NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Belarus Is Now Home to the Internet's Most Insane Law
On 1/3/2012 9:54 AM, Lauren Weinstein wrote: > > Belarus Is Now Home to the Internet's Most Insane Law > > http://j.mp/xIK0Vk (Gizmodo) Why bother with laws? Why don't they just turn off the routers to the rest of the world. Oh... wait... there are satellites... I think we may be reaching the point where the people making the laws simply do not understand enough about how the world works to have even an outside chance of making sensible laws about technology. Unfortunately, that applies equally to laws many of us NNSquaders favor, like Net Neutrality. Lauren or Vint might have a chance of making it make sense. The FCC, maybe, if they actually listened to their staff. Unfortunately, it appears that the (politically-appointed) commissioners often think they know better than their own, technologically aware, staff.(*) Congress? Not a snowball's chance. Whichever way they go -- in favor of the big telcos and cablecos, or an attempt to legislate some sort of rational net neutrality -- they are guaranteed to get it wrong. The same thing seems to apply to any other attempts to regulate technology. Privacy legislation? Well, look at HIPAA. All that has happened is that we get one more paper to sign when we go to see a new doctor or check into the hospital. Is our privacy any better protected? No. DO we have to pay more, in money and inconvenience? Yes. So what have we gotten out of it. Similarly for banking privacy. Your bank sends you a privacy notice every year. Maybe you even take the trouble to exercise your right to decline certain things. YOu still get junk mail and phone calls from the bank's brokerage, because that's legally part of the same organization, so they can share your "private" information with it. I think I understand the issues, but I don't think I could write rules to do "the right thing" even if I had a battery of lawyers to draft the legalese. Here's the basic problem, as I see it. There are all these tools: databases of private and not-so-private and public information, "deep packet inspection," cookies, "persistent cookies," "tracking cookies", "web bugs," etc. ANy and all of these can be used to benefit you. Or they can be used to hurt you. Ideally, you would legalize and enable all of the former, and ban or disable all of the latter. But how do you define which is which, in a way that is sufficiently precise to be used as law (or implemented in a firewall, etc.)? The stuff that our bank, doctor, hospital, the websites we visit, know about us? It's good when that info is used to enhance our browsing experience. Google knows what you've looked at before, and uses it to make suggestions when you're typing in your search terms. That's good. It probably would be good if Google shared that info with Yahoo, WIkipedia, etc., so that your chances of finding what you want would also be improved there. OTOH, if Google shares your browsing history with your employer -- or worse, with companies you are applying for a job with -- you probably wouldn't like that. All this information could be used, e.g., in a sort of reverse spam effort. Imagine a world where the ads you receive in the mail or when you visit a website are precisely targeted. Say that any given ad that showed up in your mailbox had a 50% chance of being something you really wanted, at a tempting price. We'd feel very different about "junk mail". I doubt if anybody who shops for a household thinks of the weekly supermarket ads as "junk mail". On the contrary, they are extremely useful for helping you get what you need at the best price available this week. And if even the web ads (which cost less to deliver, and are also generally less intrusive) had at least a 10% chance of being something your really wanted. Wouldn't that be a nice world? Similarly for DPI. It can be used to prevent us from using file sharing -- or services like Hulu and Netflix that compete with the cableco's own products. But it could also be used to block most viruses and spam, if we could trust our ISP to do the one but not the other. And of course, the answer is also not, "well, just don't regulate technology." Clearly, new stuff needs regulation just as much as all the old stuff did. (Equally true if you are a libertarian purist: 0 >= 0 is tautologically true.) And yet the people who write the rules are more likely to get it wrong. Even when they try to fix what they did wrong last time, they're more likely to get it wrong than right. Imagine trying to debug a program if each line of code you changed had a 66% chance of introducing a new bug. You'd never get a working program. I think I'll go back to bed. Wake me up in 2201. (*) This is a difficult problem. "Just listen to your staff" isn't right. If the Commission is simply going to rubberstamp its staff's recommendations, why bother with commissioners? Just hire some technogeeks for the staff and let them make the rules. And yet, when they countermand their own staff, the odds of being wrong are about 95%. _______________________________________________ nnsquad mailing list http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad