Darknets and internet genies

A while back I read a doom-and-gloom-it’s-going-to-be-1984-real-soon essay by John Walker, founder of Autodesk and e-pundit. It was fairly persuasive stuff - how Trusted Computing would by used by Hollywood and Big Government to put the lid back on the internet, and everyone would know that you were a dog. The basic premise seemed pretty sound, although I’m not sure that using NAT is necessarily the first step on the slippery slope to comprising my freedom.

The counter to that article cropped up today in a piece by Paul Boutin. It talks about how the effect of ever-more restrictive DRM and ID management will be the rise of the darknet, where all is encrypted and detection and enforcement are impossible.

Walker’s scenario is credible enough that Newsweek covered his essay in an article that only de-Orwellized it to the extent of changing Big Brother to “Big Government.” But Newsweek also added the missing part of the story: a more nuanced sense of how Internet users would react to such a system. Using the Net without the feeling you’re being watched, downloading and uploading stuff you’d get in trouble for leaving on your desk—come on, that’s a major part of its appeal. Any privacy clampdown would boost outlaw computing as surely as Jimmy Carter’s 55 mph limit did speeding. “Picture digital freedom fighters huddling in the electronic equivalent of caves, file-swapping and blogging under the radar of censors and copyright cops,” Newsweek concluded. They might as well have added: Cooooooooooool.

The trouble with this argument is that it somewhat neglects the fact that the overwhelming majority of internet users and content consumers couldn’t give a flying rat’s ass about privacy or security or anything else. There’s always going to be a minority of technically-savvy individuals who are concerned and capable enough to look for ways around Trusted Computing and DRM and so on, but for every one of them there must be a hundred thousand other AOL subscribers who aren’t able to change their screensaver, let alone configure an IPSEC tunnel. They’ll use what’s given to them, and as the giving is being done by the AOLs and the Dells and the Microsofts of this world, it’s not going to include a one-click ’subscribe to the darknet here’ button.

Without wanting to start sounding like a Daily Mail editorial, the older and more cynical I get the less inclined I am to believe that we’ve got the ability as a society to resist something that’s being pushed by big and entrenched commercial interests. Particularly when it’s something as abstract and technically-intimidating as online privacy. If the trusted computing approach is pushed on the basis of being good for you - “you’ll be more secure and safer if we know who and where you are” - then the alternatives start to sound a lot less palatable. “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve nothing to fear” sounds perfectly logical at face value, but that line of thinking allows a great deal of freedoms to be whittled away while you’re agreeing with it. I’m not sure most people care (or understand) enough to notice if their fair use rights and right to privacy are slowly being eroded.

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