

Can We Kill This Myth That The Internet Is A Wild West That Needs To Be Tamed? - ygreek
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110527/13281714462/can-we-kill-off-this-myth-that-internet-is-wild-west-that-needs-to-be-tamed.shtml

======
tlb
The actual Wild West was many things. There were certainly outlaws, but most
people were there to farm or mine or provide goods and services to farmers and
miners. Those businesses needed clear laws about who owned a piece of land, so
a complete set of laws evolved.

The best way to make laws is to watch what people decide amongst themselves in
reasonable debates, then write down the rules. There are important questions
still open. Can online crooks steal my accounts if they guess my password? Can
some slimeball send me ten thousand emails about v1agra? Can adults have
sexual conversations with minors online? Can email services read my mail,
figure out my situation and show me relevant commercial solicitations?

Anyway, if someone would put together a template of proposed internet laws as
a wiki I'd write some entries. I think they'd be fairer and clearer than laws
written by companies, promoted by lobbyists, and voted on by politicians. They
have done poorly in the past. The laws about tobacco, food and drugs, to name
some glaring examples, are not well aligned with the public interest. So let's
have an open public process for writing down some rules to live online by.

~~~
davidcthompson
>There were certainly outlaws, but most people were there to farm or mine or
provide goods and services to farmers and miners. Those businesses needed
clear laws about who owned a piece of land, so a complete set of laws evolved.

Exactly. It's not just businesses, but it's also everyday people who aren't HN
readers who want the Internet to work in a stable and predictable fashion.
They didn't grow up developing services at the edges of the network; they are
the people who use email and play Farmville and are just fine with that. They
want their GMail to work without spam, they want viruses to stop, and they
don't want to be spied on. These are not unreasonable demands. It's just that
they happen to clash with the people who read HN and want the network to be
free to grow around the edges rather than from the center.

The book Wild West 2.0 (<http://wildwest2.com>) talks a lot about this
evolution. When we wrote it, we didn't realize that we were going to make the
idea of naming worse -- we just thought it was a useful metaphor for the self-
reliance and self-defense angles of the Internet. [Full disclosure, I am a co-
author]

Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It"
(<http://futureoftheinternet.org/>) is also a great resource for this culture
clash between open and closed frontier models of the Internet and how
reasonable demands ("stop spam") lead to solutions that clash with the HN view
of the Internet.

~~~
loup-vaillant
You're not really thinking there actually is a clash between those reasonable
demands and the desire for an free internet, right?

Because the best solutions happen to be implementable at the edge of the
network: don't want viruses? Use GNU/Linux (-> needs an idiot-friendly
distribution, or education), or use a good firewall (I bet a FreedomBox could
fill this role) Don't want spying? Host your e-mail (-> needs a usable
FreedomBox). Don't want spam? Use a spam filter on your FreedomBox (will
probably be there by default).

Yeah, the FreedomBox is a damn fine hammer.

Now, if people are all lazy and just want their privacy, security, and
tranquillity to be spoon-fed without them having to think about it, then the
internet is doomed. But some of us aren't, so I have hope.

~~~
noelchurchill
BTW I upvoted you to make your karma 1337 :-)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet>

~~~
noelchurchill
I thought the HN crowd would have an appreciation for the number 1337.

------
jxcole
I may be pointing out the obvious here, but a man from a newspaper hates the
internet. The internet is killing newspapers. This probably isn't a
coincidence. I am especially convinced of this because of the irrational
arguments presented, as the argument correctly pointed out, the comment from
The Guardian was hardly sensible. A dying industry clutching out to kill its
replacement.

~~~
zecho
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, but I do disagree with this. Maybe
3-5 years ago I would agree, but for the most part the curmudgeons have left
or been forced to leave the news business. That isn't to say that Luddites no
longer exist in the media world, but the view that the Internet is the enemy
has largely died out.

~~~
bruce511
I don't work on fleet street, but I find this assertion hard to believe.

Firstly, the Internet most certainly is the enemy of the printed publication.
In the sense that printed publications are dying because of the Internet. I'm
not sure if the printed newspaper or magazine will exist at all 50 years from
now, but if they do it's somewhat reasonable to assume they'll be a tiny
fraction of the industry they are today.

Note I said _printed_.

Will journalism survive? Yes, there probably is a place for journalists, even
on the Internet. However with the barrier to entry being near zero, and
getting lower all the time the role of a traditional journalist will need to
change substantially. There's a place for pay walls, and that will help
existing news organizations survive, but their audience will be tiny compared
to what say a popular blogger might get.

The value of a many-to-many communication system is that it allows people to
communicate their opinion with zero barrier to entry. No degree. No fact
checking. No paycheck. (Indeed much like this comment itself.)

50 years ago an article in the newspaper might generate some letters-to-the-
editor, a select few of which might be published. Today literally everyone can
comment and all replies are published, and indeed a conversation on the
article ensues - whole sites (like hacker news) exist to promote that
conversation.

This freedom of expression is dangerous to those who used to control public
expression. Namely old-style "news" organizations and government. The one
calls on the other to create more legislation.

The Internet is not the enemy of the printed news, because that war has alredy
been lost. The Internet is the enemy of the professional journalist though who
now has to compete with everyone to be heard. There are lots of good
journalists who have successfully made the transition, but many will find it
hard to compete out here in the colonies.

The internet isn't the wild west. It's the new world.

~~~
zecho
I don't see printed media dying any time soon. Television never killed radio;
radio just changed tactics. Every time a new medium came out, it meant the end
of the others and it never really happened.

That said, what I'm saying is essentially what you're saying. Many in the news
business (which should really be called the advertising business) see their
futures online and are transitioning their core business to it.

It's not like they can, or should, do it overnight, though. There's still a
lot of money to be made on the sun-setting industry.

------
simonsarris
I actually end up use the above description, "Internet as Wild West" quite a
bit when trying to explain the internet to computer-illiterate people, because
for some reason their skepticism filter fades away and they become all-too-
trusting when the medium is something they are unfamiliar with. They seem to
think that if someone was able to get something posted on the internet, well
that person must certainly be a smart being in a position of goodwill.

Sure the internet functions as an information superhighway. It also functions
as a den of thieves and swindlers, and people who elevate scams and
pseudoscience to the look and feel of accurate information through mere the
power of website presentation.

I have to tell my mother that just because something is on the internet
doesn't mean it is _important_ or _true_ , and it certainly doesn't mean that
the author necessarily has good intentions. I _want_ her to consider it a Wild
West.

The article accuses the narrative of sticking because it is "compelling" in
the fanciful way, but I think the counter-argument here is the same problem.
In many ways the internet _is_ a Wild West. I think the argument is much more
nuanced than saying it's not. I think the harder argument needs to be made
with the wild west aspect as a given, but that an authoritarian clamp would
make it a worse-off place.

~~~
tgrass
I've learned web development over the past year. I can throw together a
reasonable looking site, sell a reasonable product and obtain the most highly
sensitive information from my customers in the process: their email and a
password to my site, which, for probably about 50% of the population, is the
same password for their email account and most other sites they visit.

And I have no training in database security.

Yeee haaaaw!

~~~
Zak
One would hope you're storing the passwords as salted hashes (preferably
bcrypt) so that passwords won't get leaked no matter how bad you are at
database security.

~~~
tlb
One would hope so. But many websites that keep personal data aren't very
secure. Personal information is stolen online pretty often, and it often seems
in hindsight that their information security was embarrassingly slack.

If you're a heavy internet user, your information is almost certainly stored
in a database sitting on a machine running Windows XP. There can be several
security patches in a month, and sys admins can be slow to install them. Are
you OK with that?

~~~
cookiecaper
I would change your "many" to "almost all". Very few websites, even sites that
really should know much better (like Newegg or Gawker, both catering to
technical audiences), actually implement things in a known safe manner. Many
just do plaintext (like Newegg) and many an archaic and/or useless obfuscation
mechanism (like Gawker's use of DES).

You should always act defensively when relying on any third-party. Very few
are trustworthy. Use a reliable password management system for your passwords
(like KeePass or mailing GPG-crypted passwords to yourself) and generate a
unique pass for each site. Use a unique mail if you can. If you're storing any
data on there, make sure it is encrypted and triple encrypted.

------
nextparadigms
It seems that politicians all over the world are starting to really press this
issue, and even get the press to promote these ideas for them. I don't think
they realize what they are about to start here. I think they underestimate how
much people want the Internet to remain free, and how many want it to remain
free. I feel the next few years will be very interesting.

The TechDirt post was referring to this article:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/26/internet...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/26/internet-
controls-cameron-sarkozy)

~~~
cheez
I think you give people too much credit. People don't see the Internet as the
new printing press. They see it as an improved entertainment device.

~~~
cubicle67
Ask your local small business owner how much they appreciate being able to
have their own website. Previously their options for letting people know about
their business were newspaper advertising, yellow pages or TV.

~~~
cheez
Oh, don't worry, your website license will be part of a business registration
package.

Most people consider such things a minor inconvenience.

~~~
ygreek
In China you already have to apply for a website license
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license>). And most people do not care
about it very much. I once made a site with a friend from China, and he
applied for the ICP license, even though the server was in the US and there
was not a single word in Chinese on the site. In my friend's opinion it was a
natural thing to do for a law abiding citizen.

~~~
cheez
China is a North American politician's wet dream.

------
codex
I think the Internet will end up regulated. The question is, what kind of
regulation? Want net neutrality? That's regulation. Guarantee of privacy of
your search engine history? Regulation. Freedom from email snooping without a
court order? Regulation. Taxation of purchases? Recourse from anonymous online
harassment and libel? Child protection from pedophiles and child pornography?
Terrorists?

At a gross level, Democrats/liberals want to regulate corporate interaction
with the Internet and Republicans/conservatives want to regulate personal
interaction. In this respect the Internet is no different than other sectors.

------
codex
Why should the Internet not reflect the values of society, as reflected in
existing regulations on cars, media, etc.? If people want the Internet to
remain free they should work to change the template: free up control over
other aspects of our civilization a If that fails, then society doesn't really
value what you value.

~~~
FlemishBeeCycle
You are a much less cynical person than myself if you think that society is a
reflection of its members' values. There is a mismatch between what people
say/think that they value, and what people actually value. It takes only
sidelong glance at the current political climate in the US to see myriad
examples of people voting against their own best interests.

By and large, people expect the status quo, and as it has been, so shall it
be. Had the internet been born in some corporate boardroom - restricted,
tiered, filtered - people would expect nothing more.

I suspect we only a few rebrands from control be wrested away - look at
Verizon/Google's net neutrality bill making a distinction between wired and
wireless internet access. Certainly a reasonable person might agree that wired
vs wireless internet access are conceivably "different" - and if the average
person can be convinced that there is a difference, they will accept the terms
of this difference as it is given to them.

I think that like most things in life, the internet will be controlled by a
few people with a desire to shape it. The question is whether or not the
people who value freedom, take a vested interest as well.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man."

------
trebor
The 'net looks like the wild west because most are ignorant that it is really
a bunch of city-states like Greece. Each ISP/Host/Site has its own rules. Some
are allied, some aren't. Governments are the overall nation.

This simplification should good enough to explain to most people.

------
RexRollman
This myth is needed by the MPAA and the RIAA, so you should expect it to
continue.

------
InclinedPlane
The internet is a very real disruptive force to many entrenched power
structures. I personally think that's a good thing because I value individual
liberty. However, many entrenched power structures think otherwise.

------
dspeyer
No we can't. Not so long as the Mainstream Media is powerful and afraid of the
internet. They are very good at spreading myths, and very motivated in this
case.

------
zebra
And who will regulate the internet inside internet? Internet^3? Internet^4?
Seems governmental efforts are doomed.

------
maeon3
Replace "tamed" with "controlled". There are vultures everywhere circling the
internet, pondering how to establish ownership of it (or some portion of it)
how to shape it, throttle it, condition it, modify it, how its very existence
can be turned into an asset that can produce dividends, most importantly, how
to get others to pay you money to maintain a connection to it.

The internet doesn't need fixing, what it needs is protection from men who
want to put a big fence around it and charge you money so you can get some.

~~~
bdhe
_The internet doesn't need fixing, what it needs is protection from men who
want to put a big fence around it and charge you money so you can get some._

Ars Technica had this feature article that I thought was very insightful.
[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/how-the-
robb...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/how-the-robber-
barons-hijacked-the-victorian-internet.ars)

~~~
cheez
Which part did you find insightful?

~~~
5l
If you have a problem with the article why not just articulate it.

~~~
cheez
Because I'm curious to what he found insightful.

~~~
bdhe
The article talks about how Western Union telegraph was taken over by
essentially one person, which in turn thoroughly destroyed the credibility and
trust in the system. I can imagine something similar happening to the
internet, and some people are already wary of this (that is why we have so
many projects along the lines of Tor/Freenet).

There's also a troubling story of how freedom of press was stifled despite the
technology. Doesn't this sound familiar in context of Youtube videos of
demonstrators being taken down, recently, in England?

And finally, as mentioned in the article, this is a concrete instance where
freedom _was not_ essentially a zero-sum game, which meant, regulation by the
government was not necessarily a bad thing. This squarely addresses some
arguments made _today_ about Net Neutrality among other things by people who
favor a more laissez-faire approach.

~~~
cheez
I don't think that people are distrusting the Internet because of a rogue
company taking it over. They are distrusting it because of the government
taking it over. Tor and Freenet are to prevent eavesdropping from governments.

What I would like to see happen is absolutely no subsidized infrastructure.
Once you subsidize, you have a responsibility to make sure the taxpayers get
their money's worth (theoretically). If you ignore this responsibility, as
government often does, you get the situation in the article.

One person lives a lot shorter life than a government. For example, Standard
Oil was a monopoly and yet, even they were naturally losing their grip as time
went on. I don't think you should be worried about a single person taking
over. Sure it may mess things up for a few years, but so what? Better that
than forever, by law. At least in my opinion. Competitors will pop up and the
old guard will become old.

I'm not saying I favour net neutrality or not. Just that if the government
could just resist getting involved in every single thing, they will find
economical solutions.

Today's problem is that many governments subsidized the creation of the
infrastructure and then handed over the keys to the private companies. Sounds
familiar? I don't get how anyone can look at the past 200 years in North
America and still make that decision.

So based on that history, regulation is necessary to make sure that citizens
get their money's worth.

But goddamnit, what's wrong with these people?!

------
fakeer
If only it was a myth.

------
truthout
4chan is the wild west.

