@DMCA, SOPA, etc.
Short-term, these bills are going to continue to alter the user-experience of the Internet and push casual users towards the “big-box” Internet experience: Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, etc. Long-term, these bills are actually making things worse for the copyright-hawks. If you think of copying of data through the Internet as an “organism” and copyright as a virus attacking that organism, the organism does not just die, the viral onslaught invokes an immune response. The first salvo in this arms race was Napster. Then we had KaZaa and now the most sophisticated P2P file-sharing system ever, BitTorrent.
The real control comes from the ISP-side and this will continue to increase. The best way forward for the copyright-hawks is to use the regulatory power (not legislative) to push ISPs to profile the content that their customers are streaming by threatening regulatory fines or license revocation for allowing users to “illegally” copy and upload copyrighted material. This system is probably sustainable (as evidence by China, Iran and other countries that are employing similar techniques) for casual users.
However, there are serious, long-term problems for this system. The Establishment wants you to think of the Internet like a “phone system for computers” but this is a major mistake. The difference is that it is simply impossible to keep people from using their computers to perform client-side encryption of data before transmitting and receiving it. This makes ISP-level content-profiling useless. You can’t stop a pirated movie if you can’t even tell it’s a pirated movie.
I foresee several more salvos in the war between copyright hawks and “pirates” (those peacefully copying data at below cartel/monopoly prices). As the controls continue to increase, the next generation BitTorrent protocol will be released that makes browsing the Internet itself an end-to-end encrypted experience (we currently have this capability but it’s not a very user-friendly proposition at this point, you have to know about SSH and how to set it up, etc. etc.) Then, regulators are going to try to push the ISPs to simply block encrypted data en masse, using content-profiling but this will instanteously backfire as corporate VPNs (including government VPNs) all rely on end-to-end encryption.
At this point, the copyright-hawks will have finally and fully blown it. People will then have user-friendly access to an end-to-end encrypted Internet experience and everyone - except the idiots who post photos of themselves passed out, vomit-covered and drunk at a party to facebook - can appreciate the idea of an Internet experience that is not vulnerable to nosy-nannying from Comcast or Charter or whoever (let alone NSA).
Now, this brings me back to net neutrality. NN is fairly clever in two ways. First, it attempts to stake out the moral high ground (anti-content-profiling) for the regulators and assert that the evil (free market) ISPs are profiling content to “maximize profits” by squelching bandwidth to competitors and so on. It is my belief that the ISPs are, indeed, content-profiling but not because of evil greed so much as dread fear (of lawsuits from the copyright-hawks). If they think can make a buck squelching bandwidth to competitors, I think it’s their property right to do so but it’s too easy to detect when they’re doing this and I don’t think their customers are going to like it. Blogs lighting up like Christmas trees “Comcast cuts bandwidth to YouTube!” is not what Comcast wants happening.
But this moral high ground is qualified. No profiling should be allowed for the purposes of profit, however, profiling for terrorism and to stop piracy, well, that’s another matter altogether. So the NN push is very clever.
Second, and even more clever, is the technological implications of NN. The implication is that we need some kind of regulatory protection to prevent content-profiling. The fact is (as I noted above), we do not. If content-profiling becomes a serious problem, the technological solution is fairly straightforward: end-to-end encryption. Then the ISPs are powerless to profile because they simply can’t tell what is passing through. Throttling anything that “looks random” or “looks encrypted” is already impossible because of the widespread use of VPNs.
In the long-run, it’s checkmate for the copyright hawks. This is like mate-in-4… they can make a few desperate moves to gasp for air on the way to their inevitable demise, but once they’ve played their last desperate moves, it’s game-over.
Clayton -
