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Break The Internet
paulproteus (United States) · Jun 25th, 2007 6:09 pm · 40 votes · 1 comment
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Recently, I've seen many companies proudly exclaim that they want to destroy what has made the Internet valuable. Early users of the Internet claimed that "The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it". Yet today groups are seizing on the opportunity to test the claim at every layer of the network. When together with attendees of the iSummit, I realized one way to promote their activities.
To honor these groups of individuals as well as corporations, I am working on a project called the "Break The Internet Coalition", whose website will be located at breaktheinter.net. The Break the Internet Coalition will be giving yearly awards to corporations or individuals that exert special effort in this crucial effort.
For more than a decade, savvy Internet users have been aware of "Censorware" software that computer users can install to make some websites unavailable to those who use a particular computer. When the equivalent of "Net Nanny" began to be installed in many American schools, the same savvy Net users were outraged but knew what to do: inform students how to connect to a non-broken Internet. For years, the US Copyright Office recognized the importance of understanding how the network was being manipulated specifically excepted researchers of censorware from being legally attacked on copy-protection-related grounds. Laws in the US that required such software were repeatedly struck down as violating adults' freedom of speech.
On the other hand, AT&T announced recently that it would work with the recording industry and motion picture industry to block distribution of copyrighted works at the network level. Just one curious aspect of this plan is that the network cannot know if permission has been granted for certain uses of copyrighted works. This effort by one of the major backbone providers violates a key element of the Internet architecture: that it carries all data cross it in a best-effort manner. It is even more exciting than the US laws mandating censorware in some areas because on one hand, it is the action of a private group, and on the other hand they control a huge portion of the backbone routing we all use because we have no alternative.
This best-effort architecture has long been important because it means that the routers can be very dumb: they can read the source and destination of data and just pass the rest through. Obviously this makes them much faster than if they have to process the contents. It also makes engineering the other parts of the network simpler; together, this has made the Internet innovative and reliable.
In my university years, I saw the Johns Hopkins University increasingly tighten the lock-down it put on its students' Internet connection, eventually taking those lock-downs to the academic network too. Today professors have to fight with IT to get perimssion to use many services; to discourage asking for permission, there is no list of blocked services and the way the blocks are implemented it looks as though the blocked service is at fault. As an off-campus college student I learned about Comcast blocking VoIP just before releasing a competing service.
I believe that the Internet community needs a place to promote awareness of those who attempt to break the most important values of the Internet. I would like to invite iCommoners - both those who attended the summit and those who did not - to join me in organizing the Break the Internet coalition. Special awards will have to be given each year, but even in the meantime, it would be productive to learn in what ways groups we all know and love are breaking the Internet day by day. To this end I have created a node for discussing the ways we can build the coalition.
tags: san-francisco-ca united states policy-law network-neutrality internet net-neutrality john-gilmore break-the-internet
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