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"Information wants to be free." "The Internet can't
be controlled." We've heard it so often that we sometimes
take for granted that it's true. But THE INTERNET CAN
BE CONTROLLED, and those who argue otherwise are hastening
the day when it will be controlled too much, by the
wrong people, and for the wrong reasons.
Last December, Vincent Falco, a 28-year-old game programmer
in West Palm Beach, FL, released version 1.0 of a pet
project he called BearShare. BearShare is decentralized
file-sharing software—that is, it allows thousands
of Internet users to search each other's hard drives
for files and exchange them without any supervision
or monitoring. Released free of charge, downloaded millions
of times, BearShare is a raspberry in the face of the
music, film and publishing industries: six months after
the release of version 1.0, tens of thousands of songs,
movies, videos and texts were coursing through the network
every day. Because the software links together a constantly
changing, ad hoc collection of users, Falco says, "there's
no central point for the industries to attack." BearShare,
in other words, is unstoppable.
Which, to Falco's way of thinking, is entirely unsurprising—almost
a matter of course. BearShare is just one more example,
in his view, of the way that digital technology inevitably
sweeps aside any attempt to regulate information. "You
can't stop people from putting stuff on the Net," Falco
says. "And once something is on the Net you can't stop
it from spreading everywhere."
The Internet is unstoppable! The flow of data can
never be blocked! These libertarian claims, exemplified
by software like BearShare, have become dogma to a surprisingly
large number of Internet users. Governments and corporations
may try to rein in digital technology, these people
say, but it simply will never happen because...information
wants to be free. Because, in a phrase attributed
to Internet activist John Gilmore, the Net treats
censorship as damage and routes around it. Laws,
police, governments and corporations—all are helpless
before the continually changing, endlessly branching,
infinitely long river of data that is the Net.
To the generations nurtured on 1984, Cointelpro
and The Matrix, the image of a global free-thought
zone where people will always be able to say and do
what they like has obvious emotional appeal. Little
wonder that the notion of the Net's inherent uncontrollability
has migrated to the mainstream media from the cyberpunk
novels and technoanarchist screeds where it was first
articulated in the late 1980s. A leitmotif in the discussion
of the Napster case, for example, was the claim that
it was futile for the recording industry to sue the
file-swapping company because an even more troublesome
file-swapping system would inevitably emerge. And the
rapid appearance of BearShare—along with LimeWire,
Audiogalaxy, Aimster and a plethora of other file-swapping
programs—seemed to bear this out.
Nonetheless, the claim that the Internet is ungovernable
by its nature is more of a hope than a fact. It rests
on three widely accepted beliefs, each of which has
become dogma to webheads. First, the Net is said to
be too international to oversee: there will always
be some place where people can set up a server and distribute
whatever they want. Second, the Net is too interconnected
to fence in: if a single person has something, he or
she can instantly make it available to millions of others.
Third, the Net is too full of hackers: any effort
at control will invariably be circumvented by the world's
army of amateur tinkerers, who will then spread the
workaround everywhere.
Unfortunately, current evidence suggests that two
of the three arguments for the Net's uncontrollability
are simply wrong; the third, though likely to be correct,
is likely to be irrelevant. In consequence, the world
may well be on the path to a more orderly electronic
future—one in which the Internet can and will be
controlled. If so, the important question is not whether
the Net can be regulated and monitored, but how and
by whom.
The potential consequences are enormous. Soon, it
is widely believed, the Internet will become a universal
library/movie theater/voting booth/shopping mall/newspaper/museum/concert
hall—a 21st-century version of the ancient Greek
agora, the commons where all the commercial, political
and cultural functions of a democratic society took
place. By insisting that digital technology is ineluctably
beyond the reach of authority, Falco and others like
him are inadvertently making it far more likely that
the rules of operation of the worldwide intellectual
commons that is the Internet will be established not
through the messy but open processes of democracy but
by private negotiations among large corporations. To
think this prospect dismaying, one doesn't need to be
a fan of BearShare.
Myth #1: The Internet Is Too International to Be
Controlled
At first glance, Swaptor seems like something out
of a cyberpunk novel. A secretive music-swapping service
much like Napster, it seems specifically designed to
avoid attacks from the record labels. The company is
headquartered in the Caribbean island nation of St.
Kitts and Nevis. Its founders are deliberately anonymous
to the public; its sole address is a post-office box
in the small town of Charlestown, Nevis. Swaptor's creators
seem confident that the company can survive beyond national
laws—after all, the Internet is too spread across
the world to control, right?
Indeed, Swaptor does seem protected. Nevis, according
to company representative John Simpson, "has excellent
corporate laws for conducting international business."
He is apparently referring to the happy fact that Nevis
has not ratified either the World Intellectual Property
Organization Copyright Treaty or the WIPO Performances
and Phonograms Treaty, both of which extend international
copyright rules to the Internet. As a result, Swaptor
appears not to be breaking local or international law.
The founders of Swaptor "wish to remain anonymous
at this time," according to Simpson. They won't need
to reveal themselves to raise money: the company is
headquartered in an offshore bank called the Nevis International
Trust. Affiliated with the bank is a successful online
gambling concern, Online Wagering Systems. Supported
by advertising, Simpson claims, Swaptor has been profitable
since its launch in February.
In the imagination of Net enthusiasts, offshore havens
like Nevis are fervid greenhouses in which this kind
of suspect operation can flower. But can it? Napster
at its peak had a million and a half simultaneous users,
generating a huge amount of data traffic; the company
established itself in Silicon Valley, where it could
gain access to the infrastructure it needed to handle
this barrage of connections. Swaptor, in contrast, is
headquartered in Nevis. The sole high-capacity Net pipeline
to Nevis is provided by the Eastern Caribbean Fibre-Optic
System, which snakes through 14 island nations between
Trinidad, off the Venezuelan coast, and Tortola, near
Puerto Rico. Yet this recently installed system, though
it is being upgraded, has a limited capacity—not
enough to push through the wash of zeroes and ones generated
by a large file-swapping service. Which, one assumes,
is why the "offshore" service of Swaptor is actually
situated in...Virginia.
Should the recording industry decide to sue Swaptor,
it wouldn't need to rely on the company or on Technology
Review to get this information; widely available
software can trace Swaptor traffic and discover that
Swaptor's central index of available files is located
on five servers that sit just a few miles from the Washington,
DC, headquarters of the Recording Industry Association
of America. (Two common monitoring programs, Traceroute
and Sniffer, can be downloaded gratis from thousands
of Web sites.) Not only that, Swaptor's Web site—the
site from which users download the program—is hosted
by a Malaysian company with an explicit policy against
encouraging copyright infringement.
As Swaptor shows, the Net can be accessed from anywhere
in theory, but as a practical matter, most out-of-the-way
places don't have the requisite equipment. And even
if people do actually locate their services in a remote
land, they can be easily discovered. "I don't think
most people realize how findable things are on
the Net," says David Weekly, the software engineer and
Net-music veteran who tracked down Swaptor's servers
for this magazine in a few minutes. "With simple software...you
can find out huge amounts of information about what
people are doing in almost no time."
Once international miscreants are discovered, companies
and governments already have a variety of weapons against
them—and soon will have more. According to Ian
Ballon of the Silicon Valley law firm Manatt, Phelps
and Phillips, who serves on the American Bar Association
committee on cyberspace law, even if offshore firms
are legal in their home bases, their owners "have to
be willing to not come back to the United States." Not
only do they risk losing any assets in this country,
but U.S. businesses that deal with them will also be
at risk. "Any revenue the offshore business sends to
them could be subject to attachment," says Ballon.
In the future, moreover, the reach of national law
will increase. The Hague Conference on Private International
Law is developing an international treaty explicitly
intended to make outfits like Swaptor more vulnerable
to legal pressure—"a bold set of rules that will
profoundly change the Internet," in the phrase of James
Love, director of the activist Consumer Project on Technology.
(The draft treaty will be discussed at a diplomatic
meeting next year.) By making it possible to apply the
laws of any one country to any Internet site available
in that country, the draft treaty will, Love warns,
"lead to a great reduction in freedom, shrink the public
domain, and diminish national sovereignty."
Rather than being a guarantee of liberty, in other
words, the global nature of the Net is just as likely
to lead to more governmental and corporate control.
Myth #2: The Net Is Too Interconnected to Control
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Before BearShare came Gnutella, a program written by
Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper. Frankel and Pepper were
the two lead figures in Nullsoft, a tiny software firm
that America Online purchased in June 1999 for stock
then worth about $80 million. Rather than resting on
their laurels after the buyout, Frankel and Pepper became
intrigued by the possibilities of file swapping that
arose in the wake of Napster. When college network administrators
tried to block Napster use on their campuses, Frankel
and Pepper spent two weeks throwing together Gnutella,
file-swapping software that they thought would be impossible
to block. They released an experimental, unfinished
version on March 14, 2000. To their surprise, demand
was so immediate and explosive that it forced the unprepared
Pepper to shut down the Web site almost as soon as it
was launched. Within hours of Gnutella's release, an
embarrassed AOL pulled the plug on what it characterized
as an "unauthorized freelance project."
It was too late. In an example of the seeming impossibility
of stuffing the Internet cat back into the bag, thousands
of people had already downloaded Gnutella. Amateur programmers
promptly reverse-engineered the code and posted non-AOL
versions of Gnutella on dozens of new Gnutella Web sites.
Unlike Napster or Swaptor, Gnutella lets every user
directly search every other user's hard drive in real
time. With member computers connecting directly to each
other, rather than linking through powerful central
servers, these "peer-to-peer" networks have no main
hub, at least in theory. As a result, there is no focal
point, no single point of failure, no Gnutella world
headquarters to sue or unplug. "Gnutella can withstand
a band of hungry lawyers," crows the Gnutella News Web
site. "It is absolutely unstoppable."
Peer-to-peer networks have a number of important advantages,
such as the ability to search for documents in real
time, as opposed to looking for them in the slowly compiled
indexes of search engines such as Google and HotBot.
Excited by these possibilities, such mainstream firms
as Intel and Sun Microsystems have embraced peer-to-peer
network technology. But the focus of interest, among
both the proponents and critics of peer-to-peer networks,
has been the purported impossibility of blocking them.
"The only way to stop [Gnutella]," declared Thomas Hale,
former CEO of the Web-music firm WiredPlanet, "is to
turn off the Internet."
Such arguments have been repeated thousands of times
in Internet mailing lists, Web logs and the press. But
the claims for peer-to-peer's uncontrollability don't
take into consideration how computers interact in the
real world; a network that is absolutely decentralized
is also absolutely dysfunctional. In consequence, the
way today's Gnutella networks actually work is quite
different from the way they have been presented in theory.
To begin, each Gnutella user isn't literally connected
to every other user—that would place impossibly
high demands on home computers. Instead, Gnutellites
are directly connected to a few other machines on the
network, each of which in turn is connected to several
more machines, and so on. In this way, the whole network
consists of hundreds or thousands of overlapping local
clusters. When users look for a file, whether it is
a copy of the Bible, a bootleg of A.I. or smuggled
documents on the Tiananmen massacre, they pass the request
to their neighbors, who search through the portion of
their hard drives that they have made available for
sharing. If the neighbors find what is being looked
for, they send the good news back to the first machine.
At the same time, they pass on the search request to
the next computer clusters in the Gnutella network,
which repeat the process.
Hopping through the network, the search is repeated
on thousands of machines—which leads to big problems.
According to a report in December by Kelly Truelove
of Clip2, a Palo Alto, CA-based consulting group that
specializes in network-performance analysis, a typical
Gnutella search query is 70 bytes long, equivalent to
a very small computer file. But there are a great many
of them—as many as 10 per second from each machine
to which the user is connected. In addition, there is
a constant flow of "ping" messages: the digital equivalent
of "are you there?" Inundated by these short messages,
the 56 kilobit-per-second modems through which most
people connect to the Net are quickly overwhelmed by
Gnutella. Broadband connections help surprisingly little;
the speed with which the network processes requests
is governed by the rate at which its slowest members
can pass data through.
With BearShare, Vinnie Falco developed one potential
fix. BearShare, like other new Gnutella software, automatically
groups users by their ability to respond to queries,
ensuring that most network traffic is routed through
faster, more responsive machines. These big servers
are linked into "backbone" chains that speed along most
Gnutella search requests. Further unclogging the network,
Clip2 has developed "reflectors"—large servers,
constantly plugged into the Gnutella network, that maintain
indexes of the files stored on adjacent machines. When
reflectors receive search queries, they don't pass them
on to their neighbors. Instead they simply answer from
their own memories—"yes, computer X has this file."
Finally, to speed the process of connecting to Gnutella,
several groups have created "host caches," servers that
maintain lists of the computers that are on the Gnutella
network at a given time. When users want to log on,
they simply connect with these host caches and select
from the list of connected machines, thus avoiding the
slow, frustrating process of trying to determine who
else is online.
As their capacity improved, Gnutella-like networks
soared in popularity. Napster, buffeted by legal problems,
saw traffic decline 87 percent between January and May,
according to the consulting firm Webnoize. Meanwhile,
LimeWire, another Gnutella company, reported that the
number of Gnutella users increased by a factor of 10
in the same period. "The networks are unclogging, and
as a result they're growing," Truelove says. "And the
content industries should be concerned about that."
But the problem with these fixes is that they reintroduce
hierarchy. Gnutella, once decentralized, now has an
essential backbone of important computers, Napster-like
central indexes and permanent entryway servers. "We've
put back almost everything that people think we've left
out," says Gene Kan, a programmer who is leading a peer-to-peer
project at Sun. "Ease of use always comes at some expense,
and in this case the expense is that you do have a few
points of failure that critically affect the ability
to use the network."
Rather than being composed of an uncontrollable, shapeless
mass of individual rebels, Gnutella-type networks have
identifiable, centralized targets that can easily be
challenged, shut down or sued. Obvious targets are the
large backbone machines, which, according to peer-to-peer
developers, can be identified by sending out multiple
searches and requests. By tracking the answers and the
number of hops they take between computers, it is possible
not only to identify the Internet addresses of important
sites but also to pinpoint their locations within the
network.
Once central machines have been identified, companies
and governments have a potent legal weapon against them:
their Internet service providers. "Internet service
providers enjoy limitations on liability for their users'
actions if they do certain things specified by law,"
says Jule Sigall, an Arnold and Porter lawyer who represents
copyright owners. "If you tell them that their users
are doing something illegal, they can limit their exposure
to money damages if they do something about it when
they are notified." Internet service providers, he says,
do not want to threaten their customers, "but they like
not being sued even more, so they've been cooperating
pretty wholeheartedly" with content owners.
As Ballon of Manatt, Phelps and Phillips notes, Gnutella
traffic has a distinctive digital "signature." (More
technically, the packets of Gnutella data are identified
in their headers.) Content companies are also learning
how to "tag" digital files. The result, in Ballon's
view, is easy to foresee: "At a certain point, the studios
and labels and publishers will send over lists of things
to block to America Online, and 40 percent of the country's
Net users will no longer be able to participate in Gnutella.
Do the same thing for EarthLink and MSN, and you're
drastically shrinking the pool of available users."
Indeed, the governments of China and Saudi Arabia have
successfully pursued a similar strategy for political
ends.
Perhaps sensing that Gnutella cannot escape the eye
of authority, bleeding-edge hackers have searched for
still better solutions. Determined to create a free-speech
haven, a Scottish activist/programmer named Ian Clarke
in 1999 began work on a Gnutella-like network called
Freenet that would be even more difficult to control,
because it would encrypt all files and distribute them
in chunks that constantly shifted location. Unsurprisingly,
it has attracted enormous media attention. But the system
is so incomplete—searchability is an issue—that
one cannot judge whether it will ever be widely used.
(A small number of people are already using Freenet.
Most of them are pornography fans, but a few, according
to Clarke, are Chinese dissidents who employ Freenet
to escape official scrutiny.) Even if Freenet does not
end up in the crowded graveyard of vaporware, Internet
service providers can always pull the plug—treating
Freenet, in essence, as an unsupported feature, in the
way that many providers today do not support telnet,
Usenet and other less popular services.
Myth #3: The Net Is Too Filled with Hackers to Control
It was a classic act of hubris. The Secure Digital
Music Initiative, a consortium of nearly 200 technology
firms and record labels, thought the software it had
developed to block illegal copying of music was so good
that last September it issued an "open letter to the
digital community" daring hackers to try their best
to break it. The result was a fiasco. Within three weeks,
at least four teams broke the code, and hacks were soon
distributed widely across the Internet. In the folklore
of the Net, the initiative's challenge became one more
example of a general truth: any method of controlling
digital information will fail, because someone will
always find a way around it—and spread the hack
around the Internet.
"There are no technical fixes," says Bruce Schneier,
cofounder of Counterpane Internet Security. "People
have tried to lock up digital information for as long
as computer networks have existed, and they have never
succeeded. Sooner or later, somebody has always figured
out how to pick the locks."
But software is not the only means of controlling
digital information: it's also possible to build such
controls into hardware itself, and there are technical
means available today to make hardware controls so difficult
to crack that it will not be practical to even try.
"I can write a program that lets you break the copy
protection on a music file," says Dan Farmer, an independent
computer security consultant in San Francisco. "But
I can't write a program that solders new connections
onto a chip for you."
In other words, those who claim that the Net cannot
be controlled because the world's hackers will inevitably
break any protection scheme are not taking into account
that the Internet runs on hardware—and that this
hardware is, in large part, the product of marketing
decisions, not technological givens. Take, for example,
Content Protection for Recordable Media, a proposal
issued late last year by IBM, Intel, Toshiba and Matsushita
Electric (see "The
End of Free Music?" TR April 2001). The four
companies developed a way to extend an identification
system already used in DVDs and DVD players to memory
chips, portable storage devices and, conceivably, computer
hard drives. Under this identification scheme, people
who downloaded music, videos, or other copyrighted material
would be able to play it only on devices with the proper
identification codes.
In addition to restricting unauthorized copies, it
was widely reported that the technology also had the
potential to interfere with other, less controversial
practices, such as backing up files from one hard drive
onto another. In part because of controversy surrounding
the technology, the companies withdrew the plan from
consideration as an industrywide standard in February.
But the point is clear: the technology has been tabled
because its promoters believed it wasn't profitable,
not because it would not work. This and other hardware
schemes have the potential to radically limit what people
can do with networking technology.
Some hardware protection methods already exist. Stephen
King released his e-book Riding the Bullet in
March 2000, in what were effectively two different versions:
a file that could be read only on specialized electronic
devices—electronic books—and a file that could
be read on computer monitors. Even though the text was
available for free at Amazon.com, some people went to
the trouble of breaking the encryption on the computer
file anyway; distributed from Switzerland, it was available
on the Internet within three days. But the electronic-book
version was never cracked, because e-books, unlike computers,
cannot do two things at once. "On a computer, you can
always run one program to circumvent another," says
Martin Eberhard, former head of NuvoMedia, the developer
of the Rocket eBook. "If a book is on a computer screen,
it exists in video memory somewhere, and someone will
always be able to figure out how to get at it."
Eberhard's e-books, by contrast, were deliberately
designed to make multitasking impossible. True, future
e-books could, like computers, perform two tasks simultaneously,
but publishers could refuse to license electronic books
to their manufacturers, in much the same way that film
studios refuse to allow their content to be used on
DVD machines that don't follow certain rules. And even
computers themselves, in Eberhard's view, could be "rearchitected,"
with added hardware that performs specific, controlling
tasks. "If people have to rip up their motherboards
to send around free music," he says, "there will be
a lot less free music on the Net....It would be an ugly
solution, but it would work."
Of course, consumers will avoid products that are
inconvenient. A leading example is digital audio tape
recorders, which by law are burdened with so many copy
protection features that consumers generally have rejected
them. But to assume that companies involved with digital
media cannot come up with an acceptable and effective
means of control is to commit, in reverse, the same
act of hubris that the Secure Music Digital Initiative
did, when it assumed that clever people couldn't break
its software. And if the hardware industry resists making
copy-protected devices, says Justin Hughes, an Internet-law
specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles,
an appeal to Congress may be "just a matter of time."
If the Internet proves difficult to control, he says,
"you will see legislation mandating that hardware adhere
to certain standard rules, just like we insist that
cars have certain antipollution methods."
"To say that a particular technology guarantees a
kind of anarchic utopia is just technological determinism,"
he says. "This argument should be ignored, because the
real question is not whether the Net will be tamed,
but why and how we tame it."
We are in the beginning stages of the transfer of
most of society's functions—working, socializing,
shopping, acting politically—from what Internet
denizens jokingly call "meatspace" into the virtual
domain. In the real world, these functions are wrapped
in a thicket of regulations and cultural norms that
are, for the most part, accepted. Some free-speech absolutists
dislike libel laws, but it is generally believed that
the chilling effect on discourse they exert is balanced
by their ability to punish gratuitous false attacks
on private individuals. Regulations on the Net need
not be any more obnoxious. "If the whole neighborhood's
online, it's okay to have a cop on the beat," says Schneier.
The risk, of course, is overreaching—of using
law and technology to make the Internet a locus of near
absolute control, rather than near absolute freedom.
Paradoxically, the myth of unfettered online liberty
may help bring this undesirable prospect closer to reality.
"Governments are going to set down rules," says Hughes,
"and if you spend all your time fighting the existence
of rules you won't have much chance to make sure the
rules are good ones."
In other words, hackers may be their own worst enemies.
By claiming that the Net is inherently uncontrollable,
they are absenting themselves from the inevitable process
of creating the system that will control it. Having
given up any attempt to set the rules, they are unavoidably
allowing the rules to be set for them, largely by business.
Corporations are by no means intrinsically malign, but
it is folly to think that their interests will always
dovetail with those of the public. The best way to counterbalance
Big Money's inevitable, even understandable, efforts
to shape the Net into an environment of its liking is
through the untidy, squabbling process of democratic
governance—the exact process rejected by those
who place their faith in the endless ability of anonymous
hackers to circumvent any controls. An important step
toward creating the kind of online future we want is
to abandon the persistent myth that information wants
to be free.
Infotech
stories | September issue
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