We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Governmentalism These are all internet problems and [internet users] think someone should do something about it. Although many internet users think the government should keep out of the internet, I suggest to you that most ordinary people who just use the internet like they use the banking system or the trains think that the government should make sure it all works properly for them and that bad things get stopped from happening.
– David Hendon, Director, Business Relations 2, Business Group , Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, speaking to the registrars’ meeting of Nominet. Imagine, if the government regulated it, then the internet would run as well as the banking system and bad things would get stopped from happening. This was a speech made yesterday.
(Hat-tip: The Register)
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Need I add that most “ordinary people who just use the internet” have no idea how it works? I mean, i’m not being a technosnob here. They simply don’t understand how the DNS works, for instance, nor even about how websites are hosted, and so on.
Anyway, seems pretty obvious that the government are gearing up to nationalising the DNS, to stop people they don’t like getting websites, etc, etc.
I think that people under the age of 25 have a pretty good idea of how the internet works. They certainly understand that DNS maps names to numbers, although they probably don’t understand, say, the concept of delegation. But that’s sort of irrelevant. If the government claims it can make things better, people will believe them. Maybe a little less than this time last year, but they still will. So long as Fred Bloggs can register “www.mypetrabbitonline.co.uk” he’s not going to care about the governance structure of Nominet. If the government says something vague about being better able to protect trademarks, most business will be happy to hear it.
The modern internet wouldn’t exist without vast investment from a few large, private firms. They are the ones that really control what happens, not the little users at the end of the DSL line, and not the academic and engineering outfits that ran it 20 years ago.
If the government overcomes objections from the big ISPs (and to a lesser extent the big content providers), that’s all they need.
And this from the people whose regulations provided the perverse incentives that made the banking crisis possible, whose regulations and planning have pushed housing prices out of so many people’s reach and all those other wonderful things we so love about this godforsaken age.
The key thing here is that the government will want to make it gradually more and more difficult for Fred Bloggs to do that by hiking up bureaucracy and costs; they also want to be able to immediately pull the plug on http://www.mypetrabbitonline.co.uk if it offends them. The aim is to herd all the individual cats onto big corporate sites rather than their own domains, to govern them via AUPs and so on. The idea is that say twenty years from now, youngsters will be staggered to be told it was once possible for Fred Bloggs to own his own website. They are absolutely determined to convert the internet from an individualist anarchy to a corporate playground. Big, controllable corporations and organisations should have websites, not scum like Fred.
But the cry from the government when asked about the current crises in banking, housing and everything else is “but its not our fault! We can’t be blamed!”
Who’s fault is it then? They want to regulate every aspect of our lives and our society but blame someone else when it all goes tits up. They want to take all the responsibility for such things away from us and then deny their own when it all comes crashing down. They make so many rules that those who have to live by them can only follow one path, the path to destruction, and then pretend the rules meant something different.
It won’t be long now I fear.
I don’t understand much about how the internet works and that is one of the reasons I don’t want the Government to have anything to do with it.
Well, just musing here, but we know what the Left would do in this situation. They’d dig up some dirt on this David Hendon, and destroy the bastard.
…POTUS Reagan.
Although I would prefer the government to keep its meddling paws off the internet, I’m not particularly concerned about Nominet. If they screw up DNS so badly that it no longer serves the needs of internet users then that will just create a stronger incentive to get Distributed DNS up and running properly.
The internet really does route around censorship. The danger is not that the government messes with the internet, the danger is that the government prevents or controls access to the internet. There is one weak link in the chain and that is the link from your home computer to the internet. Government regulation of ISPs is the thing we should be really worried about.
It doesn’t route around the law. If the law says “you may not put X on your website” and you put X on your website, you get arrested and go to jail. Technology can’t route around that. I had a somewhat inconclusive debate a couple days ago with Pa Annoyed and couldn’t quite put my POV properly, but I think this goes some way towards it-
When people think about censorship and technology routing around it, they tend to think of heh samizdata- transmitting clandestine messages (which may be subversive thoughts or rude pictures, doesn’t matter). But the point is, they start thinking about technological means to preserve anonymity. Well yes, there are various means to do that, which may or may not be successful depending on countermeasures (e.g. proxy servers, though they’re not much use if they’re monitoring my DSL connection to my ISP).
But the point is, it’s not about anonymity. For freedom of communication, people need to be visible, not anonymous, in most cases. In particular, anyone needing to trade needs to be visible, so they can take money (there is no anonymous cash on the internet, remember, it’s all bank computer funny money). A person selling something the government deems contraband can’t function on the internet because they can’t trade. Take the case of pr0n. Yes, you can think of ways to transmit it cunningly and invisibly, but that’s no use to a pr0n maker. They need to sell it. Selling things is how economies work, remember. Without an economy, without a market, there isn’t any stuff to surreptitiously hand around in the first place. Well, maybe blurry webcams of reader’s wife Doris from Penge on her brown corduroy sofa, but that’s no use to anybody.
Likewise, while we may be able to hand around secret PGP encrypted emails with our daring illegal political ideas, that’s not much use. The web is about talking to people we don’t know. Take for instance the BNP, whose web presence the guv are presumably just itching to close down. The whole point of them having their website is to say “we are the BNP, look at our stuff”. If the government enacts laws that make BNP policies unspeakable on the web, then they can’t have the very stuff on their website that the website is for.
I still don’t know if I’ve put this well. A meaningfully free web is one in which people are indentifiable, whether it’s Ian B the pr0n merchant or Nick Fuckwit and his nationalist socialist party. Once the government declares my type of website, or theirs, illegal, we’re dead in the water. And not a proxy server in hell is any use to us. Censorship doesn’t work, and never has worked, by physically preventing publication. It works by arresting the people who do the publishing. It’s no use to me the rude comic trader, or Fuckwit Griffin, to be able to hide. The whole point of being on the web is not hiding.
As to Nominet, one of the Register commentariat succinctly put what the government will do to it-
Ian B,
I thought you might have something to say about my comment but I don’t think we really disagree. When I say that “the internet routes around censorship” I don’t mean that there are ways to keep your communication secret and anonymous, although that is also true.
I mean that the internet as it is used by the great majority of internet users is resistant to attempts to control it. For example, consider Al-Quaeda. They are a prescribed organisation under UK law, yet they still have an enormous and effective web presence. This is possible simply because their websites are not hosted within the UK’s jurisdiction.
Similarly, if the British government decides to ban pornography, you could simply host pornographic websites in a different country. You could process credit card transactions as before. Perhaps the government could make it difficult for you to transfer the proceeds to a UK bank account but that would be a different matter, unrelated to censorship of the internet.
If the government makes it difficult to register a .co.uk domain name with Nominet, just get a domain that isn’t regulated by Nominet.
The internet is robust. The weakness is in your link to the internet. If the government forces all ISPs to regulate the connection from your home to the internet then you might have a problem. If the only country left in the world that allows pornography is not allowed to connect to any of the trunk lines regulated by other countries, then people outside that country will have a problem if they want to look at legal pornography.
The important point is that the specific technologies that make up the internet today are not that important. If a government makes them useless, a replacement will be invented. (It’s a bit like the unsurprising phenomenon whereby DRM encourages piracy.)
It’s governments meddling with the international trunk lines and the links from your home or office to the national networks that should concern us.
Al-Quaeda … are a prescribed organisation under UK law
Freudian slip, perhaps? I meant proscribed.
I’m reminded of the episode of Yes, Prime Minister in which a proposal to abolish the Education department is being discussed. “But someone has to plan things!” Is the objection. The response: “So, you’re telling me that the current system is the one that the government planned?”
Speak for yourself, mate.
Ian B,
I think you got your point of view across. The problem, as I eventually realised, is that even though there are technical ways to broadcast anonymously to large audiences of strangers, to conduct an illegal business on the internet, and there is even such a thing as anonymous digital cash, it would require a lot of people walking out of the circle of civilised firelight into a genuinely illegal world, and organising there. It’s the fact that the vast majority of people don’t believe it’s possible, and wouldn’t dare if they did, that means that a government crackdown would be fairly effective. Not totally, because there are always plenty of free-thinking criminals, but effective enough.
The problem is that the internet geeks keep thinking in terms of technology, rather than psychology.
It’s by no means certain that this problem is unsolvable, but it’s a very different one. I used to have free-market faith that if enough people wanted something then a way would be found, but I don’t know now.
Well, obviously, if enough people wanted more freedom than we have now, we would have had it by now. Problem is, not enough people want it. That is the consequence of unlimited democracy.
“The problem is that the internet geeks keep thinking in terms of technology, rather than psychology.”
Pa Annoyed,
Your comment about psychology has far wider implications for libertarians than just the internet issue.
I suspect that libertarians usually think in positive rational terms about the attractions of freedom and how to argue for them, and only infrequently in negative psychological terms, for example, about how to undermine the alternatives in the minds of the public.
Any long march back through the institutions will require a fair bit of psychological warfare.
Otto,
It’s not really about arguments for freedom or undermining alternatives. It’s about people believing that they personally can or should do anything about it.
Yes, you can eventually, by dint of great effort, persuade people that free speech is good and censorship is bad even for speech they don’t like. It’s fairly easy to argue suspicion of and cynicism about the government. And while there are some topics that I think you’ll lose on, like dismantling the welfare state, it’s not at all hard to persuade people that they should be allowed to buy pornography, then got the pub to drink beer, smoke while they’re doing it, and tuck in to a Full English or a plate of chips.
But when the government says No, most people obey. It never occurs to them not to, or if it does, the fear of officialdom’s sanction puts them off. Ironically, the more you go on about it being a police state with the Jackboots watching your every move, monitoring you with databases, and so on, the more scared they are to disconform. And truthfully, I wouldn’t really want them to – peace and civilisation relies on that voluntary adherence to law and order far more than it does the police or the military forces of the state.
So while I think that there is some advantage in trying to develop technologies so that they can’t later be centrally controlled, and to fight to keep them that way, it isn’t really a solution. The problem is that the totalitarians are legitimately in charge.
Sadly statists are (by definition) incapable of understanding that their messing about causes the problems on the trains (from the pro union and price rigging regulations of the early 1900’s onwards) and in the banks (Bank of England, hope of a “lender of last resort” to save banks who have lent out……. and so on).
Any problems are because they have not regulated enough – and anyone who doubts that is a free market dogmatist.
That statism might be a dogma (immune to either rational argument or empirical evidence) is again something that (by definition) a statist can not accept.
Of course statists sometimes stop being statists – but it is rare.
After all if someone gives up this postion all hope of a comfortable life in government (or in the “private” enterprises connected to government) is over.