License to Surf

Bogatyr writes "Robert Cailliau, who designed the Web with Briton Tim Berners-Lee in late 1990, says all Internet users should be licensed so surfers on the information highway are as accountable as drivers on the road. " W3C has been working on such systems for years - unforgeable certificates which users must present to gain access to content, and which incidentally identify them uniquely and provide assorted marketing information. The end of anonymity, coming soon to a Web near you.

Comments

Accountability?

[citizenx]

Accountable for what, I'd like to know. Should we get insurance in case our packets collide with somebody elses?

Touchier than it might seem

[jacobm]

I can see both sides of this issue. On the one hand, as society starts having more and more of its business online, it will be more and more important for people who commit online crimes to be held accountable- in real life, "I just shot him to demonstrate what poor security against bullets he had!" doesn't hold up in many courts. Which is not to say that I think pranks like defacing a web site are as serious as murder, of course, but what about the guy who discovers an exploit for those new digital iToasters that will let him burn people's houses down, and uses it? Or who subtly hacks into an e-commerce site so that when you submit your credit card number, it records it in a plaintext file on the server before passing it along so he can come back and read it at his convenience?

From that standpoint, we want to make it as hard to be truly anonymous as possible, so that we can catch people who are doing things that we ought to punish. On the other hand, anonymity on a more casual level is very important. I am doing a sociology study on homosexuality and the internet, for example, and am finding that it's pretty common for people who are just discovering that they are gay to turn to the anonymity of the Internet to get information because they don't want people to know that they're gay. Destroying their anonymity would be very bad for them, perhaps even physically dangerous. And of course there are the more common reasons: I certainly don't want people knowing about my surfing habit just because it's none of their business, dammit, and I *certainly* don't want to start getting e-mails about sites that I'll just *love* considering the sites that I visit now...

I'm not sure how to reconcile those two competing interests. Does anyone else have any ideas?

Re:Touchier than it might seem

[MrLizard]

In the real world, you do not need to present identification before being able to commit violent crimes. That is, take your 'iToaster' example. Mapping it to the real world -- I can buy a gallon of gasoline and a book of matches without presenting ID. I can make this purchase in California and burn down a house in Texas, making it quite hard for the police to find the stoned store clerk who might dimly remember selling me the supplies. Is our solution to record all transactions? No.

To a very real extent, crime is a tax we all pay on freedom. There are societies with very little crime -- these are invariably societies no one sane would want to live in, where the most common crime is trying to escape.

We manage to maintain an acceptable (hell, plunging rapidly!) rate of crime in the 'real world' without mandatory identification and tracking of all citizen-units. If anything, hunting down crooks in cyberspace, anonymity or no, is generally easier because it's much easier to leave footprints, and because, let's face it, most hackers aren't the cunning criminal geniuses you see in movies. Most of them are script kiddies who have learned one or two k00l trix, and use them incessantly. Modus operandi is the first step to capture.

What we need is not new laws. What we need is for those charged with enforcing the existing laws to get off their doughnut-fattened butts and haul their corpulant forms into classes where they can learn about the new technology they need to master.

Driving Analogy Fails

[ewhac]

It sounds like he's trying to assure some level of accountability with the net to combat certain evils like spam, but he's using the wrong analogy. Surfing the Internet is not like driving a car.

A better analogy would be visiting a library. You make a request for some information (either by looking it up in a card catalog, or asking the reference librarian), and you receive it. We would never suggest that a librarian demand ID before allowing access to the book racks. However, we might expect them to politely stop the six-year-old from wandering into the art section where are kept the books of human figure photography. It's easy, after all, for a human to spot a six-year-old.

I think what worries Cailliau is the fact that the medium of information exchange is now entirely mechanized; that there's no longer a human gatekeeper to make sure that neither the six-year-old nor the neighborhood Fundamentalist doesn't accidentally wander off with Mapplethorpe.

Unfortunately, such wisdom requires adult human intelligence and life experience, which we aren't about to get in machines for some time. And the alternative suggested by Cailliau of checking IDs is unworkable and ethically repugnant.

For the time being, it seems we must rely on the honesty and honor of humans to not foul the well water. Even given Talin's Third Law ("Politeness doesn't scale."), this approach has worked remarkably well on the Internet so far. As long as we keep developing honesty and honor in our children, I believe we should be, for the most part, just fine.

Schwab

This isn't the answer

[Raereth]

I really don't think eliminating anonymity is the answer. In Real Life(tm) for example, in order to prevent crime, shops have cameras, security guards, and so on - basically the equivalents of various security tools available for servers on the Internet, such as firewalls, proxy servers, and so on.

Licensing surfers seems, IMHO, tantamount to forcing everyone to have little credit card-like things with their social security number (or whatever). Card readers would be posted on the door of every house, shop, mall, etc. and in order to enter a building, you'd need to insert your card. That way, there would be records of where everyone was and when, so if something got stolen, they (the government, police, storeowner, or whomever) would theoretically know who it was; and, incidentally, there would be reams of information on every single person in the country who ever left their home, detailing where they went and when. So law enforcement would have a very powerful new tool to combat crime, and marketers would be able to target the right people for their bulk mailings - everybody wins! ...right?

As I think most people can tell, a system like that would never, ever, ever be brought into existence, at least in a "free" country - it would be held as a massive violation of rights. So why on Earth should such a system exist on the Internet? It's hardly the only way to combat crime.

In the article, the Internet is compared to a highway, where all drivers are licensed, and so on. I have to disagree with this; I think an analogy of people in a massive city might be a little more appropriate, although even that is flawed. But perhaps one of the most glaring flaws in the drivers-on-the-road analogy is the potential for damage: someone in a car can easily kill themselves or others through a lack of skill in handling a car - either by hitting another car, or running into a tree, or whatever. That is why drivers and cars are licensed - if someone tries to drive a car without adequate training, then nine times out of ten they'll get into some sort of accident, and quite possibly seriously hurt. Now, if you put someone in front of a computer with no prior training, they'll just get confused, nothing more. No one gets hurt or killed. On the Internet, the people with potential to cause damage are the ones who know what they're doing (or, in some cases, script kiddies who just think they know what they're doing - but I don't think most of them are capable of serious damage). And I think that the truly dangerous people will figure out how to get around the licensing anyway.

And of course, there's the problem of who you get to oversee the licensing. A government wouldn't really work, since the Internet has no geographical boundaries; W3C wouldn't be able to do it, since IIRC no one is actually *forced* to listen to them. In fact, I wouldn't be amazingly surprised if an attempt at licensing surfers like this just resulted in fracturing the Internet into parts that require licenses, and parts that don't. I personally think that part of the beauty (for lack of a better word) of the Internet is the fact that it's pseudo-anonymous, and unregulated. There isn't really anyone with the power to say what you can or can't do. Naturally, this does get abused, but that hasn't ruined the Internet. It's a place where anyone can say what they want, and have an equal opportunity to be heard, without having to be afraid of anyone coming after them for it; that's something that should always be protected. A licensing and identification scheme would be a large step towards destroying that.