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Geography, Laws, and the Internet
Sara Chan writes: "This week's edition of The Economist has the cover story and lead editorial devoted to how geography affects the Internet after all. The whole of China is basically firewalled. In France, Yahoo! is appealing the court ruling that banned its selling Nazi memorabilia. In Iran, ISPs are required to block immoral sites. Each country wants to impose its own laws on others, of course without reciprocation. The editorial concludes thus: "The likely outcome is that, like shipping and aviation, the Internet will be subject to a patchwork of overlapping regulations, with local laws that respect local sensibilities, supplemented by higher-level rules governing cross-border transactions and international standards." Not all new, but worth pondering."
What, now that someone in China may not be able to bid on your collection of Playboys on eBay, it is time to stand up?
Puh-lease. Rape, spy, kill, cheat, lie, steal, oppress - but don't limit our internet access! I know, the internet should be free, but a lot of things "should" be. Let's get everyone some food, shelter, and safe living conditions before we worry about whether they can ride the information superhighway. (haven't heard that term in a LONG time) :-)
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My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Right now, our notion of the "destination" of a packet is based on IP addresses, which are somewhat arbitrarily chosen and have little relationship with the physical location of the target machine. To make this work, we've needed to employ complex routing tables and algortihms with relatively large upkeep and administration requirements.
As the 'net becomes more strongly connected, there will be even more paths for packets to take, and it seems logical to try and simplify routing. If the "address" of a machine were derived from its physical geographic location, then packets could be routed simply by "sending them in that general direction". Instead of complex routing tables, routers would only need to know their relative geographic location in order to send packets toward the target. Conventional routing methods could be used on a local scale to calculate the final hop or two for the packet.
Needless to say, this method would trivialize the problems posed in the article as well.
I'm sorry, but I was working in China for 3 weeks last month on a job for a large oil company.
This company gets it's international bandwidth from a global supplier, and this also provides internet and e-mail access.
This means Chinese employees in the firm can surf the Intranet using the corporate intranet connection, and thus completely bypass any state-controls governing usage.
And for the paranoid out there, the bandwidth is provided over a cable laid from Shanghai by MCI WorldCOM. I have used the link extensively, and I found no evidence it is either tapped, filtered, or monitored.
I also used various alleged-illegal crypto products over it, and I never got a knock on my hotel-room door at 3am to tell me to stop.
You CANNOT firewall a country. There are always ways and means, and in practical terms the effort to do so is too high. Just because Chinese cyber-cafe's are monitored does not emply everything else actually is.
For an example I don't have to look very far; my site has a .uk domain, but it's actually hosted in Norway (even though I'm actually based in the U.K.). Now suppose I slander someone from China on my site - which legislation does it fall under? It's time to face up to the fact that the internet is a global system, and is difficult to regulate nationally.
I live in China, and the firewall is *very* obvious.
Some days, I try to get through to slashdot but I get a "Access to this page is denied" error on my screen.
Most people don't realise the extent of the firewall. 90% of the time, if I send an email to another country it doesn't arrive at the destination.
One time I even had an email message changed - I was simply stating that I was feeling a bit unhappy due to lack of money, and it changed to I was feeling unwell, but *because* of all the money flowing around the place I *was* happy.
Be thankfull for what you have !
The Germans were able to simply drive past the end of the Maginot line by taking a detour around the north, because the French government of the time thought "hey, we can save some money here... we don't need to extend it any further noth because nobody is going to be able to drive through the marshy Ardennes flatland..."
The penny-pinching government got it wrong. The Germans drove through the Ardennes.
According to the French, the people have never been defeated by the enemy. They are simply let down by incompetent leaders or are sold-out by traitors.
The analogy with firewalling an entire country would be that as soon as one [individual|organisation] finds out just where the government-organised "protection" stops, it will be circumvented. And all those nasty outsiders will be ably to flood the region with their [propaganda|pr0n|advertising].
If you want to offer services worldwide, you should compy with standards worldwide.
That is completely impractical. There are millions of legal entities world wide(countries, states, counties, cities), is it beyond the capability of any business to keep track of them all. If a legal entity doesn't want content, I think it should be up to them to keep it out like China does. Not to require some foregin business to notice that somebody is french.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
What I mean is.. there's no need to panic because some things are not they way they should just now. Criticism on the internet often referes to bad/unsuitable things published to the masses.
As an example, today in a large swedish online newspaper, a reporter found a huge "scoop". He found out that one of the Universities of sweden was providing computer resources to swedish nazists. After a bit of research, it came out that the university was running an Irc-server (dalnet) where the nazis held "online-meetings".
Noone would consider it a scoop that a bunch of criminals phoned each other over the telephone network, or that they sent snailmail.
The Internet will get integrated into our everyday routines, and its use will get balanced to what it's good for.
And where's the problem with china being firewalled, isn't that all up to them ? I bet there are firewalls protecting western world internet resources against china as well...
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
In the US, the corporations are trying to impose regulations to get maximum profit, while the government (for now) has mostly stayed out of it because of respect for free speech. Outside the US, where speech is not so free, governments will try to regulate in accordance with their countries beliefs. I hardly think this can be compared to shipping and aviation.
Regarding the cover story, the hinderences caused by distance will (like everything in the computer field) be overcome by technology. Data traveling from PC to server and back at the speed of light can have very little difference in travel time when the computers are next to each other compared to opposite sides of the planet. Of course we're far from this (optics direct to the computer, instant switching, etc.), but we'll get there, just like everything else. We'll look back and laugh at cover stories like this in the decades to come.
Developers: We can use your help.
I've always wondered just how they seem to think this is enforcable .. I guess the cuban tld is firewalled over at Redmond? :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Doesn't seem to stop .cn domains from spamming the fuck out of me, though.
(Paranoid thought: Red China takes a permissive stance towards their open relays and clueless admins because they want the rest of the world's to firewall them too. If they can't completely stop their people from talking to our people, they'll make us do it for them...)
(Evil countermeasure: When you block mail from a .cn host, make sure the bounce message contains randomly-generated text blocks. The string "I think it's so cool you left the relay open for us to use to send messages through" wouldn't hurt either. If enough admins did this, China's open relay policy might be, uh, reconsidered... ;-)
We all have our problems. But in this case, its easy - you don't want your citizens to see something? Its up to you to restrict them and deal with teh consequences like being voted out of office (if your citizens have that right.
Yes in an ideal world everything would be free and all would be free to see it - but that just isn't gonna happen. Sure, we can bitch about China firewalling and filtering everything - but that's life in a communist country.
Yes, I'm American so I can take this stance since my net use is pretty much wide open unless the FBI has a bad day, but beyond that, as long as some other country doesn't try to stick their noses into an American companies business (yeah right) I'm happy :)
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Keep in mind, the French were never that great at building impenetrable barriers.
I think I'll stop here.
I think the biggest thing we're all waiting for is for someone to break a law in another country, and find themselves arrested and extradited.
The Skylarov case comes to mind, obviously, but it's slightly different. Mr. Skylarov was accused of breaking US law, and then when he voluntarily entered the US, he was arrested.
What scares me, and should scare the rest of you, is the possibility of a foreign nation demanding extradition of someone for breaking that nation's laws without ever entering the country physically.
It is a simple matter to break Singaporean or Chinese law - simply denounce the government. Many other countries have similar laws, and if I should put up a website denouncing the Chinese government, that website would be in violation of the law in China. But I'm not in China, I'm not a Chinese citizen, the website wouldn't be in China.
That may not matter. China can demand my extradition to China to stand trial. Certainly, today the US wouldn't comply with that demand. But how long until keeping China happy is more important than a single US citizen? China produces a LOT that's exported to the US, and enjoys most favored nation trade status currently. This gives them a certain amount of clout with the US government (admittedly, not enough to extort $1million for an airplane sitting on a runway for 6 weeks or so).
If you think this can't happen, look to the state of California extending its jurisdiction to anyone in the world (the DeCSS case). I'm afraid this is only the beginning.
Thanks for taking a moment to listen to my ramblings and consider.
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That's a bit harsh - the ostensible aims of DMCA and Carnivore are far from nefarious.
DMCA "aims" (completely unsuccessfully) to ensure copyright can still function profitably (a noble aim, not everybody is motivated to create without an incentive), and Carnivore aims (with more success, but with many more undesirable side effects) to negate the effects of terrorism, the activities of child pornographers, etc etc. There are valid motives behind these things, but somewhere along the line, they got hijacked by combinations of big bizness(TM), stupid senators, and fascistic neo-mccarthyists.
And as for the US setting an example for freedom, well. I don't think we (non-USians) need to be taught, actually. Freedom is one of those rather instinctive things, and I'm not going to enhance my knowledge of it by reading USA Today (yes, slightly trollish, but I'm pissy about that comment).
If all the world leaders were trapped on an inflatable life raft, how long would it take before they decided to cut it up and distribute the pieces amongst themselves?
Sheck
We (just meeting the USians here) should be setting an example for freedom, not censorship and control.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
>
> This part of the article will be a non issue once satallite internet takes off in a few years.
Owned and operated, pray tell, from citizens of where?
Americans think porn is OK, in the Middle East you can get hanged for it.
I live in Texas, and operate a website hosted in Florida. Easy enough, two jurisdictions to worry about, both in the same country. But my cable modem service provider is Time Warner; I have no idea where my insidious signals get bounced on their way to Florida.
And, of course, there's the people who visit the site. I get hits from every continent, and it's been shown that it's not possible to accurately block an entire large geographic block. If some country out there decides to be as arrogant as the US, I'll be obliged to obey the laws of some country I didn't even intend to contact.
The Economist's story is good, but the conclusion should be restated for brevity: we're hosed.