X Wrecks And Other

A recent “Download This Show” podcast remarked on the then-recent events like the grammar school AI deepfake porn, and X’s overturn of the Australian Internet Safety officer’s request to take down a terror attack that had been carried out against a religious figure.

It shows how pure greed trumps humanness, every time. There’s a lot of things that could have been done – should have been done – before the Internet arrived at the state it is in today. And none of them was done because no-one wanted to “waste” the money. At this stage it’d be an uphill battle to start to do something about this state of affairs and yet it isn’t being done.

What Are The Things That Could Be Done?

We could let things proceed as they are, deal with the collateral damage as it occurs. This hands-off process has gotten us this far already, hasn’t it? That’s the Hands Off policy.

We could require everyone to authenticate their account with their records at their country’s government, a form of “super-passport” that uniquely identifies us to the authorities responsible for Internet in our home country. Call that SuperPass1.

We could leave it up to the groups that operate critical Internet infrastructure – the root nameservers, the key routers and interchanges, and the larger social and search and data repository server farms. We could call that Tech Pass1.

Perhaps there’s a case for letting each user have some way of tagging their own content and associate any number of rules with that content. That would be the Anarchy Pass1.

The trouble with all of these is that between the people who want all bets to be off and the Internet become a true survival of the fittest real-life acting new state of being and those that want control over every flicker of micro-expression others are permitted to display online, there’s got to be a middle ground that everyone hates equally, but that prevents maliciousness approximately as well as our current and woefully retarded systems of Laws does.

So HandsOff, SuperPass1, TechPass1, AnarchyPass1, MicrocontrolPass1. (CLUE: None of these will work, really. But they’ll all be considered.)

MicrocontrolPass1 is what the Chinese government has come close to imposing on their Internet users and traders. It works – the Chinese have access to some of the most useful web apps and facilities for buying selling trading and interacting – but it’s open to being completely used – and abused – by the totalitarian government.

Killing the crazed car killer who’s mowing down pedestrians by the dozen could be a huge boost to your social credit with the government and you would glory in the fame and number of luxuries this credit score could afford you. But when, in a year, it is found that the mad driver was the son of a prominent politician high up in the Party, it could also plunge you into Hell.

Even if suddenly it became clear that efforts to *reduce* the population were more credit-worthy (and in China it briefly was, with the One Child Per Family policy) then also you could be branded a negative participant.

MP1 is great for governments but not for the people nor for corporations. (Seeing that corporations are in their turn composed of people, who are each subject to the same microcontrol…)

HandsOff is close to what we have – some countries are calling for a ban on the internet and shutting it off as suits their agendas, some are firewalling it, some trying to legislate but finding that trying to legislate the Internet is like trying to prevent the fire burning down your house by peeing on it and asking your neighbours to take time off putting out their own house to save yours.

As I said – it’s close to what’s happening right now but it isn’t any kind of answer that’s useful.

AnarchyPass1 is functionally no better.

SuperPass1 is too close to MP1 to warrant any closer examination, other than to say that it might allow each country to more closely monitor and manage what goes in and out of their particular slice of the Internet so it’s worth examining a bit more closely.

TechPass1 at first seems to be the best fit to manage all of this but hang on – a great honking chunk of the problem seems to be caused by governments and to a far greater extent exploitative greedy tech corporations in the first place…

A Modest Solution

Is to actually establish the Internet as its own sovereign body with ambassadors from every country that wants to have a say, or even ambassadorial departments to manage complex needs. That would let the Internet government to manage and fine-tune routers and algorithms for each member country to a negotiated level, and severely curtail access to any other country other than to educational sites and limited social media.

There are many big problems and issues with this concept – no government will want to give up the bit of control they fondly imagine they have over this resource, and most definitely most corporations will have strong opposition to giving up this tool they have for managing and milking their cash cow customers…

And yet this is the only sensible way. We’ve been saying for decades now that the Internet is a Frontier Town In The Wild West, and we’re right. But it’s about time for a proper recognition of this and a formal status as a whole place of its own. That it lives distributed among grey monolithic buildings and container farms of servers scattered around the globe doesn’t matter.

We’re at that stage where it should be obvious to everyone that no-one owns the Internet – and yet it is most certainly a bit of an undeniable force in all matters of world politics, trade, commerce, news, and human interaction.

The Next Question Is

How will it be formed? You can’t expect the people who run those nameservers and key routers, and who are paid either by a terrestrial government or corporation, to kowtow to some “Internet Government” that’s also just a selection of corporate and government shills that are fighting bitching and backbiting for their own particular bosmang without any actual care for the Internet itself. It just comes out to be run by the same governments and corporations that are just tearing it apart into little warring chunks right now already.

So it would need a certain amount of government and some very governmental structure to it. You need everything to happen pretty much at once, too. It would take a LOT of money to set up, and more to keep it operational.

And there’s another reason it needs to happen very very very quickly now:

Because War.

We’ve already seen that almost every superpower in the world can reach and destroy satellites now. We already know that once a critical number of satellites are destroyed, there’s a chain reaction snowballing effect where the detritus from destroyed satellites just takes out more and more satellites and creates a belt of tiny missiles that will mean nothing can even be launched to replace them without itself being destroyed in minutes.

That is just about as certain as death and taxes, that some asswipe government head will do this at the moment that the world most need it because they feel that they’ll come out on top of the heap somehow if there’s no communications satellites and GPS constellations up there for the “weaker enemy” to use.

And the Internet itself is really dependent on those satellites too.

So “Internettia Internationale” needs to become a sovereign power in its own right really quickly and hold a great deal of control over a great deal of data and data bandwidth.

Financing It

The body could charge governments a per internet-using capita of population fee, plus a fee per corporation office in that country, plus a retaining fee. Don’t pay, get throttled bandwidth to your country. Government and businesses included. That would encourage participation – once the body is established.

Reasons To Have Such A Body

Imagine having a group whose only task is to track down breaches and spammers and deepfakes and that has the power to deny access to people who abuse the Internet. Not your government, not your region’s Intelligence taskforce, but a truly global body that can track bad actions from end to end and interrupt them. That has to be worth having.