Dreams of a free and open Internet
By: Mikael Pawlo
Tags: Cyberpunk, Policy, Freedom, Regulation, Internet Culture

That dream of the information highway. The democratization of knowledge. A world without censorship. The global village. When did we lose it? And what is Jeffrey Epstein’s role in all this?

The author with a T-shirt with an early Internet nickname printed. Provided by the Swedish Internet Foundation.

I remember it well. “Information wants to be free”. It was present in the cyberpunks’ dreams in the Usenet newsgroups. Every BBS was built on this foundation. It was present in mailing lists. Enter the web. Still the dream. Within reach. Forget bang paths. Everyone was suddenly able to use the Internet. A lot of people read William Gibson’s Neuromancer and had dreams of electric sheep. John Perry Barlow wrote the declaration of independence of cyberspace. We were indeed creating a world “where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity” as suggested by Barlow in his Davos document. We were in it together. All of us. The EFF was being founded by Barlow, Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore to defend civil liberties online. Software was being freed through Richard M. Stallman, Eric S. Raymond and Linus Torvalds. Everything was fine and dandy. The world was changing, we were all building a new and better world. A new and better world was possible.

ICANN a first step

Then things were starting to move. As Internet grew in popularity it no longer was a mere playground for aspiring self-described cyberpunks. The EFF was founded following an episode when Barlow was the target of a computer-related FBI investigation. In the world outside of our sphere, the Internet was still growing up. I think I first encountered governments seriously wanting to step in sometime around 1998. What would become ICANN was discussed following some activity and discussion in the area between the EU and the USA and Jon Postel and some of the other gatekeepers of top level domain names and IP numbers. I remember talking to Professor Jonathan Zittrain during one of the meetings held in Geneva in July 1998, telling him that “I feel like a total schmuck”. “We all do”, said Zittrain.

We had both just witnessed a session with Ira Magaziner, representing the US government. Magaziner said the government has an interest in Internet governance due to historical reasons, but that the US government would leave the Internet governance as soon as possible. Magaziner stated that the time for arguing was over and that the government was looking for a new, private, stakeholder-based organization to take over. Magaziner also said that the government was looking for consensus among the stakeholders, not different proposals as to how this organization should be managed or formed.

The next speaker was Christopher Wilkinson of the European Commission. Wilkinson acknowledged the efforts made by the US government, with certain reservations. Wilkinson firmly remarked that national and EU law must be recognized in the creation of the new entity, as for trademark and competition law. Wilkinson thought that it would be acceptable if the new entity was situated in the US, but that there should be safeguards in this area, so that no country would dominate Internet governance.

The reason I felt like schmuck was because I could not figure out how a new organization could be formed in the suggested time frame, just a couple of months.

I was soon to be even more dumb-founded. Out of a pink cloud and in no way related to the IFWP meetings a new organization emerged. This was ICANN, the organization we still know as the DNS government, if there is such a thing. Internet was lost, but many said there was hope, since ICANN was supposedly without government interference. This was the first entry into a regulated Internet.

The end-to-end principle

Many years later a promising young American Senator named Barack Obama is making net neutrality an election issue.

It should be noted that the Internet as such is a “stupid” technology. It is an end-to-end technology, which means that the network itself has no intelligence. It can only transport data. What happens to this data is then an effect of what happens at the ends. In that respect, the Internet is like the art of printing. When the printing press arrived in Europe the art of printing as such was not dangerous, but the information that could be distributed with its help could be perceived as “dangerous” or “bad” and worth censoring in various ways. The Catholic Church went the furthest with its index of banned books. The art of printing as such was not influenced. The technology was stupid and did not understand what it printed. The same goes for the Internet, whether it’s political messages, hate speech, bomb recipes, pictures of relatives and friends, copyrighted material, a letter to a friend or child pornography being distributed, the network does not understand anything. It is just data for the network. This can of course be changed by inserting products at the Internet operators that review or change the architecture. Why would you do that? Anyone who wants to regulate the Internet as such might be interested introducing this type of restriction in architecture.

At the same time, the “free and open” end-to-end architecture is in many ways a prerequisite for the great technological advances related to the Internet. There are, of course, opportunities to change what the person can take part in online, by introducing software in the individual’s computer. One such product that is interesting from a historical perspective is Netnanny. Netnanny filters out obscene material and other things that parents do not want to expose their surfing children to. Another similar product is Cyberpatrol. It may seem uncontroversial. Who wants their children to be exposed to internet pornography and articles that advocate terrorism? If you look at what these tools filter out, however, it can be about everything from alternative beliefs to advocating for rights for homosexuals. Suddenly, the index of the Catholic Church does not feel remote.

Online censorship

EFF co-founder John Gilmore said: “The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it.” However, this should presuppose that there are free ways to transport information. In the event there is control over all access, all accesses, to the network, it is technically possible to exercise far-reaching, if not absolute, censorship. China is the perfect example of this environment, but it is happening elsewhere, too.

It should be noted that the Internet is already regulated in several ways. Hate speech is prohibited in Sweden under the law on incitement against ethnic groups. Copyright infringement is prosecuted under the Copyright Act. Possession and distribution of child pornography is prohibited regardless of the technology used.

One cannot stop all criminal action with law. This holds true in the online environment. There will always be people who can encrypt their traffic or send small parts of a file in sequence to hide their actions. This could be an argument both for not regulating the Internet at all (“it is still impossible to achieve 100% regulation”) or an argument for stopping regulation at the current level and introducing regulation at the architectural level (“forget end-to-end and introduce control mechanisms to control the content”). The fact that the Internet is difficult to regulate is not in itself an argument against regulating the network on this level or towards maintaining the “free” architecture. When the controversial Communications Decency Act was tried in the Supreme Court, Judge Scalia said of the inefficiency argument: “[if the government] succeeds in excluding children from 250 out of 500 [indecent bookstores] that’s no use? “ Very few laws give one hundred percent effect. In addition, one may ask what kind of society is working to achieve that kind of result of its legislation?

How to regulate the Net

You make a systematic mistake if you want to regulate the Internet in terms of content on an infrastructure level. Such an attitude could lead to the end of end-to-end and it risks stifling the creation of new inventions and innovations in terms of what can be transported online and also lead to today’s internet technology being “frozen” in its state. The Internet is not an anarchy today. There are laws that govern the content online. At the same time, the Internet is still under construction. There is another reason to be careful about regulating the Internet separately. A global regulation of the Internet in 1996, for example, could have led to us not being able to experience peer-to-peer technology or instant messaging, which in turn could have reduced the opportunities for developing the much hated Zoom and Google Hangout conference technology that makes it possible to work from remote during the pandemic. It is also easy for regulation of new technology to have unexpected consequences. In its book Code from 1999, Lawrence Lessig gives an example of this when it comes to voluntary regulation of AOL, America Online. AOL, which at the time was an electronic bulletin board, wanted to deal with “dirty talk” and other obscenities. The use of the word “breast” was therefore banned. The only problem was that The American Breast Cancer Society, which AOL housed, suddenly could not discuss their common disease. AOL’s actions provide an example of what can happen when changing the conditions for the architecture through which information is transported and is a strong argument for continued end-to-end technology for the Internet. Then the regulatory mistakes in the cases where they occur can be implemented at the ends and at least not affect everyone.

Meanwhile, new self-regulation is introduced in a high pace right now in the social networks. Twitter is hiding messages that could be promoting fake news regarding the US election, even if the tweet is sent by the incumbent president or if the tweet is a discussion a law professor is having and you could argue both ways. Everything happens fast and in a closed environment by private actors without any external supervision. Is it good, too little, too much or too late? It is a debate that is very much needed.

The arguments for and against regulation are similar to those voiced when it came to the art of printing. The measures taken are also recognizable (cf. Cyberpatrol and Netnanny with Index). If history has shown us anything, it is to be careful about regulating new media technologies.

Epstein and the discussion

Enter Jeffrey Epstein. The cult formed around Epstein tarnished so much of what the Internet was about. People, ideas and the vision. If you were around from the inception of Wired, Epstein is the antithesis of the Internet and touching everything you loved. Some of the people you trusted the most turned out to be complete monsters.

Epstein sought out many of the people and organizations of the early Internet. That does not mean that he provided them with underaged girls. He could have. But at the very least, Epstein tarnished them. It is enough to have been at a dinner with Epstein to get into trouble, and probably for good reasons, even though he was a socialite trying to get a selfie with everyone worth anything in social ranks. Consequently, many important voices have disappeared from the arena. Whether that is right or wrong is a different discussion that needs to be addressed on a case-by-case level, but it is evident that people previously important to the discussion, vanished from the discussions around regulation of the Internet. Another thing is that the entire community of early adopters involved from The Well, early Wired and onwards are now shattered and devastated over the horrible crimes facilitated and committed by Epstein and touched or committed also by some of their closest confidantes. There is a lot of whispering going on over the wires, but my main conclusion is that Epstein put a bullet in a previously vibrant non-conformist community of Internet freedom lovers. The original culture bearers are silent. Crushed by monsters. Sometimes the culture bearers were the monsters.

We very much need an active discussion over what Twitter and Facebook and other social networks are doing now in terms of self-regulation to avoid nation state regulation. We need to engage in the issue of ICANN thinking about getting censorship into registrars and other infrastructure possibly blocking content at will for moral reasons. We need to discuss how the cloud and free and open software should function going forward. We need to dwell on the role of the known and unknown algorithms and machine learning.

We still have a shot at the global village, a censorship free environment and knowledge at your fingertips. We can’t just have the governments discussing this. If so, we might end up with a very “safe” Internet, or worse a thorough balkanization of Internet and many, many national “Internets”, as suggested by Lessig and Zittrain on multiple occasions. President Barack Obama says in a recent interview with The Atlantic that the new information architecture is the greatest threat to democracy. I am not sure he is right about this, but it is a discussion needed to be had, also with the early adopters present in the room. I have to admit I have myself lost a lot of steam with all the bad things happening. It is not just Epstein’s crime syndicate and pedophile ring. It is also all the me too-allegations and whatever certain nations and this and that corporation been up to or not. All those things make you want to walk away from it all. But we should not. I should not.

The Epstein crime syndicate needs to be cleared out and the culprits and enablers sentenced and imprisoned. It is moving too slowly, if at all. But we need to save the spirit of the Internet, too. Epstein has already destroyed many lives. We should not allow him to destroy the Internet, too.

A better world is possible.

Mikael Pawlo

Head of Growth at Bokio