Geeks: Get Involved

The Inter­net has been a dis­rup­tor to busi­ness and soon, it will start being a dis­rup­tor to estab­lished gov­ern­ment mod­els. Here’s why geeks need to get involved.

What mat­ters

To peo­ple liv­ing largely in the future, the inter­net obvi­ously mat­ters but increas­ingly, mat­ters of gov­er­nance and pol­i­tics are start­ing to pop up on radars. Whether it is the cur­rent state of rebel­lions in the mid­dle east and their after­math, or dis­cus­sions around free­dom of the press, the first skir­mishes of inter­net and the estab­lished polit­i­cal struc­tures are start­ing to happen.

In 1997, with the land­mark ACLU vs. Reno legal win in the United States, those of us who were involved thought we had done most of the work that was needed to avert some bad law­mak­ing on the inter­net. Because many of us were rel­a­tively young, we had con­fused suc­cess in an early bat­tle with total vic­tory and sur­ren­der from the estab­lished order. Over the years, though, fight­ing has con­tin­ued and the incum­bents have slowly been regain­ing ground and momentum.

Unfor­tu­nately, whether it is due to igno­rance or arro­gance, most of the tech com­mu­nity has been stay­ing out of the many dis­cus­sions related to gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions. A small cadre of ded­i­cated activists has tried to work on this or that issue but noth­ing has been done on a coör­di­nated basis to estab­lish a net-friendly view of the world in Wash­ing­ton DC.

Mean­while, in coun­tries out­side of the US, more pro­gres­sive gov­ern­ments have estab­lished some basic prin­ci­ples of inter­net gov­er­nance: for exam­ple, Fin­land made 1Mb broad­band Inter­net access a human right and I’ve heard from sev­eral sources that inter­net access will be writ­ten as a right under the new Egypt­ian constitution.

With that back­ground, you’d assume the US would even­tu­ally move in the same direc­tion. How­ever, with lit­tle out­rage in the online com­mu­nity, a bill to cre­ate an inter­net kill switch in the United States is cur­rently mak­ing its way through con­gress.

Or take the dis­cus­sions around Wik­ileaks. Much of the debate last year over the cable release seem to bring politi­cians and the pop­u­lar opin­ion to the view that Wik­ileaks had bro­ken US laws and done irrepara­ble dam­age to the US State Depart­ment. Now three months later, charges still have not been brought against Wik­ileaks… and State depart­ment offi­cials who looked into the dam­age done by wik­ileaks reported back to the US Con­gress that it had caused lit­tle real and last­ing dam­age to Amer­i­can diplo­macy. Mean­while, the rev­e­la­tions high­lighted in the Wik­ileaks doc­u­ments have been cred­ited as one of the ele­ments that helped launched the recent rebel­lions across the mid­dle east.

But once again, few geeks came to Wik­ileaks’ defense ini­tially, and fewer yet are still involved in the free­dom of the press dis­cus­sions launched by the Wik­ileaks dump. Mean­while, in an attack on gov­ern­ment whistle-blowing, some US con­gress­men are work­ing to ensure that pub­li­ca­tions sim­i­lar to the Wik­ileaks one (or the Pen­ta­gon papers in the past) would become ille­gal. Once again, few com­puter geeks are involved.

Those are but a cou­ple of exam­ples of why indi­vid­u­als whose liveli­hood depend on the Inter­net need to get involved.

A chang­ing landscape

My first expe­ri­ence with inter­net policy-making was forged through the Clin­ton years, when incred­i­ble indi­vid­u­als came together to estab­lish basic lev­els of pro­tec­tion for the then nascent Inter­net indus­try. I was for­tu­nate enough to be a fly on the wall for sev­eral of those events, hash­ing out such bor­ing issues as tax clas­si­fi­ca­tions for goods and ser­vices sold on the internet.

Pol­icy mak­ers in the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion were, for the most part, rel­a­tively friendly. While I thought it was because they were believ­ers in the poten­tial of the inter­net, a more cyn­i­cal analy­sis could high­light than those dis­cus­sions were hap­pen­ing when the com­mer­cial Inter­net was still a rel­a­tive nov­elty and did not seem threat­en­ing in any way shape or form to tra­di­tional mod­els. Viewed through that lens, to toss a few crumbs to the inter­net crowd seemed like a no-brainer to gov­ern­men­tal insti­tu­tions, and oppo­si­tion to such idea was non-existent because the stakes seemed so small to any tra­di­tional play­ers that it wasn’t even worth fight­ing for.

Since then, of course, the inter­net has moved out of stealth mode, slay­ing a few estab­lished play­ers along the way. Inter­net issues are no longer con­sid­ered small pota­toes by any indus­try. In fact, for many, they are the main issues. It is in that new cli­mate that the future of the inter­net is being fought.

At the same time, the inter­net itself con­tin­ues to expand. Only a few years ago, most peo­ple accessed the inter­net via a com­puter. Nowa­days, an increas­ing por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion is start­ing to access the inter­net through mobile devices, run­ning IP packet on the net­work of mobile oper­a­tors who have looked at por­tion of their land­line busi­ness being dec­i­mated by deci­sions they made in the 90s regard­ing let­ting the net. Back then, because they could not envi­sion the net as becom­ing a major eco­nomic force, they agreed to giv­ing any­one full access to it at a rel­a­tively low cost. The explo­sion in use put that unmetered access to the test and those play­ers now want to reverse what they see as a costly mis­take. Their goal is to throt­tle wire­less access or at least make it more expen­sive so they can return more prof­its to their own bot­tom line.  This also means they could balka­nize por­tion of the inter­net based on spe­cial mon­e­tary deals, tip­ping the bal­ance away from small play­ers and towards the peo­ple who can pay the most. This imbal­ance would have a sub­stan­tial neg­a­tive impact on the inno­va­tion explo­sion engen­dered by inex­pen­sive and unfet­tered inter­net access.

Net­work phi­los­o­phy and governments

For the most part we, in the inter­net indus­try, tend to look at struc­tures made out of net­works, where each node in the net­work has a sim­i­lar say and ampli­fi­ca­tion only hap­pens as a reward mech­a­nism based on the valid­ity of the con­tent being cre­ated. It is some­thing we mea­sure in page-views, refer­ral links, sub­scribers, and twit­ter fol­low­ers. It is a model where a 15 year old kid with good ideas can pro­vide opin­ions in a sim­i­lar forum as an retired US con­gress­man and both opin­ions are treated by the net­work in the same fash­ion initially.

The con­tent is there for all to see and to be judged on its own merit. Sure, there is some ele­ment of fil­ter­ing hap­pen­ing as peo­ple look to fol­lower counts, or sub­scribers, or longevity as social proof of value but that social val­i­da­tion changes in a dynamic envi­ron­ment and yesterday’s unknown can become today’s super­star as quickly as today’s super­star can become tomorrow’s has-been.

Our gov­ern­men­tal insti­tu­tions, how­ever, has largely based on a more tra­di­tional sys­tem of top-down com­mand and con­trol, where vision is cre­ated at the top, com­mu­ni­cated to the lower rungs, and exe­cuted within the frame of what the lead­er­ship wants. A gov­ern­ment, like any organ­ism, tend to be resis­tant to change.

Evo­lu­tion has taught us that it is not the strongest of the species that sur­vive but the most adapt­able to change. And changes cre­ated by net­work phi­los­o­phy will have a direct impact on the cur­rent state of gov­ern­ment. How well that impact is man­aged is depen­dent on how well each side is pre­pared. If prepa­ra­tions are lop­sided to one side or the other, the clash will be extremely vio­lent (think Libya) and the out­come will kill the unpre­pared side. If the prepa­ra­tions are of rel­a­tively equal mea­sure, the clash itself will be rel­a­tively pain­less (think Egypt or Tunisia) but there will still be a lot of things to hash out afterwards.

Incre­men­tal AND Revolutionary

So to put things sim­ply: it’s time for geeks to get involved in pol­icy mak­ing. Refus­ing to do so is equiv­a­lent to sign­ing a death penalty for the cur­rent state of the Internet.

Let me sim­plify that: You can either get involved or give up on the internet.

Over the next decade, the legal frame­work and the way gov­ern­ment will run for the next cen­tury or more will be defined. Your role in defin­ing it will help decide whether we live in as free a soci­ety (or even freer) as we do today or whether we end up in a more con­trolled environment.

In order to facil­i­tate the tran­si­tion, there is a need for both incre­men­tal and rev­o­lu­tion­ary approaches. The incre­men­tal model is one where one works within the estab­lished frame­work (so work­ing with gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tions, for exam­ple) to steer it in the direc­tion of change through a series of small, seem­ingly pain­less, sets of changes. It is akin to mov­ing every­thing off by a sin­gle degree 180 times to com­pletely reverse course. In that model, the secret is to estab­lish the appro­pri­ate part­ner­ships, build the appro­pri­ate coali­tions between all par­ties and help every­one under­stand that change takes time but that each step for­ward brings us one step closer to the future.

In that model, one can do sim­ple things like sup­port­ing pro-internet can­di­dates through dona­tions and vol­un­teer­ing of time, or edu­cat­ing cur­rent politi­cians on cer­tain issues. The incre­men­tal model puts the focus on the rules of law and uses the cur­rent model to move from sta­tus quo to a longer term change over a long period.

Mean­while, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary model looks to break down the exist­ing sys­tem and, through its attack, forces the sys­tem to change itself in order to co-opt the rev­o­lu­tion­ary ele­ments and get them to stop the attacks. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary model looks at the edge of changes as the begin­ning while the incre­men­tal­ist look at it as the end of the process. Because the rev­o­lu­tion­ary gen­er­ally looks much far­ther, he/she is pulled back from where they want to be and con­tin­ues to push for more reform on an ongo­ing basis, always being the early test case and always push­ing the dia­logue a lit­tle fur­ther out.

Inter­est­ingly enough, both mod­els have the same aims, for­ward motion and change, and the peo­ple from each side tend to be the ones that work together in the post evo­lu­tion­ary state.

So, while I myself am very much in the incre­men­tal­ist camp, I want to put out a call to every­one out there to choose a side and get involved: If you’re read­ing this, you care about the inter­net. And if you care about the inter­net, you now have to go out and get involved in shap­ing its future, which will ulti­mately be defined through new laws over the next decade.