2012: The Dawn of the Information Oligarchy
For several years now, the founding principles of Internet freedom have been under attack. The sources of these attacks are largely media industry organizations (meaning movies and music), and the politicians that seem to be in their pockets. The basis of these attacks come from a desire to control, police, or tax the Internet and the technology marketplace in general. Of particular concern are software patent lawsuits like this one, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its senate cousin, and the battle surrounding net neutrality. These issues are reported on very lightly, obscured by current worldwide concerns, but I believe they may be equally historic and potentially disastrous.
In all these cases, certain special interests have lobbied Congress to make sure they do the exact wrong thing. Individually these actions are egregious examples of the dysfunction of current political governance in the U.S., and together they may spell the end of the Internet as we know it.
Software Patents
Most people think of their smartphones as hardware devices, which sound like reasonably patentable devices. However, the useful functionality of these devices are driven primarily by software, with the hardware playing only a supporting role. The types of legal shenanigans where simple features are patented as if they’re comparable to inventing the telephone, currently playing out in Apple’s trivial feature suit against HTC are simply the latest examples of the fallout from innovation-killing software patents. It’s rather difficult to summarize in lay terms why software patents are such a terrible idea, so I’ll be brief and mostly just point out afew arguments online. The basics are that, as software professionals, I and millions of others have to constantly look over our shoulder, wondering if, during the course of our day to day work, we might actually be reinventing something trivia that has somehow been previously and inexplicably patented.
Worse, companies are incentivized to patent virtually everything they do, ostensibly to defend against patent infringement suits waged by competitors. This situation becomes self-enforcing unless patent law reform is enacted. The fallout is that the consumer mobile device and other software-based markets may deteriorate into monopolies, creating malware-friendlymonocultures, not to mention simply destroying innovation through litigation.
Intellectual Property
Did you know that when you watch streaming movies, your hardware is complicit in providing a guarantee to Hollywood that you are running certain software that is incapable of copying the media? That’s true even if you “own” the movie that you’re watching. That means that if their site is down, you can’t just pop in your backup copy of Pirates of the Caribbean. This is part of the righteous battle being waged by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against evil media pirates, like 10-year-old girls, grandmothers (not an isolated incident), and homeless people. Now they’ve taken that fight to Congress, who, for some reason, don’t appear to be much opposed to legislating on their behalf in the form of SOPA and PROTECT-IP. Perhaps the apparent moral failings of the proposed legislative action can be partially excused by the widespread technological ignorance among members of Congress that appears to be the true enabling factor. However, evidence continues to mount, that this ignorance is ironically self-chosen.
Net Neutrality
It’s important to understand history and to learn its lessons. Most important is understanding what those lessons really are. Politicians often invoke history, at least their understanding of it, in their political campaigns and rhetoric. In this particular case the politicians have their history wrong; very very wrong.
Having worked for several years at a company that lays a reasonable claim to contributing substantially to the creation of the Internet, I believe I have a better perspective on that history than do most politicians, Al Gore among the possible exceptions.
Opponents of Net Neutrality claim that the Internet is broken. No single entity exercises appropriate control over the Internet, and it is currently bigger than any one country. That is exactly the point. The Internet is bigger than any one country. The Internet abhors censorship and secrets. Controlling the Internet is not only doomed to failure (“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” – I would argue that bandwidth shaping is a form of censorship), but is misguided and will cause damage and unfairness in the meantime. It is antithetical to the principles under which the Internet came to become such a powerful tool and facilitator of free and open communication. By the way, you can add Al Franken to the short list of Washington-folk who seem to “get it” on technological issues, and omit others who apparently do not.
These issues are converging to form a pivotal moment in history. If we fail to sufficiently educate the public and political leaders on these issues, it will usher in a new age of information oligarchy. Innovation will be stifled, free speech censored, and information security will face brand new challenges. Control of the Internet will increasingly become concentrated in the hands of a few. Criminals and tyrannical nation states will be the only ones to appreciate the new world order… back in the USSR.
