Just finished my panel at the Internet Society’s conference, INET 2000. We were holding forth on “Fringes of the Internet” — and the conversation was fascinating.
The fringes are where you find the most interesting action in any community. Today’s center always starts at the fringe. That’s the way life works.
Law enforcement looks at the fringe and worries about crime. Law enforcers see cyberspace as a vast new opportunity for the bad guys to make new kinds of trouble, or at least old kinds of trouble in new ways.
One of my co-panelists was Ewan McPhie, who hails from the Organised and International Crime Directorate in the British government’s Home Office. Mike Nelson, an IBM executive who was the White House special assistant for information technology, calls McPhie the U.K.’s top cyber-cop.
McPhie and his colleagues are about to get every Big Brother’s wish. The Parliament appears to be on the verge of passing one of the most intrusive surveillance bills ever enacted in a Western nation, certainly the most invasive in any of the G8 nations. I trashed that bill in a recent column.
McPhie is a friendly guy, and he put the best face on the bill, saying it was only designed to apply to cyberspace what applies to phones. Several questions from the audience suggested that the Internet community does not agree.
When it came my turn to speak, I made several points.
First, When society decides what to do (or try to do) about the problems at the fringes, notably criminal activity, we must make uncomfortable policy choices that defy compromise. That’s a terrible spot for politicians in democracies, because they live for compromise. It’s difficult for everyone to acknowledge, whatever side one may be on in the debate.
For example, either we allow strong encryption to be used freely or we do not. The consequences of either decision are immense. Allow encryption and criminals will use it. Forbid it and no one is safe from crooks or the government. Try to regulate it and we effectively make it useless, because we’ll create holes in the system that the bad folks will exploit while leaving everyone else vulnerable.
This debate is happening in all kinds of areas relating to technology. Smart people are creating tools that don’t just let people communicate without being understood by outsiders. The new tools allow anyone to be anonymous, and to share files freely without being caught, among other things.
Law enforcement is creating its own tools, and an arms race is under way. That race is, in my view, a more appropriate way to deal with things than to enact legislation that makes criminals of good people who simply want to protect themselves. But it, too, raises a troubling question. Namely, if only the rich — who can afford the best tools for self-protection — are safe, what does that say about society’s beliefs? Naïve question, maybe.
Encryption is going to be part of our lives, pervasively, in coming years. We’re only waiting for the technology industry to make it transparent, the way an SSL-equipped browser talks with an SSL-equipped server. When that happens, encryption will have moved from the fringe into the mainstream. Life will change. We’ll adapt.
Second, and this is going to take some explaining, what happens at the fringes tends to move into the middle eventually — provided the activity is something people want. Napster and its ilk are a perfect example.
I find myself growing more and more angry at the music and movie industries, which absolutely transcend arrogance in their squeezing of artists and the public. No industry has been more resistant to progress — apart from progress in squeezing money out of consumers and maintaining an evil kind of control over the artists — than the entertainment crowd. No industry has more thoroughly co-opted our system of laws with the frightening Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalizes fair use of copyrighted material and gives the industry rights that the framers of the Constitution never envisioned for the holders of intellectual property.
Napster, Gnutella, FreeNet and other such applications are not simply defying the copyright laws, though they have that effect. They defy the outrageous way the entertainment industry behaves.
I used to play music for a living. My band made two albums — LPs, remember them? — for a small label based in New England. We were pretty good. We loved out music, at any rate, and people would drive for what seemed like ridiculous distances to hear us.
The big labels slammed the door in my face when I tried to discuss a deal. No, that’s not right. They never even opened the door, not even a crack. Maybe we didn’t try hard enough.
We never made a nickel on the small-label recordings. Neither did the record company. Being small and devoted to fringe-type music, its owners had an honesty the big labels couldn’t even dream about.
We made our money, such as it was, at gigs. I used to tell people that since I was a typical American I got paid for schlepping around the countryside in a beat-up van or Land Cruiser, helping haul equpment into and out of clubs and concert venues, doing the business arrangements for the band — i.e., dealing with sleazy club-owners — and that sort of stuff.
The music — I did that for free. I suspect that’s what any musician believes, deep down in his or her heart.
You can’t buy my band’s music anymore. You can get some of the songs in MP3 on my Web page. Someday I’ll post them all.
I want to get out-of-print music for my own listening. The music industry won’t allow it, because it’s not cost-effective to make new CDs of things that don’t sell well enough. So great music — in my opinion — moulders on shelves.
Or it doesn’t. It makes its way onto people’s hard disks in the form of MP3s, and people like me go and find it.
I want to pay for it. The record industry tells me to get lost. It wants to shut down Napster, which performs a service that scares the moguls and greedy superstars.
The music industry wants me to move to a system where I pay each time I listen. I will not obey.
Yes, some people use Napster to cheat the system. But there are enough honest people — the vast majority, I am convinced beyond any doubt — to support a Net-based music-delivery system that keeps creativity alive. Maybe today’s music industry won’t be as profitable as it is today. Maybe more of the money will reach the artists, who typically get nothing from record deals. We can always hope. But even if the business model has been shredded, that’s the reality we must face.
Napster, the company, may well get shut down soon by a federal judge. If so, she’ll just be following the laws that the intellectual property industry bludeoned Congress into passing.
That would be a shame. But it would be par for today’s course. It will matter to Napster’s employees, investors and users if the company gets whacked.
But Napster, the idea, is unstoppable. And if the company goes away, the problem for the industry will not have changed, and in fact will only get worse (from the industry’s perspective).
No one should have been surprised that Napster moved so quickly from the fringe to the middle, not in retrospect. Yet most of us didn’t see it coming until it was already over, at least those of us over
25.
I wonder what’s at the fringe today that will be at the center tomorrow. I’m not sure, but that’s why I like to keep an eye on what’s going on out there.
See also: the new Napster weblog.