The actual Wild West was many things. There were certainly outlaws, but most people were there to farm or mine or provide goods and services to farmers and miners. Those businesses needed clear laws about who owned a piece of land, so a complete set of laws evolved.
The best way to make laws is to watch what people decide amongst themselves in reasonable debates, then write down the rules. There are important questions still open. Can online crooks steal my accounts if they guess my password? Can some slimeball send me ten thousand emails about v1agra? Can adults have sexual conversations with minors online? Can email services read my mail, figure out my situation and show me relevant commercial solicitations?
Anyway, if someone would put together a template of proposed internet laws as a wiki I'd write some entries. I think they'd be fairer and clearer than laws written by companies, promoted by lobbyists, and voted on by politicians. They have done poorly in the past. The laws about tobacco, food and drugs, to name some glaring examples, are not well aligned with the public interest. So let's have an open public process for writing down some rules to live online by.
>There were certainly outlaws, but most people were there to farm or mine or provide goods and services to farmers and miners. Those businesses needed clear laws about who owned a piece of land, so a complete set of laws evolved.
Exactly. It's not just businesses, but it's also everyday people who aren't HN readers who want the Internet to work in a stable and predictable fashion. They didn't grow up developing services at the edges of the network; they are the people who use email and play Farmville and are just fine with that. They want their GMail to work without spam, they want viruses to stop, and they don't want to be spied on. These are not unreasonable demands. It's just that they happen to clash with the people who read HN and want the network to be free to grow around the edges rather than from the center.
The book Wild West 2.0 (http://wildwest2.com) talks a lot about this evolution. When we wrote it, we didn't realize that we were going to make the idea of naming worse -- we just thought it was a useful metaphor for the self-reliance and self-defense angles of the Internet. [Full disclosure, I am a co-author]
Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It" (http://futureoftheinternet.org/) is also a great resource for this culture clash between open and closed frontier models of the Internet and how reasonable demands ("stop spam") lead to solutions that clash with the HN view of the Internet.
You're not really thinking there actually is a clash between those reasonable demands and the desire for an free internet, right?
Because the best solutions happen to be implementable at the edge of the network: don't want viruses? Use GNU/Linux (-> needs an idiot-friendly distribution, or education), or use a good firewall (I bet a FreedomBox could fill this role) Don't want spying? Host your e-mail (-> needs a usable FreedomBox). Don't want spam? Use a spam filter on your FreedomBox (will probably be there by default).
Yeah, the FreedomBox is a damn fine hammer.
Now, if people are all lazy and just want their privacy, security, and tranquillity to be spoon-fed without them having to think about it, then the internet is doomed. But some of us aren't, so I have hope.
"The laws about tobacco, food and drugs, to name some glaring examples, are not well aligned with the public interest."
Indeed. And now that you mention it, all those lobbyists headquartered up and down K Street represent a far more lawless situation that anything I know of online.
I may be pointing out the obvious here, but a man from a newspaper hates the internet. The internet is killing newspapers. This probably isn't a coincidence. I am especially convinced of this because of the irrational arguments presented, as the argument correctly pointed out, the comment from The Guardian was hardly sensible. A dying industry clutching out to kill its replacement.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, but I do disagree with this. Maybe 3-5 years ago I would agree, but for the most part the curmudgeons have left or been forced to leave the news business. That isn't to say that Luddites no longer exist in the media world, but the view that the Internet is the enemy has largely died out.
I don't work on fleet street, but I find this assertion hard to believe.
Firstly, the Internet most certainly is the enemy of the printed publication. In the sense that printed publications are dying because of the Internet. I'm not sure if the printed newspaper or magazine will exist at all 50 years from now, but if they do it's somewhat reasonable to assume they'll be a tiny fraction of the industry they are today.
Note I said _printed_.
Will journalism survive? Yes, there probably is a place for journalists, even on the Internet. However with the barrier to entry being near zero, and getting lower all the time the role of a traditional journalist will need to change substantially. There's a place for pay walls, and that will help existing news organizations survive, but their audience will be tiny compared to what say a popular blogger might get.
The value of a many-to-many communication system is that it allows people to communicate their opinion with zero barrier to entry. No degree. No fact checking. No paycheck. (Indeed much like this comment itself.)
50 years ago an article in the newspaper might generate some letters-to-the-editor, a select few of which might be published. Today literally everyone can comment and all replies are published, and indeed a conversation on the article ensues - whole sites (like hacker news) exist to promote that conversation.
This freedom of expression is dangerous to those who used to control public expression. Namely old-style "news" organizations and government. The one calls on the other to create more legislation.
The Internet is not the enemy of the printed news, because that war has alredy been lost. The Internet is the enemy of the professional journalist though who now has to compete with everyone to be heard. There are lots of good journalists who have successfully made the transition, but many will find it hard to compete out here in the colonies.
The internet isn't the wild west. It's the new world.
I don't see printed media dying any time soon. Television never killed radio; radio just changed tactics. Every time a new medium came out, it meant the end of the others and it never really happened.
That said, what I'm saying is essentially what you're saying. Many in the news business (which should really be called the advertising business) see their futures online and are transitioning their core business to it.
It's not like they can, or should, do it overnight, though. There's still a lot of money to be made on the sun-setting industry.
I actually end up use the above description, "Internet as Wild West" quite a bit when trying to explain the internet to computer-illiterate people, because for some reason their skepticism filter fades away and they become all-too-trusting when the medium is something they are unfamiliar with. They seem to think that if someone was able to get something posted on the internet, well that person must certainly be a smart being in a position of goodwill.
Sure the internet functions as an information superhighway. It also functions as a den of thieves and swindlers, and people who elevate scams and pseudoscience to the look and feel of accurate information through mere the power of website presentation.
I have to tell my mother that just because something is on the internet doesn't mean it is important or true, and it certainly doesn't mean that the author necessarily has good intentions. I want her to consider it a Wild West.
The article accuses the narrative of sticking because it is "compelling" in the fanciful way, but I think the counter-argument here is the same problem. In many ways the internet is a Wild West. I think the argument is much more nuanced than saying it's not. I think the harder argument needs to be made with the wild west aspect as a given, but that an authoritarian clamp would make it a worse-off place.
I've learned web development over the past year. I can throw together a reasonable looking site, sell a reasonable product and obtain the most highly sensitive information from my customers in the process: their email and a password to my site, which, for probably about 50% of the population, is the same password for their email account and most other sites they visit.
One would hope you're storing the passwords as salted hashes (preferably bcrypt) so that passwords won't get leaked no matter how bad you are at database security.
One would hope so. But many websites that keep personal data aren't very secure. Personal information is stolen online pretty often, and it often seems in hindsight that their information security was embarrassingly slack.
If you're a heavy internet user, your information is almost certainly stored in a database sitting on a machine running Windows XP. There can be several security patches in a month, and sys admins can be slow to install them. Are you OK with that?
I would change your "many" to "almost all". Very few websites, even sites that really should know much better (like Newegg or Gawker, both catering to technical audiences), actually implement things in a known safe manner. Many just do plaintext (like Newegg) and many an archaic and/or useless obfuscation mechanism (like Gawker's use of DES).
You should always act defensively when relying on any third-party. Very few are trustworthy. Use a reliable password management system for your passwords (like KeePass or mailing GPG-crypted passwords to yourself) and generate a unique pass for each site. Use a unique mail if you can. If you're storing any data on there, make sure it is encrypted and triple encrypted.
The problem with all the bemoaning of hackers, fraudsters and so on is that this is the real world. In real life, there's dodgy places you don't go because you're worried about crime, and there's always the risk that someone on a street will try to attack you. Similarly on the internet unless you're looking to learn that sort of stuff, you stay off hacker/warez/etc sites, but there's always the chance you might get bitten by a hacker or poisoned legit site.
If the internet was a Wild West movie, then effectively nobody would be able to go about their daily business without witnessing a gunfight. Malware may be a growing problem, but it's not like your typical user is getting fully infected by 1 piece of malware a day.
It seems that politicians all over the world are starting to really press this issue, and even get the press to promote these ideas for them. I don't think they realize what they are about to start here. I think they underestimate how much people want the Internet to remain free, and how many want it to remain free. I feel the next few years will be very interesting.
I think the last year has been interesting. In it we've seen 3 strikes legislation undemocratically thrown onto the UK books with as good as no worthwhile debate, the USA starting to arbitrarily abuse their control of DNS, etc.
People just don't give a damn until they realise what they've lost. Certainly techies are more and more getting turned against business & government by this, but the ordinary person ... as long as they can give all their personal info to Facebook, play videos on Youtube, and so forth, they won't care and I can't blame them.
Ask your local small business owner how much they appreciate being able to have their own website. Previously their options for letting people know about their business were newspaper advertising, yellow pages or TV.
In China you already have to apply for a website license (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license). And most people do not care about it very much. I once made a site with a friend from China, and he applied for the ICP license, even though the server was in the US and there was not a single word in Chinese on the site. In my friend's opinion it was a natural thing to do for a law abiding citizen.
Agreed. This needs to be kept at the forefront of geek's minds: Farmville, Facebook, Hulu, and Twitter (and other entertainment devices) are the Internet. So long as the entertainment (circuses) flows, the masses will be happy. Regardless of what regulation happens!
I think the Internet will end up regulated. The question is, what kind of regulation? Want net neutrality? That's regulation. Guarantee of privacy of your search engine history? Regulation. Freedom from email snooping without a court order? Regulation. Taxation of purchases? Recourse from anonymous online harassment and libel? Child protection from pedophiles and child pornography? Terrorists?
At a gross level, Democrats/liberals want to regulate corporate interaction with the Internet and Republicans/conservatives want to regulate personal interaction. In this respect the Internet is no different than other sectors.
Why should the Internet not reflect the values of society, as reflected in existing regulations on cars, media, etc.? If people want the Internet to remain free they should work to change the template: free up control over other aspects of our civilization a If that fails, then society doesn't really value what you value.
You are a much less cynical person than myself if you think that society is a reflection of its members' values. There is a mismatch between what people say/think that they value, and what people actually value. It takes only sidelong glance at the current political climate in the US to see myriad examples of people voting against their own best interests.
By and large, people expect the status quo, and as it has been, so shall it be. Had the internet been born in some corporate boardroom - restricted, tiered, filtered - people would expect nothing more.
I suspect we only a few rebrands from control be wrested away - look at Verizon/Google's net neutrality bill making a distinction between wired and wireless internet access. Certainly a reasonable person might agree that wired vs wireless internet access are conceivably "different" - and if the average person can be convinced that there is a difference, they will accept the terms of this difference as it is given to them.
I think that like most things in life, the internet will be controlled by a few people with a desire to shape it. The question is whether or not the people who value freedom, take a vested interest as well.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Most of regulations on certain fields come from the fact that it's users are operating on a finite number of resources and areas, which do not expand proportionally to the userbase growth. Second of all, there often aren't efficient ways to avoid unwanted interactions, such as tools letting users selectively exclude the content of those environments. That's why people are more likely to accept regulations on those fields.
Internet is different in both of those aspects, and that's one of the reasons why applying regulations is artificial and recieves negative reception by the general public.
The best way to start fixing and/or improving a particular aspect of our society is probably not by fixing and/or improving everything else in our society first. You have to start somewhere, and the internet is a great place to do so, especially because there are many parties looking to impose rules inconsistent with internet freedom; if these rules are put into place, they will be much more difficult to remove later.
The 'net looks like the wild west because most are ignorant that it is really a bunch of city-states like Greece. Each ISP/Host/Site has its own rules. Some are allied, some aren't. Governments are the overall nation.
This simplification should good enough to explain to most people.
The internet is a very real disruptive force to many entrenched power structures. I personally think that's a good thing because I value individual liberty. However, many entrenched power structures think otherwise.
No we can't. Not so long as the Mainstream Media is powerful and afraid of the internet. They are very good at spreading myths, and very motivated in this case.
Replace "tamed" with "controlled". There are vultures everywhere circling the internet, pondering how to establish ownership of it (or some portion of it) how to shape it, throttle it, condition it, modify it, how its very existence can be turned into an asset that can produce dividends, most importantly, how to get others to pay you money to maintain a connection to it.
The internet doesn't need fixing, what it needs is protection from men who want to put a big fence around it and charge you money so you can get some.
The article talks about how Western Union telegraph was taken over by essentially one person, which in turn thoroughly destroyed the credibility and trust in the system. I can imagine something similar happening to the internet, and some people are already wary of this (that is why we have so many projects along the lines of Tor/Freenet).
There's also a troubling story of how freedom of press was stifled despite the technology. Doesn't this sound familiar in context of Youtube videos of demonstrators being taken down, recently, in England?
And finally, as mentioned in the article, this is a concrete instance where freedom was not essentially a zero-sum game, which meant, regulation by the government was not necessarily a bad thing. This squarely addresses some arguments made today about Net Neutrality among other things by people who favor a more laissez-faire approach.
I don't think that people are distrusting the Internet because of a rogue company taking it over. They are distrusting it because of the government taking it over. Tor and Freenet are to prevent eavesdropping from governments.
What I would like to see happen is absolutely no subsidized infrastructure. Once you subsidize, you have a responsibility to make sure the taxpayers get their money's worth (theoretically). If you ignore this responsibility, as government often does, you get the situation in the article.
One person lives a lot shorter life than a government. For example, Standard Oil was a monopoly and yet, even they were naturally losing their grip as time went on. I don't think you should be worried about a single person taking over. Sure it may mess things up for a few years, but so what? Better that than forever, by law. At least in my opinion. Competitors will pop up and the old guard will become old.
I'm not saying I favour net neutrality or not. Just that if the government could just resist getting involved in every single thing, they will find economical solutions.
Today's problem is that many governments subsidized the creation of the infrastructure and then handed over the keys to the private companies. Sounds familiar? I don't get how anyone can look at the past 200 years in North America and still make that decision.
So based on that history, regulation is necessary to make sure that citizens get their money's worth.
The whole thing presumably, otherwise he'd have qualified that statement further. How about you try something more constructive. Tell us what you think, and I'm sure bdhe will jump in and elaborate further if they feel the need.
The best way to make laws is to watch what people decide amongst themselves in reasonable debates, then write down the rules. There are important questions still open. Can online crooks steal my accounts if they guess my password? Can some slimeball send me ten thousand emails about v1agra? Can adults have sexual conversations with minors online? Can email services read my mail, figure out my situation and show me relevant commercial solicitations?
Anyway, if someone would put together a template of proposed internet laws as a wiki I'd write some entries. I think they'd be fairer and clearer than laws written by companies, promoted by lobbyists, and voted on by politicians. They have done poorly in the past. The laws about tobacco, food and drugs, to name some glaring examples, are not well aligned with the public interest. So let's have an open public process for writing down some rules to live online by.