Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain. — Marquis de Sade
The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty. — James Madison
To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed. — John Henrik Clarke
I made a prediction last year (The Internet Trap: Self-Governance, Information Security and Identity) that the mid 21st Century is going to result with the internet being partitioned off into separate “islands of self-governance” split along geo-political and corporate lines. Essentially, under the guise of security or self-governance, we will see the free internet disappearing. The final result will be “self-governance” by the authorities of each island, with the net effect being their controlling what information we see, what access to resources we have and thus, what identities we can construct for ourselves.
This seems to be happening. What follows is an addendum of recent events that leads towards the splitting — although there is still some time before we are finally segmented.
In the next few years we are going to see a free-for-all happening along legal, political, monetary and technological issues. How this plays out is still anyone’s guess.
Recent Events
1. In the name of stopping human trafficking…
Congress wants to pass a bill that forces websites to monitor their own content. This bill has already passed the House. It is called the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). I think all decent people and people who believe in human freedom would support stopping forced prostitution, but the bill as written also opens the door to potentially imposing on private companies the added burden of monitoring all content or monitoring nothing to have plausible deniability. The current law (47 U.S. Code § 230) basically treats websites like libraries — they are a service that provides access but have no responsibility for their content.
Of course, once this bill is passed (and I think it will be passed), what’s to stop Congress from legislating another bill that forces websites to exclude a different, more political content?
2. In the name of stopping drug trafficking…
Microsoft was charged with allowing the US government access to its emails server data. The problem? This data is saved on servers in Ireland. One of the US government’s responses is to demand that all data on US citizens be kept on servers on US soil. The lawyer for Microsoft has his summary here. Microsoft is rightly concerned about the privacy of its clients (to preserve a relationship of trust) but it also wants to comply with the government. One possible solution is the CLOUD Act.
A conflict with this solution is that the European Union (EU) already has a privacy law in place regarding EU citizens. If the US has the ability to get copies of servers in other nations, would the EU (or for that matter, China or Russia) also demand the same thing? As revealed by Edward Snowden, the NSA apparently has already violated EU laws. A great summary is available here.
A possible net effect of the CLOUD Act is to open the door for individuals who want privacy from the Federal government to purposefully use servers that are off shore, which of course, would unacceptable to the US government. The final result of this conflict may be that all US citizens would only be allowed to use servers that are on US soil. We see this situation being duplicated in China: the Chinese government has already ask Apple to remove apps that enable VPNs (Virtual Private Networks, basically tunnels that get around China’s Great Firewall) from the Apple App Store.
This server issue doesn’t stop here. At present, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services are the two biggest cloud platforms. It will be a VERY interesting to see what happens if/when Alibaba is able to copy Amazon’s success and develop their own cloud services in competition with Amazon. Would Alibaba be able to woo websites to use servers in China? As China builds its online infrastructure further, conflicts between governments over this issue are bound to intensify.
3. In the name of copyright…
A US judge has already ruled AGAINST embedding. That judge is stating that embedding is a violation of intellectual property rights. This issue is far from over, even if the summary judgement is a shock because embedding is an integral part of how social media works. Every major site does it: Facebook, YouTube, Bing, Google, Twitter, Instagram… The current accepted legal practice is to do a “server test,” which is to hold responsible the proprietors of who run the site the data is actually on. This judge however, doesn’t care where data is stored — she seems to only care about who is displaying the data in question.
Essentially, if this plays out, that embedding violates copyright, there will be major repercussions. For instance, if I embed a YouTube video in this article, the owner of that video can hold me liable for damages unless I get his explicit permission.
On a related note…
4. Linking does not violate copyright…
Playboy has sued the website boing boing for linking to a blog that contains its copyrighted centerfold images. This suit has been dropped since linking isn’t considered copyright infringement, something that has been litigated over long ago.
I added item 4 here because it relates to item 3.
The creator of HTML, Tim Berners-Lee, designed HTML such that linking is can be done without asking the linked site’s permission. This insight allowed the internet to grow at an exponential way. Imagine how slow it would be for me to write this article if I had to gather permission from each site owner to compose this article with links. Search engines like Google would not really be possible without permissionless linking. Essentially Google’s search result is just that — a list of links.
So relating back to item 3, it’s clear that embedding is not linking but both linking and embedding help foster the rich intertextuality that allowed the internet to blossom into what it is today. If embedding were not allowed, how could Google or Bing display its image or video search results? If anyone wanted to talk about a video on FaceBook, they would have to own the content to upload it to Facebook. If anyone wanted to share a video on Facebook, the owner would have to put it up under a specific content license.
We see the problem with 3 now. It’s presumable that users know which platforms allow embedding — and that in uploading their content, they are giving permission for people to embed it. After all, embedding always goes back to the original site. But if we got rid of most embedding, people would have to leave the site (through a link) often, just to see what is being said. Our experience of the media could radically change.
What next?
All of this, combined with the recent loss of net-neutrality will lead to a spontaneous order especially as private companies seek to create pay scales that segregate users. It’s well documented that humans self organize along resource access. This self organization is the main reason why the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.
Of course, net-neutrality is far from totally decided. Some states are pushing back on net-neutrality, whereas other states are deciding to use the loss of net-neutrality to legislate their own agendas, such as a kind of tax on porn.
Regulations can slow online balkinization but it seems that even if net-neutrality were to be reinstated, islands of self-governance would still emerge. After all, corporations aren’t the only ones seeking to police the flow of the internet. As pointed out above, governments also have a stake in where and how the information is managed, stored and who controls it.
Islands of self governance will emerge, either justified by the need for security or the need to remove it. Because servers are physically located, even utopic dreams of ownerless blockchain can’t effectively function if the flow of information isn’t free.
We have seen this happen on a micro-level as social media feeds continue to give us content that we engage with. That constant refinement of content creates a feedback loop that forms echo chambers. Feedback loops aren’t so new either: Capitalism works by fulfilling desire, so the technology of remarketing enables internet companies to just more immediately create feedback loops. The difference between now and say, six years ago, is that the immediacy of technology entraps our experience more, well… immediately. There will be ways out but any institution with enough clout will be able to stop the majority of users. For example, we are already seeing worse scenarios happen in China where finance and social behavior are beginning to be regulated on an individual level.
Once we are members of a digital island, who can tell what the world at large will look like? Today we are in a free-for-all virtual land-grab (or server-grab as the case may be) so we get opportunity to reflect on what has changed. Of course, thinking about past or future, will always reflect of our present moment. We will see in the alternate timelines our values and thoughts reflected in a way that is absent whatever interference we deem to be wholly transitory. In that sense, Futurama isn’t about the future at all, but about the problems encountered in late 1990s.
It is inevitable however, that although the internet, as new technology, has irreparably changed the social landscape, so our social landscape will come to be reflected in the blank slate of the internet.
Thus it behooves us even more to be responsible for our actions, thoughts and expressions in the present, because the world we all present ourselves will be the world we all end up living in.
If you think this essay insightful, provocative or thoughtful, give a clap, or a share or two. Feedback is always welcome.
