Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

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providers to filter particular content, a tool like Blossom can allow someone in
China to see the Internet as if he or she were a New Yorker, and vice versa. But
such a tool undermines individual state sovereignty worldwide, just as a tool to
facilitate filtering can be deployed to encroach on fundamental freedoms when
ported to regimes that do not observe the rule of law. A tool like Blossom not
only makes it hard for China to filter politically sensitive content, but it prevents
Germany and France from filtering images of Nazi swastikas, and it gets in the
way of attempts by copyright holders to carve the world into geographic zones as
they seek to release online content in one place but not another: the New York
Times could not as easily provide an article with an update about a British criminal
investigation everywhere but within Britain, as it recently did to respect
what it took to be the law of the United Kingdom on pretrial publicity. 88
Tools like Blossom, which succeed only as much as netizens are impelled to
want to adopt them, ask the distributed users of the Internet to decide, one by
one, how much they are willing to create a network to subvert the enforcement
of central authorities around the world. 89 Each person can frame a view balancing
the risks of misuse of a network against the risks of abuse of a sovereign’s
power to patrol it, and devote his or her processor cycles and network bandwidth
accordingly. Lessig is chary of such power, thinking of these tools as
“technological tricks” that short-circuit the process of making the case in the
political arena for the substantive values they enable. 90 But this disregards a
kind of acoustic separation found in a society that is not a police state, by which
most laws, especially those pertaining to personal behavior, must not only be
entered on to the books, but also reinforced by all sorts of people, public and
private, in order to have effect. 91 Perhaps it is best to say that neither the governor
nor the governed should be able to monopolize technological tricks. We are
better off without flat-out trumps that make the world the way either regulator
or target wants it to be without the need for the expenditure of some effort and
cooperation from others to make it so. The danger of a trump is greater for a
sterile system, where a user must accept the system as it is if he or she is to use it
at all, than for the tools developed for a generative one, where there is a constant—perhaps
healthy—back-and-forth between tools to circumvent regulation
and tools to effect the regulation anyway. 92 The generative Internet upholds
a precious if hidden dynamic where a regulator must be in a relationship
with both those regulated and those who are needed to make the regulation
effective. This dynamic is not found solely within the political maneuvers that
transpire in a liberal democracy to put a law in place at the outset.
Today our conception of the Internet is still largely as a tool whose regulabil-