WikiLeaks and its struggles to maintain a presence on the Web have jump-started a discussion about alternatives to the Internet. (Note: wikileaks.org is not available at this writing, with traffic redirected to http://mirror.wikileaks.info.)
The tight affiliation between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) and world governments and businesses is at the center of the dispute. ICANN maintains the master tables that translate URLs into domain name servers, or DNSs. Anti-copyright activists and other “pirates,” like convicted Pirate Bay developer and anti-copyright activist Peter Sunde, want to create alternatives to ICANN.
Historically, pirates usurp public infrastructure, be it shipping channels or highways, to conduct their business. Credit card pirates see the Net as just another highway, and credit card data as the target of their activities. From what I gather, they are not considering a physical alternative to the Net, but rather an alternative routing structure that would establish new root servers. Technologically, that is feasible.
Alternative name servers will most likely initiate an arms race with service providers. Those service providers will find ways to detect and either shut down or curtail traffic from the Alternative Nets -- and that is likely to slow down the movement of “authorized” content, similar to the way the search for terrorists slows down traffic into airport terminals.
As I write this, I realize it sounds as though I think the pirates may succeed. Alternative Net proponents face more organizational issues than technological ones. But a distributed information highway is difficult to administer, and pirates aren’t known to be the most cooperative of personality types.
ICANN was created as a central structure to manage Internet domains. The pirates may well discover that reintroducing distribution of domain creation and registration will introduce procedural issues they don’t want to deal with. One way to combat the distribution issue is to limit the number of servers as they bootstrap their addressing scheme, giving them time to work out an alternative server management model to complement the vision of alternative traffic flows.
Sunde suggests developing a distributed, peer-to-peer (P2P) network of servers, which isn’t surprising, given Pirate Bay’s BitTorrent origins. Pirate Bay has been shut, and Sunde and his co-developers convicted, but that isn’t stopping their challenges to the “official” Net. Beyond sparking this debate with tweets and blog entries, Sunde is also offering to accept donations to WikiLeaks through his micro-donation site, Flattr, now that PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard have disassociated their services from WikiLeaks.
Another alternative is to rethink the current Internet by getting political actors, such as the US Department of Commerce, to help review and reinvent the governance model and policy charter of ICANN. ICANN and its sponsors may see policy changes as more manageable than the emergence of a competitive alternative. A political solution, however, may seem unworkable because of entrenched views on intellectual property ownership, historically slow government response to technology changes and their social implications, and ineffective negotiations on many other topics. The pirates may not have the patience for due process.
Wikileaks presents a unique current case for an Alternative Net, but similar confrontations will soon join it. Hyper-transparency in government might make WikiLeaks less damaging, but anti-copyright activists will still want to set movies and music and musings free, and they will find a way. Like the war on drugs, the only long-term solution to IP theft is the elimination of demand, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.
If Chris Anderson’s Free economic model achieves escape velocity, piracy might be demoted to marketing, and then it just wouldn’t be fun anymore. In the meantime, the pirates will find a way, and, interestingly, whatever approach they take will likely drive innovations back into the legitimate Internet -- from more efficient encryption to legitimate uses for alternative DNSs -- even if that isn’t on their agenda.
— Daniel W. Rasmus, author ofManagement by Design (Wiley, 2010), is a strategist who helps clients put their futures in context.
...anti-copyright activists will still want to set movies and music and musings free, and they will find a way.
It's not just anti-copyright activists and pirates. Some people just don't believe that the Internet domain structure should be governed by a central authority.
Regarding the distinction between pirates and privateers, I highly recommend this informative video.
Thank you for all of the comments. It is a tough choice to consider, but an Alernative Internet is not all about illegal activity. Some would argue that the control of the Internet has create new issues with free speach, and the alternative Internet would nurture that aspect of our democratic ideals as well.
I'm not sure I want to be on a highway run by pirates, but if you look at early American history, or the history of any conflict, the pirates sometimes get morphed into patriots. Only history gets to decide the letters that end up between the P and the S.
I am of a mixed opinion regarding this one. I don't approve of illegal activities - malware distribution, virus distribution, theft, etc. However, I can't get behind the idea of hijacking domains and DNS records, particularly without due process, for the purposes of stopping these activities. Having a single point of control, while ideal for maintaining order and proper structuring, makes the web as we've known it vulnerable to attack by those powerful enough to attack, mainly governmental entities.
When the internet was originally in development, as ARPANet, it was specifically designed to insure there was no single point of failure. That rebust nature has continued into the modern internet, to a degree. DNS has become our single point of failure, more than any other. Routing problems can cause issues, but DNS tampering has the ability to bring the web as we know it to its knees. A single point authority is a single point attack - a single point of failure.
I'm not sure the pirate proposal is the solution, but we need to have one. The way it stands now, anyone with enough power can literally cause the web, or any given part of it, to cease to function. It's become too important in world economies and relations to allow that to continue to be the case.
Excellent post Daniel. And excellent exposition of the actual intrincasies opf the techological issues at stake. Thanks.
Piracy has always used the same or improved technology of the establishments with a dose of innovation, wit and defiance. The new information pirates have the same spirit so history may actually gives us some insight on what to expect, at least, possibly. My take is that the possibilities are now so many that to make a safe judgement a bundle of possible alternatives must be the answer. That is, applying sound systems theory, the answer most probably will be an aggregation of alternatives and not a single nor a dominant one. Why?
Because we are really amidst a literal explosion of technological change in the web, not just innovation. Net capacity, net access, net energy consumption, net income and expenses models, in fact, everything is now at stake and in a state of constant flux. Nobody can even devise a model that may try to include most of the variables because some of them are, right now, unmanageable. What will be the effect of the new FCC regulations just enacted? Who knows? And then some...
Just last week, some of the final the runners up for TIME's Man of the Year were web personalities as disparate as Mark Zuckerberg ( the selected one) and Julian Assange (the one formerly in jail). I think that gives us a scenario of how complicated things are.
So lets see what the new pirates are really for and where they force the web to go.
A bit of history: some very successful pirates of the Caribbean were actually the major and municipal (cabildo) legislature of a Puerto Rico town in the west. When the passengers arrived to the island they were greeted by "the local authorities" as if "you know who?..." SURPRISE! Nobody spoke at the moment. History spoke latter.
It would be interesting to see if the future history tells our successors: Hey, did you know who that unknown pirate was? Most may be reading this as of now...
Daniel, while reading your post, I couldn't stop thinking about Johnny Mnemonik and some other stories by William Gibson. The World that can our world turn into, with multiple and opposing Nets. It may be Internets or Intranets but they will definitely be opposed to each other
Could the new alternative net be the mobile devices with encrypted contents or PKI contents where someone would need a key to actually view the contents? just a thought.
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