Slashdot Mirror
Perverts and Consumers
Perhaps the luckiest break the Net and Web got was time: nearly a generation to grow and develop before journalists, legislators, lawyers or CEO's quite realized what it was, or accepted its political, economic and cultural importance.
Still, it's always been inevitable that politicians, corporations and media companies would try to regulate and control the Internet. It's becoming much too important and lucrative to be left alone.
Until this year, most efforts to control the Net consisted either of lunatic software or legislation advanced by opportunistic politicians -- decency acts from Congress, blocking and filtering programs from companies.
Rattled institutions refused to take the Net and Web seriously, or perhaps simply hoped it would just go away. Then they seemed to grasp in the mid- 90's that networked and linked computing somehow threatened the way they work.
So the largely mythical Net Pervert was invoked as a means of controlling this booming new sub-culture.
The pervert (and, to a lesser extent, the inaccurately-labeled "hacker") was the perfect late 20th century techno-nightmare, the ideal rationale for trying to stick a finger in the crumbling dike that was holding back the Information Revolution.
The Net was promoting isolation, addiction, loss of privacy - the end of civilization itself. Since the Internet was unsafe, and children were vulnerable to it, government agencies and law enforcement authorities had to regulate it.
So, as the media told it, the spectre of the online Pervert and his cousin, the Predator, grew. He lurked out there in the ether, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting children, to draw them into child pornography rings, to lure them into real-world encounters where they were kidnapped, murdered or raped.
There have been a handful of cases where this horrific scenario actually occurred. But given the number of interactions between children and the Internet, kids have always been statistically more likely to have jet planes fall on their heads than to be harmed online.
In fact, statistically, children are more likely - 300,000 times more likely, according to author Don Tapscott and Justice Department crime abstracts - to be harmed by the people they live with than by strangers they might encounter online.
Partly because real-world online crimes are so rare - despite the staggeringly disproportionate amount of media attention they receive - something gradually becoming obvious to computer-acquiring middle-class Americans, the invocation of the Pervert as a means of controlling the Net hasn't worked.
In the last few years, even the most mule-headed and reactionary corporations have figured out that they'd better learn to do business on he Net, if they're going to do business at all. So one way or another, the wild, unregulated frontier atmosphere that has characterized the Internet's first decades are coming to an end.
The good news about Judge Jackson's findings of fact about Microsoft is that the company's arrogant, rapacious and predatory behavior will be curbed. But that's the bad news too. We might be haunted one day by those voices wishing that the marketplace had been given the chance to do the job rather than the federal judiciary.
For the diverse and loosely-affiliated collection of sub-cultures we call the Net and the Web, a new era is definitely underway.
The Microsoft anti-trust action and a wave of legislation now before Congress heralds the beginning of a new, monumentally significant period in the history of the Net - the systematic effort by corporations, lobbyists and lawmakers to make it a safe, rational and, above all, profitable environment in which they can do business. The corporations that dominate media and commerce in America are the biggest, richest and most influential forces in recent U.S. history. And they're going digital.
To a one - lawyers, record companies, Hollywood studios, publishers, media conglomerates, politician institutions - the Net threatens their ability to set social and economic agendas, to dominate markets. There's plenty of debate about whether the Net can ever be harnessed by any the growing coalition of companies or government agencies wanting to do so, but there's no longer much doubt about whether they're going to try.
Their assault on the Net - sure to intensify over the next few years - marks an evolution in what will surely be one of the 21st century's slam-bang political struggles: that of individualism versus corporatism.
For much of the 20th century, political scientists and freedom-lovers worried about governmental tyranny - monarchies, fascism, Communism, Nazism as the primary threat to personal freedom. But increasingly, it's mass-marketing that threatens to kill off innovation, freedom, and individual expression.
Microsoft's history suggests a faint glimpse of what's to come.
These corporate and legislative political struggles make movements like open source and free software more vital by the day, not only in terms of freedom of speech and ideas, but of corporate flexibility and innovation as well. They may, in fact, signify the best chance of keeping the Net and Web competitive, innovative, cheap and lucrative.
At the moment, lawmakers are passing a growing list of measures that will put the federal government's stamp all over the Net. Many more are on the way. Perhaps prompted by all those lobbyists nibbling on their ears, congress has finally stopped worrying about whether Johnny will get on the Playboy website and gotten down to big issue worrying corporate America - how will they will do business on the Internet?
Congress now wants to create rules for selling Net addresses, define legal standing for digital contracts, ban some content and programming, including advice on legal contracts, medical research and information, restrict the spread of medical information, prohibit online gambling, curb the dissemination of music and sexually- explicit material, and regulate spam.
Much of this legislation is being initiated by companies, not members of congress who have, until now, been happy to view the Net from a wary distance, enacting the occasional, unworkable and totally decency act to keep up appearances.
But today, Internet legislation currently before Congress includes bills concerning digital signatures, cyber-squatting, database protection, Internet filtering, online alcohol and gun sales, Net gambling, online privacy, Net access, encryption and opening broadband cable Internet lines to competitors.
Many of these bills represent the handiwork not only of the usual clueless lawmakers, but of increasingly Net-savvy professional organizations and corporations who have hired lawyers and lobbyists to set this brand new digital congressional agenda.
In Washington, The New York Times reported on this week, "The Internet is an easy target." That's not really new, but it's significant that it's becoming big news.
In many cases, these companies are invoking protection of the Consumer - the successor to the lurking Pervert - as a rationale for controlling the Internet.
Rules, they say, are necessary to protect individuals in the booming era of Internet commerce. Stories about sexual predators online are being replaced by a wave of tales of consumer rip-offs.
When businesses invoke the protection of "consumers," it's a like lot politicians invoking the "morality" of children: grab your wallet and/or your kid and run for your life.
As is standard in Washington, the real shaping of such legislation occurs in ways completely opposite from Net conversations - it happens out-of-sight, in secret, at lunches and meetings, dinner parties and functions attended by lawyers, pundits, lobbyists and legislators.
The vast horde of reporters encamped in Washington still includes only a handful who know anything about the Net or technology. The press cover these issues only sporadically, as compared to stories they consider significant, like the nature of the oral sex the President received. That makes it even harder for the public - especially those much-invoked and mythic "consumers" in whose name new legislation is being proposed - to follow the debates and developments.
And it makes it much easier for the techno-blockheads in Congress to pass laws that corporations - the biggest political financial contributors in the United States - want passed.
There is also considerable hypocrisy involved: an increasing number of these bills originate with the very Net corporations and online services who have repeatedly called for the government to keep its hands off the Internet.
AOL is lobbying for laws that would force cable companies to open their high-speed Net lines to competition. eBay supports a database protection bill that many online fear could restrict access to information on the network. Powerful lobbies representing banking, law, publishing, medicine and the insurance industry also are players in this growing but quiet campaign.
More than any other single ethos, the Net has always embodied individualism. From the first BBS's to giant messaging systems, the Net has made it possible for people to communicate with one another in unprecedented ways, to build the infra-structure of a new culture and share it with one another.
The Internet is forcing business, education and politics to change. It's spawned countless new kinds of virtual communities, in which millions of individual people can express themselves in unfettered and unrestricted ways, and can access much of the archived information in the world for free.
Preserving those traditions isn't the goal of corporatism, or of legislators busy at working trying to fence off the digital frontier. Their real agenda is, in fact, just the opposite: reversing every single one of them.
Until 1995, 90% of the net was American. By 2005, more than 50% of the net will be Non-American. I make the changeover point sometime around 2002; Europe is about 12 months behind the USA and has 20% greater population, and the rest of the world (notably the Pacific Rim) is in there too.
The real action to keep your eyes on is not the speechifying in Congress, but what happens at the G8 summits and in the various low-key trade treaty meetings that happen from time to time. International treaties are effectively law -- once ratified they are binding, and they're a lot harder to make an end-run around than local ordinances. To this end, you really want to watch out for what is happening in the European Commission offices -- a market for national bureaucrats to talk shop -- and eye up what they agree with the US government about. Once the EU and the USA work out a common subset of ground rules, those rules will almost certainly stick.
Moreover, what the EU member states want and what the USA wants are very different. Take Germany's recent willingness to undermine the Wassenaar Agreement by providing public funds for GPG. Or France's current turmoil over a move to a maximum 35-hour working week (the leisure society coming home to roost as a way to abolish high structural unemployment). Or the EU-wide interest in privacy law, so totally alien to the US political process, but counter-balanced by a more overt US commitment to freedom of speech (at least in theory).
There will be interesting times ahead as a cross- border consensus gets thrashed out. And because the net knows no frontiers, you Americans can expect some European values to come home to you.
There were two issues that I found that the economists and the governments have with the internet. The first is that any transactions that take place on the web aren't taxed, and therefore the governments will get less money, and then the quality of the services the governments provide will go down. The second was that because the major divisions of the world (the boundaries between the countries) really have no bearing on the internet, the divisions will instead be based on interests, desires, needs, etc. This they fear because it erodes people's sense of community (the physical one, not the internet one).
A place like this, slashdot, is one of these "communities" that is a threat to a goverment. Because the members identify more with the other members of their internet community (sorry about the buzzwords here), and identify less with the community that they actually live in, they care less about what happens in that community.
One really good example is the number of young people in the US that vote, or have even bothered to register to vote. Many think that it doesn't affect them, or that they can't do anything about it.
I think we need to keep a very good eye on our government. It's shown its ability in the past at sticking its nose in where it doesn't belong, and it could really screw over what we now have with the internet.
Ok, this is a rather long-winded heads up for those of you who don't think that the government can do anything, look at what's going on with MS right now. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but the government could bend that into an excuse to heavily regulate the market. That could pose many obstacles to Open Source.