"Something Must Be Done-ism" - the dangers of controlling the internet
One of the fascinating threads woven throughout PDF was the way in which the networked world has made life hard for the gatekeepers of information, whether the copyright industry or control-minded governments. It’s a new world for those whose models were predicated on scarcity or manipulation of information.
Perhaps the bravest presenter at PDF was Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America; the organization which became the evil empire in the epic SOPA/PIPA fight last winter. Sherman did his level best to present the case for the copyright holders to the crowd, and he did so with aplomb. (The slides pictured in this article were brilliant.)
The conclusion he drew from charts of precipitous revenue falloff was that, while SOPA and PIPA might have been poorly executed, something must be done to save artists (and, btw, the RIAA) by protecting copyright. If we had Vladimir Putin on the stage, I imagine that the words would be different but the tune the same; something must be done to stop the threats that Russia and other states face from online criminals, terrorists, and the other four horsemen of the digital apocalypse.
Sherman and Putin aren’t wrong in their statements. Right-thinking people should be in favor of artists being compensated for their work.* No one with a soul and/or brain is in favor of child pornography, murderous terrorists or online credit-card thieves. The challenge remains: in the face of such genuine evils, what should – rather than can – be done? What are the costs and benefits and who bears them?
In this case the cure could be worse than the disease. It isn't a coincidence that the leaders of the most autocratic governments in the world are the ones pushing for strict internet controls - all in the name of protecting the children, or IP holders, or minorities, of course.
You can't build a system that has the power to effectively control some specific content on the internet without building a system that can control any content on the internet. It's all just ones and zeros; if there is a superstructure to effectively censor what a government judges to be hate speech it can block political speech as well.
Even if you trust those in charge to Do the Right Thing(tm) we are faced with the question of efficacy. If such a censorship regime was created, the genuine bad guys wouldn't be stopped completely. One of the classic lines about our networked world is that the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. I've become a bit less triumphalist about that of late for the average internet user (well hi there, Apple Walled Garden.) The true hacker – in positive or negative connotations – is much harder to block. I'm not one who frequently quotes the NRA in an approving manner, but their cliché "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" is particularly apposite when it comes to the internet. Our online world is too rich, too complicated, too full of encryption and steganography to effectively interdict the highly motivated.
So if the creation of such a system can't stop all of the bad guys, what can it control? Well, most everyone else. In the US, it might be for pirating MP3s or anti-Semitic hate speech, but the same tools in China or Russia could block political speech on the grounds of fomenting chaos or the ever-popular chestnut of violation of societal values.
By trying to achieve the laudable goals of protecting children or compensating artists, we would in fact be developing a system designed to put the internet genie back into its bottle, and give the old gatekeepers the power they once had to control the flow of all information - positive political advocacy included. Attempting to tame the internet to the whim of nation-states will inevitably fail at the things we care about while achieving success that will horrify us.
* (Jaren Lanier, one of the PDF presenters, had a creative and radically different perspective of how that could be accomplished.)