BWGThe "myth of the online pervert" seems roughly analogous to me
to the "myth of internet instability" as a reason d'etre for ICANN.
by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
A wave of significant legislation seeking to regulate electronic
commerce and culture is now before Congress, marking a
significant new era in the history of the Net. The rationale for
earlier efforts to control the Internet was the largely mythical
specter of the online Pervert. Now, it's the poor Consumer
who's on the local news every night getting ripped off online. So
corporations and Congress are teaming up to fence off the Wild
Frontier.
Perhaps the luckiest break the Net and Web got was time:
nearly a generation to grow and develop before journalists,
legislators, lawyers or CEO's quite realized what it was, or
accepted its political, economic and cultural importance.
Still, it's always been inevitable that politicians, corporations and
media companies would try to regulate and control the Internet.
It's becoming much too important and lucrative to be left alone.
Until this year, most efforts to control the Net consisted either
of lunatic software or legislation advanced by opportunistic
politicians -- decency acts from Congress, blocking and filtering
programs from companies.
Rattled institutions refused to take the Net and Web seriously,
or perhaps simply hoped it would just go away. Then they
seemed to grasp in the mid- 90's that networked and linked
computing somehow threatened the way they work.
So the largely mythical Net Pervert was invoked as a means of
controlling this booming new sub-culture.
The pervert (and, to a lesser extent, the inaccurately-labeled
"hacker") was the perfect late 20th century techno-nightmare,
the ideal rationale for trying to stick a finger in the crumbling
dike that was holding back the Information Revolution.
The Net was promoting isolation, addiction, loss of privacy -
the end of civilization itself. Since the Internet was unsafe, and
children were vulnerable to it, government agencies and law
enforcement authorities had to regulate it.
So, as the media told it, the spectre of the online Pervert and his
cousin, the Predator, grew. He lurked out there in the ether,
waiting to pounce on unsuspecting children, to draw them into
child pornography rings, to lure them into real-world encounters
where they were kidnapped, murdered or raped.
There have been a handful of cases where this horrific scenario
actually occurred. But given the number of interactions between
children and the Internet, kids have always been statistically
more likely to have jet planes fall on their heads than to be
harmed online.
In fact, statistically, children are more likely - 300,000 times
more likely, according to author Don Tapscott and Justice
Department crime abstracts - to be harmed by the people they
live with than by strangers they might encounter online.
Partly because real-world online crimes are so rare - despite
the staggeringly disproportionate amount of media attention they
receive - something gradually becoming obvious to
computer-acquiring middle-class Americans, the invocation of
the Pervert as a means of controlling the Net hasn't worked.
In the last few years, even the most mule-headed and
reactionary corporations have figured out that they'd better
learn to do business on he Net, if they're going to do business at
all. So one way or another, the wild, unregulated frontier
atmosphere that has characterized the Internet's first decades
are coming to an end.
The good news about Judge Jackson's findings of fact about
Microsoft is that the company's arrogant, rapacious and
predatory behavior will be curbed. But that's the bad news too.
We might be haunted one day by those voices wishing that the
marketplace had been given the chance to do the job rather
than the federal judiciary.
For the diverse and loosely-affiliated collection of sub-cultures
we call the Net and the Web, a new era is definitely underway.
The Microsoft anti-trust action and a wave of legislation now
before Congress heralds the beginning of a new, monumentally
significant period in the history of the Net - the systematic effort
by corporations, lobbyists and lawmakers to make it a safe,
rational and, above all, profitable environment in which they can
do business. The corporations that dominate media and
commerce in America are the biggest, richest and most
influential forces in recent U.S. history. And they're going
digital.
To a one - lawyers, record companies, Hollywood studios,
publishers, media conglomerates, politician institutions - the Net
threatens their ability to set social and economic agendas, to
dominate markets. There's plenty of debate about whether the
Net can ever be harnessed by any the growing coalition of
companies or government agencies wanting to do so, but
there's no longer much doubt about whether they're going to
try.
Their assault on the Net - sure to intensify over the next few
years - marks an evolution in what will surely be one of the 21st
century's slam-bang political struggles: that of individualism
versus corporatism.
For much of the 20th century, political scientists and
freedom-lovers worried about governmental tyranny -
monarchies, fascism, Communism, Nazism as the primary threat
to personal freedom. But increasingly, it's mass-marketing that
threatens to kill off innovation, freedom, and individual
expression.
Microsoft's history suggests a faint glimpse of what's to come.
These corporate and legislative political struggles make
movements like open source and free software more vital by
the day, not only in terms of freedom of speech and ideas, but
of corporate flexibility and innovation as well. They may, in fact,
signify the best chance of keeping the Net and Web
competitive, innovative, cheap and lucrative.
At the moment, lawmakers are passing a growing list of
measures that will put the federal government's stamp all over
the Net. Many more are on the way. Perhaps prompted by all
those lobbyists nibbling on their ears, congress has finally
stopped worrying about whether Johnny will get on the Playboy
website and gotten down to big issue worrying corporate
America - how will they will do business on the Internet?
Congress now wants to create rules for selling Net addresses,
define legal standing for digital contracts, ban some content and
programming, including advice on legal contracts, medical
research and information, restrict the spread of medical
information, prohibit online gambling, curb the dissemination of
music and sexually- explicit material, and regulate spam.
Much of this legislation is being initiated by companies, not
members of congress who have, until now, been happy to view
the Net from a wary distance, enacting the occasional,
unworkable and totally decency act to keep up appearances.
But today, Internet legislation currently before Congress
includes bills concerning digital signatures, cyber-squatting,
database protection, Internet filtering, online alcohol and gun
sales, Net gambling, online privacy, Net access, encryption and
opening broadband cable Internet lines to competitors.
Many of these bills represent the handiwork not only of the
usual clueless lawmakers, but of increasingly Net-savvy
professional organizations and corporations who have hired
lawyers and lobbyists to set this brand new digital congressional
agenda.
In Washington, The New York Times reported on this week,
"The Internet is an easy target." That's not really new, but it's
significant that it's becoming big news.
In many cases, these companies are invoking protection of the
Consumer - the successor to the lurking Pervert - as a rationale
for controlling the Internet.
Rules, they say, are necessary to protect individuals in the
booming era of Internet commerce. Stories about sexual
predators online are being replaced by a wave of tales of
consumer rip-offs.
When businesses invoke the protection of "consumers," it's a
like lot politicians invoking the "morality" of children: grab your
wallet and/or your kid and run for your life.
As is standard in Washington, the real shaping of such
legislation occurs in ways completely opposite from Net
conversations - it happens out-of-sight, in secret, at lunches and
meetings, dinner parties and functions attended by lawyers,
pundits, lobbyists and legislators.
The vast horde of reporters encamped in Washington still
includes only a handful who know anything about the Net or
technology. The press cover these issues only sporadically, as
compared to stories they consider significant, like the nature of
the oral sex the President received. That makes it even harder
for the public - especially those much-invoked and mythic
"consumers" in whose name new legislation is being proposed -
to follow the debates and developments.
And it makes it much easier for the techno-blockheads in
Congress to pass laws that corporations - the biggest political
financial contributors in the United States - want passed.
There is also considerable hypocrisy involved: an increasing
number of these bills originate with the very Net corporations
and online services who have repeatedly called for the
government to keep its hands off the Internet.
AOL is lobbying for laws that would force cable companies to
open their high-speed Net lines to competition. eBay supports a
database protection bill that many online fear could restrict
access to information on the network. Powerful lobbies
representing banking, law, publishing, medicine and the
insurance industry also are players in this growing but quiet
campaign.
More than any other single ethos, the Net has always embodied
individualism. From the first BBS's to giant messaging systems,
the Net has made it possible for people to communicate with
one another in unprecedented ways, to build the infra-structure
of a new culture and share it with one another.
The Internet is forcing business, education and politics to
change. It's spawned countless new kinds of virtual
communities, in which millions of individual people can express
themselves in unfettered and unrestricted ways, and can access
much of the archived information in the world for free.
Preserving those traditions isn't the goal of corporatism, or of
legislators busy at working trying to fence off the digital frontier.
Their real agenda is, in fact, just the opposite: reversing every
single one of them.
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