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   Self-Policing The Internet

or: An Ion Cannon In Every Garage

Some people just can't take a hint.  With the entertainment industry licking its wounds in the wake of the SOPA/PIPA blackout protests, and a public and tech industry forcefully rejecting the way Hollywood has manipulated and bought the lawmakers, what happened next?

Less than a week passes, and the entertainment industry gets Megaupload taken down.

Yes, that's right; at a time when the public perception of the way the entertainment industry conducts business and influences politics is at an all-time low, the dust hasn't even begun to settle, and the eyes of the world are upon them and scrutinising their behaviour, they then take exactly the kind of action that has got everyone so pissed off at them in the first place.

For an industry so obsessed with image, this wasn't a very smart move.  I'd argue that it was about the dumbest move they could have made.  Postponing this action for just a week would have at least mitigated some of the negativity, but instead they have an incredibly high-profile example of inconveniencing a large number of people on frankly spurious grounds.

"Spurious?"  Yes, because here's the problems with taking down a site like Megaupload:.

1. Did the site host files that violated copyright?  Almost certainly.  But for twelve years now (starting with Napster), has taking down such sites actually worked?  No.  All it does is create a vacuum into which other, more legally robust services will rapidly inflate, fulfilling the same role for users, but giving a Sisyphean legal task for content producers.  Which is just dandy as far as their lawyers are concerned, but benefits no one else.
2. Does an unpaid download equal a lost sale?  No.  No, let's not even have this argument.  I'm sure some sales have been lost due to unpaid downloads, but it's insulting to suggest that every single download is something people would otherwise have paid for.  What's more, those free downloads can have a positive effect as a loss leader - what you lose in the cost of producing the song/movie/TV show, you gain in raising awareness of your product and in widening your fanbase.  This is why a lot of musicians are willingly giving away free music - it's advertising.  Plus, lest we forget, people who download for free are also the people who spend the most on downloads.  You punish the downloaders?  You punish your biggest customers.
3. Were copyright-violating files the only ones hosted by Megaupload?  Nope.  So a bunch of legitimate users have been hurt, and denied access to their entirely legal files, all of which serves to increase resentment of an industry that already has a serious image problem, at a time when they're already in the spotlight after Black Wednesday.

"So what then, Seej?  Should anyone just be allowed to put anything online and hang the consequences?  What about the terrorists, Seej?  What about the pedos?  What about the terrorist pedos you sick fuck?"

...is basically the fall-back argument for why we need this kind of legislation in the first place.  And yes, I'm not denying there are some utter subhuman shits out there, and they do need to be monitored, regulated, controlled, and prevented from being allowed to pursue unambiguously harmful and hate-filled agendas.  We do need some way to deal with them.  But should we surrender our own liberties so completely, just on the off-chance that an incredibly tiny number of people want to behave reprehensibly?

And then it struck me.  Then I had a moment of epiphany.

Don't you see?  We don't need laws to contain those people.  We don't need politicians and private companies interfering and being given far-reaching powers to block, ban and takedown parts of the net (that they will then, if their past behaviour is anything to go on, totally abuse and use in grossly and unjustifiably draconian ways that they were never intended for and that we were promised wouldn't happen).  We don't need Internet Police.

We need Low Orbit Ion Cannon.

Side note: the plural of "cannon" is "cannon."

The Low Orbit Ion Cannon is a piece of software that floods a target IP address with traffic.  If enough people are using it, that target gets overwhelmed, and ceases to be able to respond to genuine traffic.  It's a DDoS attack, and in the wake of Megaupload being taken offline, numerous government and corporate sites who bore some responsibility for the takedown were attacked using the LOIC, and taken down in retaliation.

The public spoke.  It said, unequivocally, "No."

This was, at best estimate, about five and a half thousand users flooding those sites.

And that's what we need.  We need LOIC to be legitimised, and more widely used.

Don't rely on a single, corruptible organisation to police the internet.  Rely on the users of the internet themselves.  The more objectionable a site, the more likely it is to be attacked, and the more likely it is to shut down.  Something inoffensive would remain unscathed, while the fanatics and the nutters that are used as scare-stories to justify legislative measures would be rapidly and much more effectively attacked.  The more people who have LOIC at their command, the more effective and self-policing the whole internet becomes, with the attacks on any particular site perfectly matching, from minute to minute, the level of outrage that any particular site is causing.

No site would be above the rule of the people, no corporation could evade or ignore public disgust, the government would be just as answerable to their constituents as anyone else, no one person would be in charge, and power would be in the hands of everyone, distributed perfectly throughout the crowd.

Is this not a more elegant, democratic, egalitarian approach?

It already works.  What we need is for LOIC to become socially acceptable, more anonymous, and more widely installed.  The internet distributes power and control as effectively as it distributes information.  We don't need some centralised body, modelled on real-world policing to control things.  Such a body is only open to corruption and abuse anyway, and can only be less-effective than everyone collectively and collaboratively making decisions themselves.  And we already have the technology.

Low Orbit Ion Cannon for everyone.  This is our internet, and we can manage it ourselves.

Seej 500

Yorkshire, UK, 22/1/2012

This article was written by Seej 500 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License.

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