Can We Kill This Myth That The Internet Is A Wild West That Needs To Be Tamed?
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
The best way to make laws is to watch what people decide amongst themselves in reasonable debates, then write down the rules. There are important questions still open. Can online crooks steal my accounts if they guess my password? Can some slimeball send me ten thousand emails about v1agra? Can adults have sexual conversations with minors online? Can email services read my mail, figure out my situation and show me relevant commercial solicitations?
Anyway, if someone would put together a template of proposed internet laws as a wiki I'd write some entries. I think they'd be fairer and clearer than laws written by companies, promoted by lobbyists, and voted on by politicians. They have done poorly in the past. The laws about tobacco, food and drugs, to name some glaring examples, are not well aligned with the public interest. So let's have an open public process for writing down some rules to live online by.
Exactly. It's not just businesses, but it's also everyday people who aren't HN readers who want the Internet to work in a stable and predictable fashion. They didn't grow up developing services at the edges of the network; they are the people who use email and play Farmville and are just fine with that. They want their GMail to work without spam, they want viruses to stop, and they don't want to be spied on. These are not unreasonable demands. It's just that they happen to clash with the people who read HN and want the network to be free to grow around the edges rather than from the center.
The book Wild West 2.0 (http://wildwest2.com) talks a lot about this evolution. When we wrote it, we didn't realize that we were going to make the idea of naming worse -- we just thought it was a useful metaphor for the self-reliance and self-defense angles of the Internet. [Full disclosure, I am a co-author]
Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It" (http://futureoftheinternet.org/) is also a great resource for this culture clash between open and closed frontier models of the Internet and how reasonable demands ("stop spam") lead to solutions that clash with the HN view of the Internet.
Because the best solutions happen to be implementable at the edge of the network: don't want viruses? Use GNU/Linux (-> needs an idiot-friendly distribution, or education), or use a good firewall (I bet a FreedomBox could fill this role) Don't want spying? Host your e-mail (-> needs a usable FreedomBox). Don't want spam? Use a spam filter on your FreedomBox (will probably be there by default).
Yeah, the FreedomBox is a damn fine hammer.
Now, if people are all lazy and just want their privacy, security, and tranquillity to be spoon-fed without them having to think about it, then the internet is doomed. But some of us aren't, so I have hope.
Indeed. And now that you mention it, all those lobbyists headquartered up and down K Street represent a far more lawless situation that anything I know of online.
Firstly, the Internet most certainly is the enemy of the printed publication. In the sense that printed publications are dying because of the Internet. I'm not sure if the printed newspaper or magazine will exist at all 50 years from now, but if they do it's somewhat reasonable to assume they'll be a tiny fraction of the industry they are today.
Note I said _printed_.
Will journalism survive? Yes, there probably is a place for journalists, even on the Internet. However with the barrier to entry being near zero, and getting lower all the time the role of a traditional journalist will need to change substantially. There's a place for pay walls, and that will help existing news organizations survive, but their audience will be tiny compared to what say a popular blogger might get.
The value of a many-to-many communication system is that it allows people to communicate their opinion with zero barrier to entry. No degree. No fact checking. No paycheck. (Indeed much like this comment itself.)
50 years ago an article in the newspaper might generate some letters-to-the-editor, a select few of which might be published. Today literally everyone can comment and all replies are published, and indeed a conversation on the article ensues - whole sites (like hacker news) exist to promote that conversation.
This freedom of expression is dangerous to those who used to control public expression. Namely old-style "news" organizations and government. The one calls on the other to create more legislation.
The Internet is not the enemy of the printed news, because that war has alredy been lost. The Internet is the enemy of the professional journalist though who now has to compete with everyone to be heard. There are lots of good journalists who have successfully made the transition, but many will find it hard to compete out here in the colonies.
The internet isn't the wild west. It's the new world.
That said, what I'm saying is essentially what you're saying. Many in the news business (which should really be called the advertising business) see their futures online and are transitioning their core business to it.
It's not like they can, or should, do it overnight, though. There's still a lot of money to be made on the sun-setting industry.
Sure the internet functions as an information superhighway. It also functions as a den of thieves and swindlers, and people who elevate scams and pseudoscience to the look and feel of accurate information through mere the power of website presentation.
I have to tell my mother that just because something is on the internet doesn't mean it is important or true, and it certainly doesn't mean that the author necessarily has good intentions. I want her to consider it a Wild West.
The article accuses the narrative of sticking because it is "compelling" in the fanciful way, but I think the counter-argument here is the same problem. In many ways the internet is a Wild West. I think the argument is much more nuanced than saying it's not. I think the harder argument needs to be made with the wild west aspect as a given, but that an authoritarian clamp would make it a worse-off place.
And I have no training in database security.
Yeee haaaaw!
If you're a heavy internet user, your information is almost certainly stored in a database sitting on a machine running Windows XP. There can be several security patches in a month, and sys admins can be slow to install them. Are you OK with that?
You should always act defensively when relying on any third-party. Very few are trustworthy. Use a reliable password management system for your passwords (like KeePass or mailing GPG-crypted passwords to yourself) and generate a unique pass for each site. Use a unique mail if you can. If you're storing any data on there, make sure it is encrypted and triple encrypted.
If the internet was a Wild West movie, then effectively nobody would be able to go about their daily business without witnessing a gunfight. Malware may be a growing problem, but it's not like your typical user is getting fully infected by 1 piece of malware a day.
The TechDirt post was referring to this article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/26/internet...
People just don't give a damn until they realise what they've lost. Certainly techies are more and more getting turned against business & government by this, but the ordinary person ... as long as they can give all their personal info to Facebook, play videos on Youtube, and so forth, they won't care and I can't blame them.
Most people consider such things a minor inconvenience.
At a gross level, Democrats/liberals want to regulate corporate interaction with the Internet and Republicans/conservatives want to regulate personal interaction. In this respect the Internet is no different than other sectors.
By and large, people expect the status quo, and as it has been, so shall it be. Had the internet been born in some corporate boardroom - restricted, tiered, filtered - people would expect nothing more.
I suspect we only a few rebrands from control be wrested away - look at Verizon/Google's net neutrality bill making a distinction between wired and wireless internet access. Certainly a reasonable person might agree that wired vs wireless internet access are conceivably "different" - and if the average person can be convinced that there is a difference, they will accept the terms of this difference as it is given to them.
I think that like most things in life, the internet will be controlled by a few people with a desire to shape it. The question is whether or not the people who value freedom, take a vested interest as well.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Internet is different in both of those aspects, and that's one of the reasons why applying regulations is artificial and recieves negative reception by the general public.
This simplification should good enough to explain to most people.
The internet doesn't need fixing, what it needs is protection from men who want to put a big fence around it and charge you money so you can get some.
Ars Technica had this feature article that I thought was very insightful. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/how-the-robb...
There's also a troubling story of how freedom of press was stifled despite the technology. Doesn't this sound familiar in context of Youtube videos of demonstrators being taken down, recently, in England?
And finally, as mentioned in the article, this is a concrete instance where freedom was not essentially a zero-sum game, which meant, regulation by the government was not necessarily a bad thing. This squarely addresses some arguments made today about Net Neutrality among other things by people who favor a more laissez-faire approach.
What I would like to see happen is absolutely no subsidized infrastructure. Once you subsidize, you have a responsibility to make sure the taxpayers get their money's worth (theoretically). If you ignore this responsibility, as government often does, you get the situation in the article.
One person lives a lot shorter life than a government. For example, Standard Oil was a monopoly and yet, even they were naturally losing their grip as time went on. I don't think you should be worried about a single person taking over. Sure it may mess things up for a few years, but so what? Better that than forever, by law. At least in my opinion. Competitors will pop up and the old guard will become old.
I'm not saying I favour net neutrality or not. Just that if the government could just resist getting involved in every single thing, they will find economical solutions.
Today's problem is that many governments subsidized the creation of the infrastructure and then handed over the keys to the private companies. Sounds familiar? I don't get how anyone can look at the past 200 years in North America and still make that decision.
So based on that history, regulation is necessary to make sure that citizens get their money's worth.
But goddamnit, what's wrong with these people?!