Guest post by With so many threats to a free and open Internet, sooner or later, people will need to arm themselves for the fight, writes Deep End’s Paul Venezia. ‘If the baboons succeed in constraining speech and information flow on the broader Internet, the new Internet will emerge quickly. For an analogy, consider the iPhone and the efforts of a few smart hackers who have allowed anyone to jailbreak an iPhone with only a small downloaded app and a few minutes,’ Venezia writes. ‘All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites “banned” through general means.’
It’s a bit “doom and gloom”, but ever so slowly we are edging creepily closer to that reality.
Centralized services would be at the most serious risk. Unfortunately though, the gradual loss of direct peer to peer connectivity due to NAT devices for technical reasons (whether through our own routers, or by wireless/cable ISPs), is already making us largely dependent upon centralized services to reach each other. Consider that many mobile devices cannot establish direct connectivity between each other using publicly rout-able IP’s.
So in order for peer to peer censorship evasion technologies to work on a very wide scale, we’d need to simultaneously solve the growing peer to peer connectivity problem. Some may consider this “already solved” with IPv6, but that hasn’t occurred yet. NAT solutions like STUN are dependent upon no-NAT peers, and will perform worse as the ratio of NAT to no-NAT increases.
Personally, I think it’s a bit overblown. Entities like the RIAA and MPAA don’t care a wit about censoring speech; they just want people to stop pirating their shit. Of course, people are never going to stop pirating their shit, so they’re going to keep trying to pass laws like SOPA, until they eventually give up or (more likely) go bankrupt. Sure, they might one day be successful at buying a law that breaks the internet, but that would be an unfortunate consequence of their end goal, which is to stop little Johny from downloading the latest Snoop Dogg album without paying for it. That’s all these entities really care about.
Of course, we could kill all this nonsense today if people would just STOP F**KING PIRATING, but we all know that’s never going to happen. I guess it’s more important to us to have the latest Snoop Dogg album for free than to get rid of this looming threat that constantly over the horizon.
Edited 2012-02-01 06:13 UTC
The problem is: figthing piracy IS also censoring and figthing privacy …
Edited 2012-02-01 07:47 UTC
Exactly. A great example of this are the results when BMG Canada attempted the same style of “John Doe” lawsuits that had been used in the US, trying to force ISPs to reveal the identity of their customers. A judge denied the request on the grounds that several conditions needed to be met (and hadn’t), including:
“the public interests favouring disclosure must outweigh legitimate privacy concerns.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMG_v._John_Doe#Federal_Court_decision
Of course, any nationalistic pride I might feel about that is undermined the fact that our current federal government is gung-ho to jump on the ACTA bandwagon and doing everything in their power to bring our copyright system & enforcement in line with the US (see also: Bill C-11, which might as well be called SOPA.ca – http://www.michaelgeist.ca/tags/c-11).
We must remember that for most people on internet today, “the internet” is only facebook. So, why should they care? They just want to be “boxed” and share photos with family and friends while insulting each other.
People with minimal discernment are minority. Easy to ‘seek and destroy’ (to quote J. Hetfield).
Internet is gone, nothing we can do here. Lets move on and find another tool.
Reincarnate Usenet anyone?
Reincarnate huge floppies? they’re so practical.
Usenet was kinda hard to use for a normal, regular person. It may be the refuge for geeks only.
For many, maybe. For most, I don’t think so. I do have a FB account, and I don’t spend more than 10 or 20 minutes a day on it. But then I am also the administrator of a technical forum with 800,000+ users and visitors in excess of 2,000 during the day.
And let’s be honest, how do many people use most of their internet bandwidth? Downloading.
Isn’t Netflix now responsible for some majority share of all bandwidth consumed?
Unfortunately is. That damn thing slows down the internet to cripple.
Of course it needs to be in HD quality and it needs to be the whole goddamn season people are watching. Do something productive. Supporting Hollywood and the industry that fights your rights and freedom IS NOT productive, people.
Edited 2012-02-01 07:49 UTC
Yeah, right. And Radio is all gone because of TV. Books are gone too … come on! get real and cure your unreasonable pessimism.
I do – however – agree [to some extend] with FB part of your post.
I believe you are mistaken, even grossly inaccurate…
…people generally don’t insult each other on FB – they are circle-jerking themselves (well, and their small babies, in a way; or at least pictures of them)
But seriously, ultimately the internet is only… network of networks. We can add another to it, one that’s hiding (or maybe, at worst, is largely on the ~side, like municipal networks in various technologies, with some inter-city links – even independent, like optical or backup radio / directed ~wifi, when weather is worse …intercontinental would be a problem; still, it will be probably largely the “hiding” variant)
Actually, that thing is being produced as we speak …
It’s called “FreedomBox”.
Besides, I don’t get the autor. Why should you trust your freedom to closed source OS? it’s like giving a dog to some crazy-ass violent maniac for a weekend.
It won’t thrive
And, finally … I don’t think it’s good to compare internet and iPhone jailbreaking. iPhone is closed, internet was always open. Even if some baboons [love this word] decide otherwise, internet is built on open technologies [unlike iPhone for that matter – we don’t count OSS components but final product]