So true and I could not agree more. When did technical problems start requiring political solutions?
I think it's a Trojan horse from politicians to start legislating where nobody needs legislation. The net will still route around censorship, but it's becoming increasingly harder in a world where a high percentage of global bandwidth transits through a small number of large deployments by centralized corporations.
The pessimist in me sees this as a sure sign that the "Balkanization of the internet" train has long since left the station. However I remain optimistic that "information wants to be free." As long as information exists somewhere (and people know to look for it), decentralized tools like torrents, ipfs, Tor, etc will continue to enable access to it.
What I worry most about is the public's increasing dependency on sandboxed devices. We celebrate sandboxing as a win for security, which it certainly is, but the more we depend on it, the more we are subject to the whims of its corporate gatekeepers. How long before laptops are as sandboxed as phones?
Software can only solve the technical problems so long as it can run on the hardware in your possession.
> When did technical problems start requiring political solutions?
When the technical solutions became criminalized. End-to-end encryption is only now becoming common, and English MPs are already talking eagerly about outlawing it. The need for political fights isn't exactly new - think of the Clipper chip in the 90s - but it hasn't abated either.
I see lots of suggestions that we can solve this with keeping tech ahead of law, but I don't think that's a realistic answer. People have tried that in banking and finance and a lot of other domains, and the result is that you eventually get stuck with whitelists (only access the internet these 3 ways) or intent criminalization (banning access the government can't see). You have to win some political fights, if only to carve out space for the technical solutions.
I think it's a Trojan horse from politicians to start legislating where nobody needs legislation. The net will still route around censorship, but it's becoming increasingly harder in a world where a high percentage of global bandwidth transits through a small number of large deployments by centralized corporations.
The pessimist in me sees this as a sure sign that the "Balkanization of the internet" train has long since left the station. However I remain optimistic that "information wants to be free." As long as information exists somewhere (and people know to look for it), decentralized tools like torrents, ipfs, Tor, etc will continue to enable access to it.
What I worry most about is the public's increasing dependency on sandboxed devices. We celebrate sandboxing as a win for security, which it certainly is, but the more we depend on it, the more we are subject to the whims of its corporate gatekeepers. How long before laptops are as sandboxed as phones?
Software can only solve the technical problems so long as it can run on the hardware in your possession.