Is The Battle Over The Internet About Control vs. Chaos? Or Delusions vs. Reality?

from the entropy-is-not-a-bad-thing dept

A bunch of folks have been pointing to Vanity Fair's writeup on the fight for the future of the internet. It talks about a bunch of things, but I think the best summary of the article comes not at the beginning, but a little ways in, where author Michael Joseph Glass writes:

One way to think about the War for the Internet is to cast it as a polar conflict: Order versus Disorder, Control versus Chaos. The forces of Order want to superimpose existing, pre-digital power structures and their associated notions of privacy, intellectual property, security, and sovereignty onto the Internet. The forces of Disorder want to abandon those rickety old structures and let the will of the crowd create a new global culture, maybe even new kinds of virtual "countries." At their most extreme, the forces of Disorder want an Internet with no rules at all.

A conflict with two sides is a picture we're used to--and although in this case it's simplistic, it's a way to get a handle on what the stakes are. But the story of the War for the Internet, as it's usually told, leaves out the characters who have the best chance to resolve the conflict in a reasonable way. Think of these people as the forces of Organized Chaos. They are more farsighted than the forces of Order and Disorder. They tend to know more about the Internet as both a technical and social artifact. And they are pragmatists. They are like a Resistance group that hopes to influence the battle and to shape a fitful peace. The Resistance includes people such as Vint Cerf, who helped design the Internet in the first place; Jeff Moss, a hacker of immense powers who has been trying to get Order and Disorder to talk to each other; Joshua Corman, a cyber-security analyst who spends his off-hours keeping tabs on the activities of hackers operating under the name of Anonymous; and Dan Kaminsky, one of the world's top experts on the Internet's central feature, the Domain Name System.

This is an interesting, and somewhat different way of positioning many of the battles that we normally talk about. I think that some of the descriptions in the article are overly simplistic (to downright misleading), but the framing is still interesting. I cringe a little at the use of "chaos" as being the opposite of control here, because I think chaos (and disorder) have negative connotations. Furthermore, when you set it up that way, you are effectively suggesting that order or control on the internet is possible. I don't think that those pushing back against the folks described in the article as seeking "order" are necessarily in favor of "disorder." It's more that they recognize the impossibility of controlling a system that is effectively uncontrollable, and that each attempt to do so has significant (sometimes intended, but frequently unintended) consequences.

The people described in the article as seeking "Organized Chaos" are realists not because they compromise the principles of one side with the other, but because they recognize how the system has to function, and worry when those who don't understand it seek to tinker with what they clearly do not grasp.

The article centers on the upcoming attempt by certain countries to shift significant internet oversight to the ITU, in part to help countries like Russia, China, Brazil, India and Iran who seek greater control over the internet. This is going to become a bigger and bigger issue as the year goes on, but it is definitely part of a larger debate over what happens to the internet going forward. The article also discusses the SOPA/PIPA fight, and how politicians around the world are learning not to just mess with the internet blindly.

All in all a good read, but one that definitely underplays some of the significance of what's really happening, and (unfortunately) pitches it as a battle where either side has an equal chance of succeeding. That's not true. The fight is really more between those who understand the internet, and those who don't. The "pragmatists" listed in the article are really just those patient enough to try to drag those who don't get the internet far enough into the future that they don't muck things up too badly.

Filed Under: chaos, control, fight, inevitability, internet

On The Inevitability Of Exponential Progress In Technology

from the it's-how-growth-works dept

Kevin Kelly has written up yet another must read discussion -- this one looking into the inevitability of Moore's Law. In it, he looks not just at Moore's Law, but how a variety of different technologies have all found similar "laws" where they get better/smaller/cheaper/faster at an exponential rate, at a pace that sticks so closely to an observed curve as to seem predetermined by fate. DNA sequencing, magnetic storage, semiconductors, bandwidth, pixel density all seem to follow this same thing, and Kelly notes that each case is separate. While some may influence others, it's not a case where one is dependent on another.

He notes that this certainly doesn't apply to all technologies -- but it does seem to be limited to technologies that scale down at microscopic sizes, rather than technologies that scale up (i.e., improvements to airplane or automobile technology aren't seeing any such rate of change). His argument is that this is due to energy requirements. Scaling up requires more energy, which greatly limits growth. But scaling down does not.

But where this gets most interesting is that, the more Kelly explores the issue, the more convinced he is (and he makes a compelling case) that this sort of technological progress is pretty much inevitable. It can be slowed down by bad policy, but it can't be stopped. And, what's most compelling to me is that this sort of progress isn't dependent on anything like patents. It's happening no matter what. The advancement of technology happens for a variety of reasons, little of which has to do with "protecting" the ideas. In fact, within that "protection" there's little benefit.

Everyone recognizes these curves and where they're headed, and how following along the path of that curve creates so many off-shoot benefits (what some might call externalities), that the idea of hoarding a concept or an idea is actually counterproductive. The benefits to staying on the curve in some way or another are so great that people implicitly recognize that helping others (even competitors) keep everyone on the curve isn't a bad thing -- but in many cases a very good thing. That's because everyone is better off, and the opportunities increase across the board as you stay on such a curve. And, in fact, this is where all that research on noncompetes comes in. While it's rarely official company policy (they all still talk up patents and trade secrets and such), it's quite common when there are issues in getting to that next level, engineers start sharing ideas or more importantly jump ship from company to company, so the ideas get spread that way. Advancement continues, and the world is better off -- not because of patents, but because of a more free flow of information.

Kelly doesn't get into that aspect of the discussion -- focusing just on the inevitability of the growth rate -- but it's a key point. Notice that none of what he's discussing really involves some major breakthrough discovery or some brilliant invention. There are lots of breakthroughs and lots of brilliant people involved, of course, but they're all progressing in the direction where they need to go. One may get there first, but that's hardly the breakthrough. Lots of others are all progressing along those same lines. The progress isn't driven by patents, but by the technology itself and the massive opportunity its advancement creates. In many ways this relates back to our discussion of how, throughout history, nearly every major scientific "breakthrough" has occurred to multiple independent people at almost the exact same time. It's the natural progress of applying ideas to problems, and following where the technology allows you to go.

As such, there's an argument to be made that patents get in the way of this sort of progress. Since much of the progress is, in fact, a progression, rather than a "breakthrough," and it's done by a variety of different people (or teams of people), everyone is actually better off not in limiting that progress by holding back an idea or requiring a tollbooth to be a part of the process, but in lowering the barriers to it, and letting that true pace of advancement quicken.

Filed Under: economics, inevitability, kevin kelly, moore's law