Are The Internet And Government Incompatible?
Perhaps we were lucky that the Internet came of age in the anti-government age, under a Democratic President.
If it came along today, it would be banned.
The fact is that the Internet, by its nature, runs counter to all government control. It is simply a protocol for sending bits. It does not ask what those bits will be used for, or even where those bits will go.
This would be better stated "Perhaps we were lucky that the Internet came of age under an ineffectual president". I remember the 90s as a tense period, wondering whether or not the groups pushing for weak cryptography with government-required backdoors, widespread censorship and even less accountable, widespread wiretapping would be successfully countered by a few activist groups like the EFF and the ACLU. When the FBI and the spooks proposed all of those new civil rights restrictions following September 11th 2001 they were merely dusting off projects like Carnivore (which started in 1997) which had failed for lack of a popular president and widespread panic to overpower the critics. That it took such a disaster to push things through is a credit to the civil libertarians - it certainly wasn't for any lack of effort by the Clinton administration.
Today not only is the American government trying to control the Internet (in the name of fighting terrorism and crime) but so are individual state governments (in the name of fighting for entrenched political and economic interests).
Again, this isn't new - the 90s were marked by local governments and law enforcement officers attempting to project their community standards onto everyone else. When we got a temporary sales-tax moratorium, it was because even Congress hadn't yet figured out how to spend the dot-com tax spike and decided it wasn't worth fighting the pro-Internet activists, not because everyone had an abrupt change of life and became devout libertarians.
blog comments powered by Disqus