to do before. Companies battle to establish digital footholds. Media and cultural institutions - the media, Hollywood, Wall Street, the recording industry - demand legal measures to curb the Net's freedoms, fearing they undermine intellectual property, private content, and the marketing of products, information and culture, and the nature of capitalism itself.

Of course, almost almost everything about the Net, including the recent ascension of open source into a significant economic and cultural phenomenon, challenges the way hierarchical institutions have always operated. It has from the first. In the past few years, though, an entirely new kind of corporatist culture - shaped by behemoths like Microsoft and now AOL/Time-Warner - has come into being with resources, reach and power beyond any corporation before them.

These companies are all targeting the Internet as a primary source of profitability and growth. Not one of them - with the possible partial exception of IBM - has embraced or even flirted seriously with an open source model for doing business.

Microsoft, the inspiration and nearly-universal bete noir of the hacker/open source movement, is a stumbling giant now. But its legacy, Microsoftism, is thriving. It includes proprietary ideas about technology, a desire to dominate markets, a passion for mediocrity, an impulse to stifle individuality and competitive creativity. Call this new space The Corporate Internet, as an e-mailer named Gaeltact suggested.

Many of the architects of this evolving, second generation Internet come not from academe or engineering but from companies. They're beginning to build a different brand of architecture, focused on encryption, tracking software, closed spaces, patents and copyrights, and boundaries around intellectual property. The arrest of a Norwegian teenager for allegedly violating DVD software copyrights two weeks ago was a deliberately much-publicized warning, a symptom of these growing tensions. So are the recording industry's massively-funded efforts to develop powerful encryption technologies to thwart MP3 users and its growing legal confrontations with college and other music-dispensing Web sites. This is just a preview of many more conflicts to come.

Net and legal scholars like Harvard Law's Lawrence Lessig argue that the new architects will build in much greater levels of control. That is, in many cases, their mission. Traditional practices of capitalism and corporations depend on maintaining walls, on clearly-defined notions of content and property. The news on Slashdot, C-Net, Wired News and other techno-media, therefore, is increasingly about lawsuits, about efforts to stop the distribution of so-called intellectual property and block the spread of innovative software, about defining turf and collecting money.

Because so few non-geeks grasped the significance of the Internet early on, government officials, regulators, corporate executives and educators ignored it, allowing its architects and users to experiment and innovate. Now that everyone wants a piece of the action, the portents are troubling.

Education, journalism, business and politics are all highly constricted, not only by legal and economic concerns but by increasingly complex and volatile social pressures: the rise of a politically-correct ethos in public communications, encroachments on depictions of sex and violence. No newspaper will ever challenge the notion of God or challenge the fundamental structure of government and commerce.

In a sense, the architects of the Internet built a structure and space that enjoys a far stronger First Amendment that the framers of the Constitution provided (or that exists in most other countries, since the Net transcends the United States). As Lessig wrote, "Nations wake up to find that their telephone lines are tools of free expression, that e-mail carries news of their repression far beyond their borders, that images are no longer the monopoly of state-run television stations but can be transmitted from a simple modem."

Theoretical anonymity, de-centralized distribution, countless points of access, the sudden irrelevance of geography, sophisticated tools of encryption - these and other features of the Internet protocols made it virtually impossible to control speech on the Internet.

But Lessig adds, "there is no reason to believe that this initial flash of freedom will not be short-lived."

Lessig, along with high-tech journalists like Simson Garfinkel ("Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century," from O'Reilly), argues that new advances in technology, especially software, threaten both free speech and privacy. Marketers, medical institutions and insurers, and individual companies are gathering staggering amounts of data about individuals, students and employees.

This may shape up as one of the bitterest political struggles of the next generation, as an empowered army of technologically - advanced Netizens, programmers, geeks and nerds struggles to preserve privacy and the free nature of the Net, using tools most of us haven't begun to imagine. Some accessible examples of this experimental new architecture are weblogs (www.camworld.com); Slashdot's moderating sytem and Everything, a system (www.everything2.com) in which users can create nodes of information that link to one another -- almost like a neural communications system.

The issue really lies in the hands of the people who frequent sites like this one. Technology is volatile, fluid and inherently unpredictable. It often moves beyond technics and has broader social implications - Linux for example.

So this is an effort to talk about the second generation Internet. The idea, for anyone who wants to participate, is to begin to explore the kinds of ideas, software and hardware - the next generation of Internet architecture - that might preserve the original ideals and free nature of the Net and establish some broadly held rights and values.

This is virgin turf. As Lessig points out, the Net has taken conventional ideas about individual liberty and taken them farther than they've gone before. Some of the best guidelines might come from the recent and not so recent past. The GPL (General Public License: www.GNU.org), the open source programming license, has become a significant public document. This idea could be taken farther, and broadened. We could choose to do business only with sites and companies that subscribed to new understandings about freedom, openness and privacy.

Consider the ideas that predate primitive workstations with early computers. Or go back to the European cities of the eighteenth century. The philosophers of the Enlightenment undertook - without the means to communicate quickly with one another, let alone the rest of the world - a strangely relevant, eerily familiar program of secularism, humanity, and freedom. Their idea of freedom, as outlined by the historian Peter Gay, took a number of different forms: "freedom from arbitary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one's talents, freedom of aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of moral man to make his own way in the world." The Enlightenment took as its motto Emmanuel Kant's at-the-time radical "Sapere Aude" - Dare to Know. It's a shame none of them got to see the Net. Thomas Jefferson wrote passionately about a new kind of democratic culture in which ideas moved freely all over the globe. Ironically, many of these visions have come to life on the Net more powerfully than anywhere else.

This kind of discussion has at least two dimensions: First, what rights and freedoms to people want to preserve? And second, what kind of architecture - software and hardware -can do for this Internet generation what the Net protocols did for the last one?

The boundaries, length and nature of this discussion are up to you. You can take these starting points or reject them, add your own, change course, flame away, or ignore the conversation completely, in which case it will automatically vanish. Part two will be a representative sampling of e-mail, and of course, the conversation continues below on Threads.

Comments

Individual Action Is Not Enough!

[Jack William Bell]

But if the source is open, once it's released it can't be taken back. (eg. DeCSS) If someone is willing to either risk paying a price, or release their work anonymously, the software will be created.

True. And there will always be exceptions. But so long as there are onerous legal consequences most of us will not be willing to suffer them.

Phil Zimmerman took the risk with PGP, and now we can all communicate with strong encryption whether the government likes it or not.

That isn't entirely true. Try going to China and handing out disks with PGP software for example. Besides, as I have already pointed out -- most of us are too chicken. The chilling effect of negative consequences is too great to overcome without some hope that our efforts will actually amount to something.

The future is in our hands, but only if we're willing to fight for it.

As a citizen of the United States of America, I am the heir of a great tradition of Freedom. One fought for by some very great men over two hundred years ago. The quote "The tree of freedom must be fed from time to time with the blood of patriots." is as appropo today as it was then.

But, sadly, this great tradition is paleing into insigificance even here. We Americans have traded our freedom for safety many times already, and are prepared to trade more in the future:

"Drugs kill people, we should suspend the Constitutional rights of anyone suspected of selling them!"
"Guns kill people, they should be outlawed!"
"Hackers are evil gnomes who want to steal your money and show pornography to your children. They must be stopped at all costs!"

Why should programmers be different than anyone else? The problem isn't one of individual action. It is societal. If I act in some significant way on my own, at best I will be considered a nut and at worst a terrorist. Our biggest problem isn't a lack of will, but rather an inability to educate the masses, to reach out beyond /. and the other geek enclaves. Until Joe Sixpack agrees with us, no amount of revolutionary rhetoric will tilt the scales in favor of Freedom.

Jack