MikePadgett.com

Leave the Internet alone

— The day after some websites went dark in protest at proposed US laws on online intellectual property rights, the authorities shut down a file sharing service.”

So the United States shut down Megaupload.com today.

The United States is the major hub and remains over-represented in the management and delivery of the Internet (cf. ICANN) which, as I recall, has always been done in a consensual, multi-organisational, global environment without the need for tampering in the form of regulatory control or oversight. It’s a bit like Belgium sans gouvernement: you let people who know what they’re doing get on with it and you find that they do well enough without intervention from the political class and the money men (who are the only ones losing out here, let’s face it).

What the United States .gov has chosen to do here unilaterally – shutting down a Hong Kong company primarily serving out of China – has an obvious effect on the rest of the world, but we would be foolish to swallow any assertion that this has been done “to protect and to serve” the rest of the world.

This political blinkering is compounded by a general failure, as far as I see it, to find and support a proper, open global forum for the discussion of the Internet-specific issues beyond narrow and exclusive processes like ACTA which are about as open as a maximum security jail.

Certainly orgs on a supranational level such as WIPO have not really grasped the nettle. This may be because the ACTA process has cut them out of the deal.

Elsewhere the output of interesting developments like WSIS and WGIG has either remained fairly abstract or slowed to a trickle.

Old men with old ideas shuffling slowly

As I see it, this generation of representatives and legislators is faced with a phenomenon for which it does not really have a proper vocabulary. It continues to apply proprietary models that date back to medieval society.

These models are flawed in the online context because they are based on intrinsic notions of fixed physical boundaries and transactions conducted essentially between two parties, each with obligations that bind them to the other.

It is fairly obvious that the Internet does not slide nicely into this particular suit of armour.

To quote the Wikipedia article on WGIG:

IT experts have expressed doubts that a UN body that does not necessarily know enough about the Internet will effectively coordinate the Internet technologically.

If the Internet were a physical object, for that generation it would be a quantity of mercury: a marketable yet frustrating, shapeshifting and fairly noxious liquid which needs to be contained in a bottle.

In fact, the Internet is more like oxygen. It’s already out of the bottle, it’s all around us, you can’t measure it and even if we share a common need for it, we each have a unique relationship with it. You can package bottles and sell them in lots. You cannot package an atmospheric gas, you can only cut access to it.

So if the lawmakers have abdicated from addressing the more technical aspects of the Internet, how do they propose to address the issue?

The Internet is also, for want of a better term, a cross-cutting issue. What we are talking about here ticks an awful lot of boxes and individual institutions will find it hard to address these modern questions with the relatively narrow scope of their respective remits.

The Internet includes elements of intellectual property, the law of contract, freedom of expression, human rights, international law etc because it is the collective product of human intelligence.

If you focus on the tangible targets – the companies, the websites and the servers – you ignore the the way people behave and vice versa.

After all that, my feeling about the Internet is that it’s a reflection of our world. Some good, some bad.

Perhaps those few with the big vested interests are the ones who need to evolve instead of trying to impose their self-serving control on “the rest of us”.