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Safe European Home: towards a governable Internet
©2003 Bill Thompson
"After the correct political line has been laid down, organizational work decides everything, including the fate of the political line itself, its success or failure."
The military-entertainment complex that currently dominates policy making in the United States and drives its government's agenda has realised that the operation of the Internet Protocol - my favourite form of IP - is potentially very damaging to its ability to control its own favourite IP - intellectual property.
At the same time governments have realised that effective legislative control over the network and online activity requires a technical infrastructure to support surveillance, monitoring and sanctions against individuals and companies who break laws and regulations.
It is therefore in the interest of governments and of the content owning companies that the Internet is redesigned to allow greater control, and innovations such as trusted computers, signed code and content, digital rights management and protected systems are all under development or already available.
We are seeing what Lawrence Lessig anticipated in his book 'Code': a move from a relatively open architecture Internet to one which requires authentication, identification and approval, one where regulation and control are built into the network from ground up.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. There are many good reasons for building trusted systems , including a desire to make the Net more accessible to and usable by the majority of the world's population, the five and half billion people who are not yet online.
However an architecture of control is only as good as those who implement it, and there are many reasons to be worried about the impetus behind the rapid endorsement and adoption of trusted and closed networks. It seems clear that the people most likely to be in charge of tomorrow's network are not interested in freedom, truth or justice but only in power and control.
They are asserting control over technology and legislation to a remarkable degree. In the USA and Europe laws are being written (or have already been passed) to provide almost total protection for the control mechanisms implemented on top of new technologies, especially mechanisms which limit the use of copyright material.
The freedoms which the Internet Protocol once offered are being stripped away and there are no signs that legislation will ensure that those freedoms are available to users of the new network.
We see governments take a keen interest in ways to monitor and repress the use of the Internet by citizens, either to preserve public order (China) or protect against a perceived external threat (US, UK) or to promote public morality (Saudi Arabia).
Ownership of the network is now sufficiently concentrated in large corporations to permit governments to feel that laws will be obeyed: instead of tens of thousands of recalcitrant programmers and Web publishers, it is only necessary to frighten a few tens of company chief executives and the Net can be regulated.
As a result the public space of the Internet, that unstructured, unregulated zone of free expression and innovation that I have called the dot.commons, is being destroyed. Our freedom to play, experiment, share and seek inspiration from the creative works of others is increasingly restricted so that large companies can lock our culture down for their own profit .
This is a tragedy for those of us who operate in the Net's public spaces. It is the equivalent of the enclosure of common land in the 18th century, depriving the people of space to graze their animals and grow food crops.
It is a tragedy which can be avoided. The solution is not to attempt to stop the changes to the technical architecture of the Internet, nor to resist the imposition of regulation, but to ensure that the Net is under the control of democratically elected politicians rather than powerful corporations. At the same time it is necessary to ensure that a space for resistance, for activism and for opposition exists on the network, whatever it's underlying technical architecture.
That architecture does matter, as we can see by considering the history of the net. It's atonishing success depended on two factors. First, the network was based around technical standards that were all entirely in the public realm. Anyone who wanted to could read the documentation and build either hardware or software to connect to or use the Internet. There were no licenses to negotiate, no patents to worry about and no incumbents with market share to stand in the way of innovation.
Second, the Internet was simple, based around the principle that a computer network should simply shift bits around as reliably and rapidly as possible. All the 'intelligence' in the network was located at its edges, leaving the Net itself as an end-to-end channel for data. It was therefore very easy for anyone to write applications that used the Internet because it was not necessary to understand very much about how the network operated .
As a result, today's Internet has an architecture which expresses certain liberal values, to do with lack of centralised control, support for freedom of speech, openness to innovation, and resistance to monopoly - either cultural, economic or technological.
These values are implicit in the way that the Internet links computers and networks together and moves data around, as defined by the network protocols (TCP/IP) and the way they interact .
One important consequence of this is that anyone can write an application that uses the Internet Protocol to organise data into small 'packets' which can be sent across the Internet , and the network has no way of knowing or caring what application is creating or assembling the packets it moves from node to node . This is what the end-to-end principle which Lawrence Lessig proselytizes in 'The Future of Ideas' really means: it is not an abstract philosophical issue but a case of what facilities are available to programmers.
Yet the liberal ideology embedded in TCP/IP is not, in itself, enough to guarantee that the Net will be a force for social good. The lack of any real control over content or applications does not ensure that the tools created to use the Net will be used in a liberal way.
Instead, the Net's lack of control makes it porous to ideology and hence subject to colonisation. Like the Labour Party under Tony Blair, the Net has no core beliefs of its own and can be hijacked by any sufficiently aggressive ideology.
This is not just an abstract point: today's Internet has a dominant ideology, that of the United States of America, resulting in the blind acceptance of the what Richard Barbrook terms the 'Californian ideology' in almost any discussion of network regulation or politics. US values and US interests dominate so comprehensively that it is reasonable to view this as hegemony and to see the Internet today as expressing a US world view.
In the early days of the Internet the dominant ideology was that of the academy, with sharing of information, freedom of speech and a commitment to the non-commercial use of the network. This changed from 1990 onwards, as the free market/free speech values of the US replaced asserted themselves online.
We have lived with US hegemony for many years, but on the open Internet it has never been absolute: US values may be dominant but they are not exclusive, because today's Internet cannot be completely controlled. On the Net a thousand flowers can bloom, and all points of view can find expression.
As a result. even those who object to the values which the US seeks to promote online have been able to live with them. Now, however, a far more dangerous situation has arisen, The Net is in trouble, not because US culture and US values are dominating an essentially open network but because governments and corporations around the world are making a concerted effort to dismantle this open network and hard-wire many of those same values in a regulated network.
The architecture of control has two goals. First, it is being promoted as a way to manage the online use of intellectual property of all kinds, as discussed below. Second, its proponents believe that the new network technologies will make it impossible to resist the imposition of the US world view, so that hegemony will become imperialism.
On this model, US economic, political and cultural values will dominate the network just as US interests dominate the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
However there are likely to be unanticipated consequences of this, not least that the trusted network will give each country the ability to assert its own values on those parts of the global Internet that fall within its jurisdiction. On the trusted network nation states will be sovereign, as they are in their physical territories. And this will mean that those states who do not share US values when it comes to freedom of speech, the publication or sharing of information, openness to critical comment or unregulated markets will be able to d what they want, using the same tools.
On this network the losers are the users, those who want to use the Net freely, to share information across borders, to explore ideas or challenge institutions. Whether the US or China determines the operation of the regulated Net is unimportant. With no space for resistance or revolution, the Internet we know today will vanish and the potential for play, exploration, discovery and innovation will vanish with it.
This is not inevitable. A regulated Internet does not have to be a closed Internet . However the trends today are towards increased control, and we must understand how this is happening before we can identify ways to resist it.
The argument in favour of a closed network has two strands. The first is the belief in the content industries that they should use technological means to assert complete control over creative products such as music, film or text. These businesses want to make use of the network which they - or their now bankrupt former competitors - so expensively built, and they have realised that they need more control than the current networks architecture allows. They are putting the technologies in place to make this possible.
The second strand is the growing desire of governments of all political persuasions to exert complete control over the online activities of their citizens. Some argue for this in terms of protecting the public, others are more overtly concerned with closing down dissent, but the end result is the same.
We cannot rely on technological opposition to these changes. The destruction of today's Internet and its replacement by a closed network is eminently possible simply because what programmers have built, programmers can take away.
Effective opposition must therefore involve more traditional forms of protest and activism, and be grounded in politics rather than programming. This does not mean that programming will not be important to the eventual defeat of attempts to clamp down on the network, just that the politics must come first.
The two areas where opposition is most important are copyright and freedom of expression. It is vital that Internet users reclaim copyright from the corporations, restating the principle that copyright is a state-mediated bargain, not an inalienable property right.
It is also important to resist the erosion of our rights to freedom of expression, freedom of online movement and personal privacy when online, whatever the technical capabilities of the network may be.
Being able to use, copy and adapt other people's work - within limits, of course - is vital. But there is more to freedom online than just being able to rip CDs, exchange MP3s or cut and paste from ebooks.
We also need to ensure that we have the same rights to freedom of expression and association online as we do offline. I've been criticised in the past for saying that regulation of the Net is not only inevitable but desirable - but that does not mean we should accept harsher controls over what we say or do online than we would expect in the street or in our homes.
We must think differently about the Internet and acknowledge that it has to be regulated and controlled if it is to serve the interests of the many rather than the few; that freedom from viruses and worms and spam is important too.
We need a new settlement for the online sphere, one that acknowledges the needs of all users and not just the cyberlibertarians and the netheads. We need compromise, and recognition that the net is not just an online extension of a particular anti-government US approach to personal liberty.
A regulated network does not have to be an online police state. In the real world tools of oppression exist but their use is controlled and managed through the political system. In the United Kingdom measures which are felt to limit civil liberties can be challenged, and the Human Rights Act offers protection from loss of freedom.
Other counties and other political traditions will do things differently, but along with accepting that the Internet is just part of the real world we must also accept that freedoms we hold dear are not respected elsewhere.
The solution cannot be to abandon attempts to integrate the Internet more fully into our everyday life by making it regulable, if for no other reason than that oppressive Governments have already shown themselves willing and able to control, manage and suppress even the open Internet. China, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and many other countries have used a combination of legal restraint and technical expertise to limit Net access from their territory, and they will continue to do so.
Instead we must exert political pressure and encourage openness and access, perhaps in exchange for trade concessions. If Turkey is willing to respect the human rights of its citizens in order to qualify for membership of the European Union, why can't China be encouraged to offer full access to US news services in return for trading agreements?
Of course, we must not naively claim that government always gets it right. Things do go wrong - look at the damage done to civil liberties and the constitutional settlement by the President and Congress of the United States in the USA PATRIOT Act. Even so, it is important to retain a belief in government and the power of the state to do good as well as harm, and not accept the dominant US view that government is always mistaken and dangerous.
Neither should we put our faith in technology, as commentators like Declan McCullough urge, because that is an arms race that those in favour of online freedom will never win. The work on trusted processors, secure networks, digitally-signed code and the other building blocks of a regulable Internet is already well advanced, and it will not be abandoned. We must anticipate the rollout of this new network and accept that it will be generally endorsed by the state, the corporations and the majority of end users.
Nor do we need an online militia: one needs only look at the oppressive, authoritarian, undemocratic and unaccountable groups that have set themselves up as 'spam cops' to see how illiberal, dangerous and ultimately ineffective such a plan would be.
Instead of spending out energies resisting the deployment of the new technologies of regulation and control, we should decide how to work with them to create a network where our freedoms are preserved, where openness prevails and where state power is properly limited.
The solution is political, not technical: we must ensure that the regulated Internet, when it arrives, is under effective political control and that our democratic system is capable of framing those regulations in the wider public interest rather than serving the interests of the executive, the corporations or any other group.
If we want a networked future, and we want the network to serve the interests of the whole world and not just one class or other - neither the geeks or the corporations - then we have to embrace the regulated net and abandon today's Internet.
Unless we recognise this and start thinking about how we will exert democratic control over that new network then we will, by default, leave it to the corporations. Because the new network will not be a self-organising system, it will not be some anarchist paradise or even a libertarian cyberstate - it will be a space where almost total control is possible.
If we do not ensure that the new network is properly incorporated into existing political structures, so that our governments can pass laws which are effective online and we can use our strength as citizens to fight for good laws, then we will give up control to the corporations. If we do not allow good governments to act, then we will give bad governments the freedom to use the Internet to oppress.
We have an opportunity now that is rarely given: we can see the future, see the shape of the network in 2010, and start now to build political structures and even laws that will ensure that the coming network preserves the principles that we value and is able to serve the real interests of the world's six billion people.
Surely that is worth fighting for?
Bill Thompson
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