SOPA won't stop the internet, it will merely force it underground. | Hacker News Reader

SOPA won't stop the internet, it will merely force it underground.

blog.webdistortion.com

49 pointssquiggy2216 comments

This article seems to be just the kind of positive vibe that geeks love to read: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Yeah, right. I don't see any evidence that we will have a usable underground internet soon, and in the meantime an ultra-censored, walled-garden internet appears inevitable.

Technical efforts might eventually create a platform which cannot be controlled by the government but it will be a very long time before this is usable for all but the most technical people. By the time something is ready for the the average public we will have had a censored internet and no viable uncensored platform for many years. How will you convince average joe that they should be interested in such a project? This will be a niche service used by child pornographers, drug traffickers, file sharers and freedom geeks. Good luck convincing anybody to identify with that group.

I genuinely agree with you on all points.

However, I do have one small note; the early 90s internet was also unusable for all but the most technical people. It was also fantastic, and I'd largely be happy to have access to an internet community of that size and quality today -- especially since I wouldn't have to also give up today's consumer internet.

IRC and USENET never went away...

USENET: The eternal September. IRC: mIRC

Pherhaps it would go full circle?

Darknet starts as a place for hardcore techies , so the techies that use it start to build cool stuff for it and self regulate. The cool stuff attracts the semi-technical early adopters who bring money to the party. The money is used to finance more cool stuff and eventually innovation on the darknet outpaces the normal internet due to the lesser restriction.

Soon the masses arrive and now every business wants a 'dark site', piracy explodes and major corporations and government try to get their tentacles into gaining more control over the darknet.

I agree the article is geeky. But I'll point you to all the "freedom geeks" in the PRC bypassing the Great Firewall with simple VPN software as a counterexample to your claim.

I have no problem being identified with freedom geeks. I don't think lumping all 4 groups you listed as one group is a foregone conclusion. It seems to me that for the most part people recognize that you can be a member of one while not being a member of the other.

While it may take a certain amount of technical skill to participate that still leaves a free, as in freedom, route open for the dissemination of information. That is, after all, the first step. You can bet that as long as a route remains open then that route will be made easier to use. I point you toward the LOIC as an example. My mother if she were so inclined to take part in a DDOS with that. Something that as recently as a year ago would have been beyond her.

It seems to me that for the most part people recognize that you can be a member of one while not being a member of the other.

Do you think so? People can be very quick to paint people into very broad categories. I would imagine that if you were to join a network where child porn was readily available then it doesn't matter how much you shout about doing it for freedom of speech etc, many people will assume that your secretly only there for the child porn.

This is very true, even if the government does not outright ban use of darknets their use could be stigmatized enough in society to the point that people who use them would be viewed with suspicion.

Recent (French) history tells us that this argument will probably not be taken into account by the law makers, because they are in majority incompetent, and more importantly this argument isn't backed with promises of positive income nor better behaviour. They will blindly look at the exposed pros and cons, and their limited expertise will merely say "so what" to these cons. The SOPA project, much like all Internet regulation projects, are considered as short-term "win-win" deals and long-term "win-don't care" deals with the Entertainment Majors. Since they expect the masses to not understand the cons either and keep voting the way they always did, they don't foresee any negative mid-term consequences either.

Arguments against Internet Regulation laws have to include profits for the government, otherwise I'm afraid the law makers will keep on not listening.

I find the article a little overzealous; while I'm no staunch capitalist, including sentences like "The web in its current, open state is a threat to capitalist ideals" doesn't help convince me about your goals.

And yes, while this is partially true, a lot of legitimate businesses and people who aren't motivated enough to "go dark" also drive the internet, and they're not going to be so easily forced underground - any such internet would be a shadow of its former self, and an easy thing for governments to demonise with the usual examples (drug trafficking, child pornography, etc.)

It's not even true: plenty of free market capitalists view copyright as a monopolistic distortion caused by the state, not as a real mechanism of the market.

Against Intellectual Property [1] is a good example.

[1]: http://mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf

I saw that line as a distraction from the larger point the author was trying make. There are many capitalists who view this any act of censorship as foolhardy and destructive. Among laissez faire the whole IP debate is not at all settled.

For the record I am a staunch capitalist and I see SOPA, the MPAA/RIAA, and censorship in general as reprehensible.

The net can route around censorship. People will just have to get used to encrypting their stuff, using proxies, hiding their DNS requests, and support ISPs that resist. Maybe it will spark the demand for more off-shore data centers.

A "dark net" is highly unlikely given the geographic dispersion of our populations and the high-cost of infrastructure for moving signals over those kinds of distances.

Some (unintended?) irony:

From a random Server Beach Unix host of mine:

   shephard@sbwc:~$ dig +short blog.webdistortion.com
   ghs.google.com.
   ghs.l.google.com.
   173.194.64.121

From my laptop at work using whatever DNS resolvers happen to be operational here:

   ghshephardmb:~ shephard$ dig +short blog.webdistortion.com
   ghshephardmb:~ shephard$

Wasn't the US once known as "the land of the free"? When did they lose it?

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