Taming the Web

Thomas writes: "A story on Technology Review outlines the closer-to-reality-than-you-think fact that Internet regulations are right around the corner. It points out three false hopes held by web 'libertarians.' 1. the web is too international to control. 2. the net is too interconnected to fence in. 3. the net is full of hackers that are impossible to control. This is a good read." Bingo.

Comments

Freenet - dodging the issue

[Sanity]

He goes to great lengths to point out why Napster and Gnutella are easy to shut down (duh, they weren't really designed for that kind of attack), but then glibly dismisses Freenet because only pornographers are using it, and it doesn't support "searching". Clearly he hasn't read the FAQ.

Even if you believed that Freenet has *no* userbase, and that it is still so incomplete that nobody can use it, the simple fact that it exists and he doesn't (can't?) present a way to shut it down, refutes his argument. As has been pointed out elsewhere, even if ISPs placed restrictions on usable ports, Freenet can easily be persuaded to tunnel over other ports.

Of course, you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story...

Did you even read the article's arguments?

[Artifice_Eternity]

The internet has been around for more than two decades, during which time it has managed to elude being regulated in any meaningful way, anywhere in the world.

That's an unsupportable generalization. Plenty of individuals and groups have seen their online activities regulated - Napster, Yahoo! France, and any site ever kicked off an ISP due to outside legal pressure.

The internet stretches across national boundaries. For regulation to be successfully carried out, an international body would need to be involved.

Ever hear of the Hague Convention? It was in the article. International agreements on intellectual property, copyright, etc. are growing day by day, as the economy is globalized and more information moves around the world.

Now that we have web servers in space, even international bodies will be powerless to censor the internet.

The US is embarking on wholesale weaponization of space. I disagree with it, but satellite-killing satellites - built by the US or someone else - will become a reality sooner or later.

The skills of hackers and crackers will summarily overcome any attempts by government to lock-down the internet. If hackers can infiltrate the most secure military computers of the greatest nation on earth, how will the US, but more especially, the rest of the world, ever regulate the internet?

This is about the only variable that I don't think can be controlled. Human ingenuity is pretty amazing. But the hurdles to an open Internet are going to get higher and higher (you didn't mention hardware-based content management, featured prominently in the article), and only an elite few may end up being able to circumvent them.

Re:A counter-example

[crucini]

Well that's great as long as Bobby already knows and trusts Sally. Suppose Sally's an FBI agent? Then Bobby has just done the equivalent of selling drugs to a cop. Per the DMCA, traffiking in a circumvention device is punishable by ten years imprisonment.
Will Bobby take this chance to benefit some random stranger?
I think the real threat to the entertainment industry is not Bobby's ability to send data to trusted friend Sally, but Bobby's ability to publish information so it's accessible to a huge audience.
So you have just proved that in the absence of government intervention, our technology beats their technology. Which is exactly the smug hubris condemned by the article - we don't have absence of government intervention. We have the DMCA precisely because the government thinks Bobby is 'out of control' and blowing past every technical restraint.