Saturday 13 August 2011

Tightening the Web

David Cameron has promised to “do whatever it takes to restore law and order and to rebuild our communities”, which may include a law to permit removal of face masks and plans to block access to social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry messaging. He said in Parliament:
    "Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."
Facebook has already replied to Cameron by announcing that it has "already actively removed several 'credible threats of violence' related to the riots across England" but the major social networks are unlikely to comply fully until Cameron can introduce new legislation, which will expose him to widespread opposition on grounds of freedom of speech. At the time of the Wikileaks affair last year I wrote a PC Pro column predicting the imminence of such regulation, and I'm publishing an edited extract of its argument here, since I know that many of my political friends don't read that nerdy-but-excellent journal.

Adapted from the Idealog column in PC Pro issue 197 March 2011:
At the Web '10 conference in Paris this April, we heard European telecom companies demanding a levy on vendors of bandwidth-guzzling hardware and services like Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and Apple. These firms currently make mega-profits without contributing anything to the massive infrastructure upgrades needed to support the demand they create. Content providers at the conference responded "sure, as soon as you telcos start sharing your subscription revenues with us". It's shaping up to be an historic conflict of interest between giant industries, on a par with cattle versus sheep farmers or the pro and anti-Corn Law lobbies.

But of course there are more parties involved than just telcos versus web vendors. We users, for a start. Then there are the world's governments, and the content-providing media industries. In today's earnest debates about Whither The Webbed-Up Society, no two journalists seem to agree how many parties need to be considered, so I'll put in my own bid, which is five. 

My five categories of player are Users, Web Vendors, Governments, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Telecom Companies (Telcos), each of whose interests conflict with every other, thus connecting them in a "pentacle of conflict" so complex it defies easy predictions. The distinction is basically this: users own or create content and consume bandwidth; web vendors own storage (think Amazon servers and warehouses, Google datacenters) and consume bandwidth; telcos own wired and wireless fabrics and sell bandwidth; and poor old ISPs are the middle-men, brokering deals between the other four. 

Note that I lump in content providers, even huge ones like Murdoch's News International, among users, because they own no infrastructure and merely consume bandwidth. And they're already girded for war, for example in the various trademark law-suits against Google's AdWords. What will actually happen, as always in politics, depends on how these players team up against each other, and that's where it starts to look ominous. 

At exactly the same time as these arguments are surfacing, the Wikileaks affair has horrified all the world's governments and almost certainly tipped them over into seriously considering regulating the internet. Now it's one of the great clichés of net journalism that the net can't be regulated: it's self-organising, re-routes around obstacles etc, etc, blah, blah. However the fact is that governments can do more or less anything, up to and including dropping a hydrogen bomb on you (except where the Rule of Law has failed, where they can do nothing). For example they can impose taxes that completely alter the viability of business models, or else stringent licensing conditions, especially on vulnerable middle-men like the ISPs.

Before Wikileaks the US government saw a free Web as one more choice fruit in its basket of "goodies of democracy" to be flaunted in the face of authoritarian regimes like China. After Wikileaks, my bet is that there are plenty of folk in the US government who'd like to find out more about how China keeps the lid on. The EU is more concerned about monopolistic business practices and has a track record of wielding swingeing fines and taxes to adjust business models to its own moral perspective. 

All these factors point towards rapidly increasing pressure for effective regulation of the net over the next few years, and an end to the favourable conditions we presently enjoy where you can get most content for free if you know where to look, and can get free or non-volume-related net access too. The coming trade war could very well see telcos side with governments (they were after all best buddies for almost a century) against users and web vendors, extracting more money from both through some sort of two-tier Web that offers lots of bandwidth to good payers but a mere trickle to free riders. And ISPs are likely to get it in the neck from both sides, God help 'em. 

Friday 12 August 2011

How VeryTaxing

photo: David Jones/PA from The Guardian Aug 11th
One grimly humorous moment in the London Riots was video footage by a journalist with a "well-bred" voice chasing along the street after a young girl who was carrying a huge flat-screen TV. Asked why she was doing it she said she was "taking back her taxes". Several people have accused her of hypocrisy since they're pretty sure she doesn't work or pay taxes. But of course in gang-speak "tax" means to steal:

URBAN DICTIONARY 
1. Tax
Verb. - To steal.
Noun (Taxer) - Thief 
"im going to tax that guys cash back in a sec"

where'd you get that from
"oh i just taxed it from some old lady"
 

She was quite literally carrying her taxes home. But the humour gets grimmer still once you recall that the US government has recently been reduced to impotence and near default by a group of Tea Party Republicans who actually share this young girl's attitude to tax - that it's simply theft. (Perhaps Sir Philip Green shares it too, though not in public). It seems the understanding that taxation is the price of civilisation is vanishing from all levels of society. A very modern form of barbarism, the proud result of the neo-liberal project to replace all social solidarity with market values.

David Robins and I caught a whiff of this attitude when we were writing Cool Rules back in 1999:

"Cool is an oppositional attitude, an expression of a belief that the mainstream mores of your society have no legitimacy and do not apply to you."

"Cool has a dangerously ambivalent attitude toward the rule of law and could accommodate to criminal neo-feudalism just as well as it does to consumer capitalism - the uncomfortable truth is that,compared to the excitements of the drug and gun culture, a prosperous, well-ordered society is boring . Fukuyama takes a rather Panglossian approach to such matters - so far as Cool is concerned history isn’t just over, it is the ultimate negative, something that is washed up, finished with, as in ‘Bang! You’re history’."

"Cool may once have been an expression of rebellion but it is surely not any longer. The real question is whether or not it can sustain the key elements, the rule of law and freedom of conscience, that make western democracy the least bad form of government ever invented. The picture is murky and contradictory: on the one hand Cool values personal freedom above all, it hates racism, it is egalitarian and hedonistic in temperament, on the other hand it is fascinated with violence, drugs and criminality, and mesmerised by the sight of naked power. "
More recently Will Davies, on his excellent Potlatch blog, has been developing the concept of the "criminal consumer", a type of individual whose presence is equally discomfiting to politicians of both Left and Right.  (Of course Proudhon was there long before all of us with his "Property is Theft!") 

The digital revolution has been eroding people's respect for property for several decades now because digital goods are weightless and stealing them might deprive their owner of revenue but not of the original article. However there's no indication that anyone has yet discovered a workable formula for living together in large groups without property, law and taxes. I fear the outcome will be a harsh authoritarian crackdown in which those who own much property privately hire the hardest and meanest to keep it out of the hands of the rest of us - dissatisfaction with the current police force (a public good as well as an instrument of control) is palpably spreading.  

POSTSCRIPT: The furore over David Starkey's supposedly "racist" remarks on Newsnight about white kids "becoming black" highlights a real problem for the Left. Starkey was quite correct in his analysis, which was cultural rather than racial. He deprecates gangsta culture, and quite rightly identifies it as a central factor in these riots. This is very inconvenient for liberals, and particularly for some Guardian writers, who have uncritically embraced this culture (which is perhaps the most important contemporary manifestation of the attitude we called Cool). 

GILT BY ASSOCIATION

I don’t have any special credentials as a commentator on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The c...