Route Around

Doc Searls wrote an inter­est­ing arti­cle enti­tled “Sav­ing the Net” in Linux Jour­nal. While he does present a dystopia in which the net is con­trolled by large cor­po­ra­tion that under­stand how to use reg­u­la­tions as a weapon, I beg to dif­fer on his vision of the future.

My per­sonal sus­pi­cion is that the net com­mu­nity will route around the prob­lem once enough peo­ple become aware of what is going on.

The rise of Linux as an alter­na­tive to deeply entrenched Win­dows is show­ing that some­thing new is hap­pen­ing here. While SCO has started men­ac­ing lit­i­ga­tion over intel­lec­tual prop­erty and Linux, the mes­sage from big com­pa­nies is that they are not chang­ing their strat­egy. What is impor­tant here is not the fact that com­pa­nies are adopt­ing Linux but the fact that com­pa­nies are start­ing to look at the OS as a com­mod­ity, one that can eas­ily be replaced at a later time. This is an impor­tant devel­op­ment because it low­ers the poten­tial for con­trol. In order to fully con­trol what con­sumers have access to, you need to be able to con­trol the envi­ron­ment. With oper­at­ing sys­tems becom­ing a com­mod­ity, that con­trol erodes.

Con­trol of the oper­at­ing sys­tem is one of the key ele­ments behind the TCPA’s goal to lock up com­put­ers in order to give more con­trol to con­tent pro­duc­ers. How­ever, with a com­mod­ity oper­at­ing sys­tem that con­trol becomes more dif­fi­cult to gain. The next two areas in which such con­trol can hap­pen are at the proces­sor level (and here, I would invoke mar­ket dynam­ics as a sure­fire way to fight this point since at least one ven­dor will prob­a­bly want to dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself from its com­peti­tors by offer­ing non-crippled chips) and at the access level.

That last point, how­ever, is coun­tered by the fact that increas­ingly (and this is some­thing the phone and cable com­pa­nies do not want you to know), the cost of run­ning your own access point is drop­ping. True, it still costs sev­eral hun­dreds or thou­sands of dol­lars a month to do so but I sus­pect that some­thing much scarier could hap­pen if the pipes start clamp­ing down.

With the rise of Wi-Fi, con­trol of the net is mov­ing from cables to the open air­space. Granted, many will say that in order to access resources on the Inter­net, there is still a need for access to a land line soft­ware, even if that land line is con­nected to a wire­less router. How­ever, with the rise of cheap access point devices, there is a pos­si­bil­ity for cre­at­ing a new net­work, one that does not touch upon the rest of the net, but one that does con­nect com­put­ers from access point to access point. In a way, all the tech­nol­ogy needed for this already exists. A net­work pro­to­col like TCP/IP can carry con­tent over the air, and tech­nolo­gies like Zero Con­fig­u­ra­tion Net­work­ing make dis­cov­er­abil­ity easy to do. Cou­pled with the explo­sive growth of wire­less hotspots, the hold on con­nec­tion lines is increas­ingly becom­ing irrel­e­vant. What is hap­pen­ing here is not only a com­modi­ti­za­tion of the oper­at­ing sys­tem but also a com­modi­ti­za­tion of the con­nec­tiv­ity space.

Even in a world where the United States man­ages to out­law Linux and where the big tel­cos man­age to reg­u­late Inter­net access, unfetered access to ressource beyond their con­trol will con­tinue. If one stud­ies geopol­i­tics, it is easy to see that some coun­tries will see it in their best inter­est to avoid such reg­u­la­tion so they can offer data havens, pick­ing up nice extra tax dol­lars on the sale of goods and ser­vices in those havens. Ulti­mately, the prob­lem US com­pa­nies have, whether they man­age to reg­u­late the Inter­net or not, is that the net­work is now largely a global one.

To date, attempts to limit Inter­net activ­i­ties in cer­tain parts of the world (Iraq and China for exam­ple) have only met with resis­tance and ulti­mately fail­ure in terms of lim­it­ing what peo­ple can and can­not see. I sus­pect that if such lim­its were imposed by large cor­po­ra­tion, they would meet the same fate as those efforts, maybe stop­ping activ­ity for a lit­tle while but, even­tu­ally, some­one would find a hole. And it is from such small hole that the dam would burst.