We are to talk of the politics of the net, but there are none.
There are no values embedded in the Internet because the Internet does not exist.
There are values embedded in the protocols, especially those grouped together into TCP/IP; there are values embedded in software, as servers, daemons, applications; there are values embedded in uses. But the net cannot be said to have 'values' in any useful way or to exist in any useful way.
I see two key questions which can inform our debate:
Is the end to end principle the fundamental basis of all that we value on today's internet, and therefore something which we must fight to preserve on tomorrow's - as universal suffrage and fair elections are fundamental to democracy?
To which the answer is 'yes'.
Is the end to end principle fatally compromised by moves to introduce trusted computing architectures, DRM for content, signed code and other aspects of the regulable Internet?
To which the answer is 'no'.
Talking of the politics of the net as if it was something that stands alone is a mistake, one we have made too often in the past. There is only one politics: how power is exercised in groups of people. There is only one dimension: acts that tend to support those currently holding power, and acts that tend to change the distribution of power.
The rest is just PR, padding and intellectual masturbation.
We need to avoid talking about the politics of any technology, and to talk instead about politics as it is exercised through a technology.
The net today is a tool through which political power can be exercised in various traditional and non-traditional ways. But more importantly, it is a contested zone where politics is done. In that zone issues like censorship, peering and routing, rights management
A belief that permission networks simply cannot flourish because 'freedom will triumph' is sweet but fundamentally wrong - permission networks are all around us, in company LANs and in the world of the media.
It is important to avoid essentialism, to avoid any claim that the network has core properties which define it and which cannot be changed. The net has no essential values, no essential qualities. Asking 'what is the Internet?' is, pace Wittgenstein, as useful as asking 'what is a table?'
There are many networks, sharing a family resemblance.
This is not to say that particular forms of the network are not the consequences of particular design choices, but as with any cause-effect relationship we cannot be sure that another cause could not produce the same effect.
To know 'if A then B' tells us that, if A is observed, B will also be observed. But it does not allow us to deduce that if B is observed, A will be observed. Nor that, if A is not observed, B will not be observed .
Can I imagine an internet that does not respect the end-to-end principle? Yes, I can, because we could implement today's Internet over any protocol - we would not have the flexibility or the ease of deployment of new protocols, but it would look and feel the same to users and even to most developers. In the same way, I can imagine a table with three legs rather than four, or one that is not a flat surface. The tableness of an object is its method of use.
However without end to end we cannot see an Internet which is as extensible, open or unfettered as the one we have today - we could design a managed network that replicated the functionality of today's net, but it would lack the openness to innovation that is one of the things we in fact value most.
End to end essentialism is a very limited view of net.politics and one which leaves too much space to those who are engaged in real world politics.
An end-to-end Internet is permeable to all political values, which leaves it open to colonisation by the most aggressive belief systems - as we see in the cultural hegemony of the West Coast free market liberalism on today's network, complete with anti-censorware vigilantes and spam cops.
We can attempt to categorise the political positions of the groups which use the Net or see it as a viable space for action. The main axes I would draw are:
altruism <-> selfishness:
should the net benefit those who are not like me, or only me and those I identify with?
individualism <-> collectivism
is online activity principally a personal act or a group activity
humane <-> cruel
should the core principle be 'do no harm to others' or must we accept damage to others' interests
However I am not sure that this is useful, interesting or a way to improve our understanding.
The wider goals - undermine dictatorships. expose lies and falsehoods, bring world peace - are only our side of the story. Those who want to promote hatred, undermine democracies, tell lies, encourage wars - are also able to make effective use of the net. Indeed, perhaps they are a lot better than we are.
The net is a reflexive political area, a space for action which is created by action. It is about the things we do to create the space in which we do the things we do to create the space in which we do the things we do to create the space...
And every new protocol is a political act, one that shapes the sphere and can affect the real world.
Like the relationship between the physical and the psychological that we see in psychosomatic illnesses and some allergies, the relationship between the politics of the net (and net affordances) and the real world is complex, two-way and deeply recursive. For example, the ownership of fibre/copper determines the peering of networks determines latencies, response times and where the packet filters are located, which in turn determines the format of virtual communities... but that ownership is itself determined by commercial factors, including number of paying users, traffic loads and so on.
We must not assume that network politics are inherently progressive. I have described the net before as 'permeable to ideology': it will support all and any ideologies, although repressive ones will find it hard to preserve the openness that characterises today's network and will try to limit its capabilities.
The Net, like the British Labour Party, has no core ideology, no ability to draw a line in the sand and say 'this far but no further', no principles to call on to defy any expediency. Data can be captured and retained, even on today's 'open' Internet, and without breaking anything. Anonymity can be compromised without vast technical effort and the construction of elaborate systems of virtual mirrors which may be flawed and which can always be compromised in the real world by the sort of intelligence gathering we already see. It's fine to use Freenet, but if my car number plate has been logged parking near the cybercafe and I've had my ID card checked by a police officer on the street outside, nobody is going to believe it wasn't me who lobbed a logic bomb at Barclays.
Technology is not neutral, but nor is its method of use determined. If we want a liberal Internet we have to make it from what's lying around - it won't just emerge from the mud-caked TCP/IP straw through a process of spontaneous generation. The Net must be a contested political zone. That is, we must think of it in political terms, as an arena for action where ideas matter, where the choices we make about technology has consequences and outcomes for our ordinary lives.
We are used to this. Our choices over the technology underpinning the congestion charge scheme - cameras and penalty notices instead of tags and account debits - changes the pattern of daily life for those living in London. We have to accept it for the Net, instead of seeing it as a 'special place' somehow outside the dirty world of politics, plotting and compromise.
One consequence of this is that we cannot leave its evolution to technologists, however well-intentioned or principled they may be. ICANN realised this first, and has successfully deposed the IETF and indeed the Internet Society from core decision-making. It must be deposed - that is indeed one of the reasons I favour giving the ITU and the United Nations System control over the Net, as it is the only way I can see to assemble a strong enough coalition against ICANN.
We also have to recognise that we - the geeks, the hackers, the liberal intellectuals - have come late to this party. The major corporations realised that they needed to exert political control over the Net years ago, and they've packed the standards bodies, distorted the standards, used what laws they can find (WTO) and paid for new laws when they had to (DMCA, EUCD), and used the free market rhetoric to construct a Network both technically and legally shaped in their own interests.
Remember that having a revolution and overthrowing the government is only one way to change the world. Bilateral trade talks and WTO agreements are another. And taking advantage of the 'freedom' today's network offers is yet another.
If I was the Chinese government or a radical Islamist state with an eye on the future, or a Russian billionaire with ambition, then I'd spend lots of money building the coolest social software I could, and release it freely and under the GPL; I'd sponsor people to attend IETF; I'd buy a registry and get closely involved in ICANN and I'd offer useful extensions to standards, put software into the public domain. I'd build something like Google's orkut, or MT, and I wouldn't even bother putting back doors or secret stuff in them (they would only be found). I'd just want to be loved. Perhaps I'd tell people that I would 'do nothing evil', and even take lots of money from the Western banks and investors, letting them finance their own downfall.
I'd use the information I gathered from people, all those log files and search terms and even the personal and corporate email that passed through my servers, but carefully, just as the British government used the Enigma intelligence. And perhaps, at some point in the future, I'd use the power I had acquired.
But if the network used encryption and signed code/content, and had content management built into the core protocols, under the control of governments rather than corporations, my task would be harder. Companies are cheap; governments tend to be more expensive - and the ones that are affordable by gangsters are usually rather decrepit.
The internet is regulated and carefully controlled in some ways and at some levels, in order to make other forms of regulation either possible or impossible.
• IP address space is controlled to make e2e possible
• BGP is patrolled to make peering possible
So don't give me none of your hippy freedom bullshit.
The question is: what forms of regulation do we want to have, and at what levels, and what outcomes do we want the regulation to create?
At the moment we have a network in which we are free to make and distribute spam, viruses, phish and the rest. It is one which can provide only a simulacrum of free speech because the real world regulations - carried by law and lawyers - can reach down with a cease & desist order and break our little virtual world whenever they want.
Yet any attempt to provide strong guarantees for freedom that rely on law not technology are resisted by those who prefer to code anticensorware instead of the hard work of changing the way the Chinese government works.
Again and again we see a woeful lack of imagination on the part of the e2e essentialists, who are like the framers of the US constitution who could not imagine a viable economy that was not built on slavery, or AT&T who did not see what packet switching could do for their business.
If our discussion is about anything it is about constitutional principles. Not JP Barlow's absurd constitution for cyberspace, but the principles which underpin the network as a polis, just as the US constitution underpins that country. It is about creating structures which are open or closed, democratic or autocratic, flexible or rigid - acceptable or not.
The real question is whether we want an open or a closed network: the politics we engage in through the net is determined by that choice.
In the end, this is a battle about {making | keeping | preserving} a space for forms of action which do not serve the interests of the powerful. In our discussion we should not be concerned with what these forms are, or indeed how they will be used, but with what must be done today to ensure that our children, should they wish to do so, can act in accordance with their desires rather than simply with the permission of those holding power.
Democracy is the touchstone for a politics which does not accept anyone's claim to power without testing it against the will of the people. We must embed our network, the one we have all worked hard to build, within that democratic tradition. It is not there now.
Thank you
Bill
( We can, however, deduce that if B is not observed, A will not be observed. But this is often less useful than it seems.)