Since last Friday I've been Slashdotted, NTK'd and Kuro5hined. I've made the DayPop top 10 and been No8 on Blogdex, and my name has been trashed all over the net by people I have never met. At Kuro5hin, one of the most widely read weblogs, 35% of those voting in their online poll think I'm a "snobby, self-important European".
Others think I'm just foolish. I've had email inviting me to "go to Baghdad", I have been described as a "poor scared little man" and been called "a whining socialist weenie".
Some people were less kind. However, I've also had many expressions of support, and a lot of helpful and intelligent comments from people who enjoy the opportunity to engage in an online debate. And all because of an article I wrote for online news site The Register, with the slightly provocative title Damn the Constitution: Europe must take back the Web.
In it I outlined the reasons why today's internet is being destroyed by the actions of US corporations, programmers and politicians, all obsessed with commercial advantage and crippled by their outdated adherence to the political principles of a Constitution which is no longer relevant. I described the absurdity of recent US legislation - like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes anyone who gets round copy protection a criminal, or the Berman Bill that would make hacking into P2P networks legal - and showed how US legislators acted as if its laws applied over the whole net while the majority of the population has simply abandoned any belief in the political system.
And I outlined a new approach, based on current developments in "trusted" computers, which could let us map the internet far more closely to the real world, giving us the ability to restore national boundaries and national law to our online activities and get away from the idea that "cyberspace" is outside the real world. It was hardly surprising that many US readers were aggrieved by the tone of the article - at one point I called the Founding Fathers "a bunch of renegade merchants and rebellious slave-owners."
Yet many seemed more upset by the idea that the US is incapable of showing leadership as the net evolves, believing that they have an automatic right to decide its future because they invented it and paid for it. Since my email address was at the bottom of the article, they took the opportunity to tell me that I was an enemy of freedom, a pathetic European or a fool who did not understand the beauty of the US way.
And they posted the piece to weblogs all over the net, creating a storm of inter est which has not yet died down. I am still getting a couple of emails every hour, a level of response which is astonishing to a journalist used to writing for print publications where five or 10 emails mark a major success.
Despite the criticism from some, I stand by my argument. The internet, 20 years old next year, is at a critical point in its development. It can either remain in the hands of the technologists and the geeks or become absorbed into our society as a key aspect of our daily lives. In order for this to happen it must, like television, telephony or motor cars before it, be regulated and controlled in the public interest.
This is not a popular point of view among those who think that when we are online we are in a separate space that cannot be subject to mere earthly regulation. Like shamans, they see the keyboard as a portal to a new level of existence, where limitations on freedom vanish and laws cannot apply. Of course, they are wrong, and the net is already heavily regulated by the legal system. There have been several successful prosecutions for online libel, and the current debate on copyright is not framed in terms of the "law of cyberspace".
Having no law is not an option: we need good, sensible and workable laws. Our online freedom may be illusory, but it is an attractive illusion. The time has arrived, however, when we must abandon it and decide how and by whom the net will be controlled. As a "socialist weenie", I believe in democratically elected governments and the political process, even though it is far from perfect. We certainly don't need the US Constitution to decide what laws we will have online - we need a network based around European traditions, serving European interests and subject to European law. Anything else will be a disaster.
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