Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

A Contrarian View: Evolutionary is pressure being applied to the Web. Excellent!

I was going to make this a longer and more academic blogpost, but today’s news (whatever the truth or falsehood behind it) makes it more pertinent than it has been for quite some time.

To make the points briefly:

In some ways I see this all as a goodness; sorry if that comes at a shock but what is happening here is a form of evolutionary selection, and what is being selected-for are the protocols and mechanisms that are even more proof against the efforts of a centralised control/authority.

Consider the loss of net neutrality, the premise of which is that a carrier (eg: Verizon) can receive money from a website that wants their traffic to be delivered as quickly as (eg:) Google’s traffic. Contrawise, it means Google can pay Verizon to ensure that its traffic arrives preferentially to any other providers’ traffic.

Now step back for a moment, and realise that net neutrality only works when a carrier is in a position to extort receive money from one data provider to serve its data in preference to another; but in a BitTorrent-like network such a control is an irrelevance — the first packet comes from Finland, the next from France, the third from Malaysia… there is no throat to be choked, nobody from whom to demand payment, and the result of losing net-neutrality will be to encourage adoption of BitTorrent and similar distributed data models [edit:] which will maintain high-bandwidth to the end user, below the radar of corporate bandwidth chokes.

Re: WikiLeaks – I don’t know what’s going on, but I am pretty sure that any attempt now to remove Julian Assange from it will only result in the infrastructure itself becoming even more distributed and harder-to-destroy than it currently is; and there will be clones and forks, too. The result will be information-leakage-whack-a-mole across the breadth of the net.

People in the Government who are trying to kill WikiLeaks should really read-up on the consequences of the improper use of antibiotics; or maybe re-watch Star Wars ep IV:

Obi-Wan: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine”

⊞

Comments

10 responses to “A Contrarian View: Evolutionary is pressure being applied to the Web. Excellent!”

  1. Matthias Daues

    Brafmann, Ori & Beckstrom, Rod A.
    “The Starfish and the Spider”

    Seems like this is book doomed to be read by the already knowing only, similar to the Cluetrain Manifesto. They describe exactly this process of becoming more distributed under pressure. Bit Torrent is themtized there as well as the Spanish surprise when trying to subdue the Apaches. If it were spread more widely now, they wouldn’t even try.

    Reply
    1. alecm

      Fascinating, Matthias – I’m just reading the first chapter at http://www.starfishandspider.com/

      Reply
  2. Matthias Daues

    My pleasure. It gets better 🙂

    Reply
  3. Charles

    I’ve been trying to post your link on Facebook, and it seems like they’re blocking your site (or, at the very least, I can post links from other sites, just not yours).

    Reply
    1. alecm

      Sorry Charles, I have no idea why that might be; perhaps try using a TinyURL version of the URL instead? That would be http://tinyurl.com/2wta2de …

      Reply
  4. Simon

    Afraid I tend to the view that Internet censorship works.

    Technically it is dead in the water, but you end up with a situation like China where people self censor, and you need technical skill (very limited) to bypass the censors – but most people simply don’t have those skills or won’t risk it.

    Sure it is hard to suppress any particular piece of information, but one can use it to delay the realisation that an authoritarian government doesn’t have much popular support.

    Reply
  5. Boyd Waters

    In the United States they have already characterized Bittorrent as a tool of terrorists and pornographers. Who don’t believe in Jesus. That will be easy enough to censor. Perhaps other tools will come along in response to such pressure. There was a period of time, during the dot-com boom I suppose, when I re-read William Gibson’s “cyberpunk” novels with a wry sense of superiority. In Gibson’s future, society had broken down. There were a few phenomenally wealthy people, and everyone was a criminal. Of course our Economy 2.0 was going to end scarcity, and be a better future. But now I’m not so sure.

    Reply
  6. Matthias Daues

    @Boyd Waters re distribution of wealth i recommend Beinhocker, Eric “The origin of wealth”, especially the passages on the ‘sugarscape’-series of agent -based simulation experiments. Sobering in regards of musings on equal participation.

    Reply
  7. alecm

    @Simon I hear you, and agree that the best whips are the ones that are in peoples’ heads – but given that there’s also a (mostly) free world as well as a totalitarian one, I am confident seeing this as a biological metaphor where freedom-enabling technologies can be brewed up and tested in one place to enable communication in the other. Of course Tor and Freenet will hardly help anyone anyone North Korea, but there are places where they _can_ help – Iran, for instance.

    Aside: I suspect that most authoritarian governments know that they lack support amongst the people; kinds goes with the turf.

    Reply
  8. dropsafe : Concept: #Iran sets itself up as regional internet backbone. Iran censors regional Internet. Iran wins.

    […] you don’t want to transport certain kinds of traffic… well, I stick to what I’ve said before on the topic of Internet censorship but the region’s intermediate generation will be provided a very limited subset of what […]

    Reply

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