Don Reisinger at CNET posted an angry blog entry yesterday titled “A tech lover’s call to arms”. It’s the usual hand-wringing over various and sundry attempts to regulate/control/limit technology, ranging from the RIAA’s and MPAA’s feckless crusade against the scourge of piracy to the seemingly endless procession of politicians banning violent video games “for the children”. Apart from being more alarmist and less..well..helpful than I think it should, it does resonate with the gripes I and I think my fellow geeks feel towards various encroachments upon our technological liberty.
It’s not clear what Don would have his readers do, save for the obvious:
For what it’s worth, I call on all journalists, readers and companies to forego their apathy and do what they can to stand together and fight the ridiculous notion that technology should be throttled back for fear of its inability to adapt to the expectations of the Old Guard.
What that means, exactly, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure the fix isn’t regulatory, though. The same government that can ban “excessive” broadband prices and force telecomms into network neutrality can just as easily go the other way. If the last 250 years have taught us anything, it’s that placing one’s fate in the hands of government is always and everywhere foolish.
I would like to see the tech community focus more energy on hardening the Internet and content distribution technologies against government and corporate munging. The early days of the Internet were preoccupied with the notion that cyberspace would be a new frontier free of the constraints and yokes of meatspace, and it was upon that Utopian vision that the modern Internet was built. As it turned out (not surprisingly, in retrospect), the Internet does not “[interpret] censorship as damage” and “[route] around it” as John Gilmore famously said back in ’93. At the time, though, it seemed government and corporate meddling in the free flow of information was finally over, thanks to a the holy trinity of freely available encryption, anonymity, and global interconnectivity.
Though the Internet’s architecture makes it easier to censor and regulate than I first thought, the advantage still lies with us. If the Pirate Bay can stand up to the worst the MPAA can throw at it, then defiance of the DMCA and government and corporate attempts to monitor/regulate/censor content is also possible. If rich content could be hosted and distributed anonymously, how can content bans be effectively enforced? Where do you send the DMCA takedown notice? To whom do you serve baseless search warrants and frivolous law suits?
There’s nothing wrong with agitating for less technological forms of change, but giving governments more regulatory power over the Internet should not be undertaken lightly. What happens if the RIAA buys the chairman of the Network Neutrality subcommittee? What if some fundamentalist Muslim or Christian religious figure gets control of the Internet regulatory agency? All those powers that seemed great in the hands of a Network Neutrality warrior would suddenly be turned against us. It’s possible somewhere in human history a government has been given awesome power and subsequently not abused it, but nothing springs to mind just now.
Much like an armed citizenry is (supposed to be) the last bulwark against government tyranny, a decentralized, anonymous, covert darknet tunneled through the Internet should be established as a last bastion of freedom of thought and expression if the world’s governments’ contempt for virtually limitless freedom of conscience reaches its logical conclusion.
Reading this back to myself, it sounds like an angry cryptoanarchist rant. I’m not some sort of fringe libertarian, I swear! I just don’t like to be told what to do by clueless bureaucrats and pandering politicians, and if the time comes I want to be sure I have the means to disobey those who presume to control me.
