Earlier this week, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart summed up the debate over net neutrality by stating, “On one side [are] those who want the marketplace to remain a wide open market of ideas, and on the other side [is] a larger group who have no idea what net neutrality means.”
Stewart may have been joking, but he was right about one thing – many folks are confused about what net neutrality actually is and what it would mean for Internet users.
That’s why I decided to enter the America’s Got Net video contest, sponsored by the Open Internet Coalition, a pro-net neutrality trade association. In a short video entitled, “The Open Internet and Lessons from the Ma Bell Era,” I explain how mandating net neutrality would endanger the networks of tomorrow and insulate entrenched firms from competition. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/v/ZS_udd5K91o?fs=1&hl=en_US
The way Ben Kunz puts it in a new Business Week article, “Each device contains its own widening universe of services and applications, many delivered via the Internet. They are designed to keep you wedded to a particular company’s ecosystem and set of products.”
I like Ben’s article a lot because it recognizes that “
walling off” and a “widening universe” are not mutually exclusive. If only policymakers and regulators acknowledged that. They must know it, but admitting it means acknowledging their limited relevance to consumer well-being and a need to step aside. So they feign ignorance.
Many claim to worry about the rise of proprietary services (I, as you can probably tell, often doubt their sincerity) but I’ve always regarded a “Splinternet” as a good thing that means more, not less, communications wealth. I first wrote about this in Forbes in 2000 when everyone was fighting over spam, privacy, content regulation, porn and marketing to kids.
Increasing wealth means a copy-and-paste world for content across networks, and it means businesses will benefit from presence across many of tomorrow’s networks, generating more value for future generations of consumers and investors. We won’t likely talk of an “Internet” with a capital-“I” and a reverent tremble the way we do now, because what matters is not the Internet as it happens to look right now, but underlying Internet
technology that can just as easily erupt everywhere else, too.
Meanwhile, new application, device and content competition within
and across networks disciplines the market process and “regulates” things far better than the FCC can. Yet the FCC’s very function is to administer or artificially direct proprietary business models, which it must continue to attempt to do (and as it pleads for assistance in doing in the net neutrality rulemaking) if it is going to remain relevant. I described the urgency of stopping the agency’s campaign recently in “Splinternets and cyberspaces vs. net neutrality,” and also in the January 2010 comments to the FCC on net neutrality.
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The Washington, D.C., fight over “net neutrality” in some ways only scratches the surface of what’s really at stake in the question of government regulation of Internet service providers’ treatment of online content. The downside of permitting FCC and Congressional authority over cyberspace “neutrality” is hard to overstate.
A former colleague and friend, now at New Media Strategies, sent me a January 2010 article—“The Splinternet means the end of the Web’s golden age”—about the proliferation of non-compatible devices used online, and th
e shielding of much new content behind logins and passwords, like the way News Corp. “hides” Wall Street Journal content behind a paywall, and other perceived insults. The author doesn’t see the trend as reversible, but the tone implies what an ominous development this somehow is, as if all this abundance and customization is negative, and that caution is in order.
But the realities of pay models and splintering—like the fact that some journalists have families to feed and can’t write for free, that Google doesn’t see much of what’s on Facebook, and that I can’t stream your iTunes—have no metaphysical, free speech, or public policy implications. Emergent splintering online represents the beginnings of a groundbreaking expansion of the Web’s basic capabilities, not a curtailment. (Besides, many with pro-neutrality views have been upset with Google lately anyway.)
This hand-wringing and use of the term “splinternet” reminded me of a related speculation I’d made in Forbes nearly 10 years ago about the tailoring of networks and pipes. Disturbed by then-burgeoning calls for regulation of the Internet emerging from various quarters over issues like privacy, spam, porn and cyber-trespass, I called for a “splinternet” mindset then and put it as follows:
The Internet needs borders beyond which users can escape damaging political resolutions of [policy] battles, which are rooted in the Internet’s non-owned, common-property status. Conflicting legislative visions in a cyberspace populated by exhibitionists at one extreme and would-be inhabitants of gated communities on the other, reveal the basic truth that not everybody wants or needs to be connected to everybody else.
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What would it take to create a more secure Internet? That’s what John Markoff explores in his latest New York Times article, “Do We Need a New Internet?” Echoing some of the same fears Jonathan Zittrain articulates in his new book The Future of the Internet, Markoff wonders if online viruses and other forms of malware have gotten so out-of-control that extreme measures may be necessary to save the Net. Compared to when cyber-security attacks first started growing over 20 years ago, Markoff argues that:
[T]hings have gotten much, much worse. Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.
Like many others, Markoff fingers anonymity as one potential culprit:
The Internet’s current design virtually guarantees anonymity to its users. (As a New Yorker cartoon noted some years ago, “On the Internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog.”) But that anonymity is now the most vexing challenge for law enforcement. An Internet attacker can route a connection through many countries to hide his location, which may be from an account in an Internet cafe purchased with a stolen credit card. “As soon as you start dealing with the public Internet, the whole notion of trust becomes a quagmire,” said Stefan Savage, an expert on computer security at the University of California, San Diego.
Consequently, Markoff suggests that:
A more secure network is one that would almost certainly offer less anonymity and privacy. That is likely to be the great tradeoff for the designers of the next Internet. One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers’ licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network. But that runs against the deeply held libertarian ethos of the Internet.
Indeed, not only does it run counter to the ethos of the Net, but as Markoff rightly notes, “Proving identity is likely to remain remarkably difficult in a world where it is trivial to take over someone’s computer from half a world away and operate it as your own. As long as that remains true, building a completely trustable system will remain virtually impossible.” I’ve spent a lot of time writing about that fact here and won’t belabor the point other than to say that efforts to eliminate anonymity for the entire Internet would prove extraordinarily intrusive and destructive — of both the Internet’s current architecture and the rights of its users. There’s just something about a “show-us-you-papers,” national ID card-esque system of online identification that creeps most of us out. That’s why I spend so much time fighting age verification mandates for social networking sites and other websites; it’s the first step down a very dangerous road.
But what if we could apply such solutions in a narrower sense? That is, could we create more secure communities within the overarching Internet superstructure that might provide greater security? Markoff starts thinking along those lines when he suggests…
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.