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Thursday Jul 24, 2008
Future of a free internet
Yesterday an article appeared on the BBC news site about the big ISP's in the UK signing some kind of deal with the UK Government to combat piracy. This morning it was headline news across BBC radio and television. Fergal Sharkey was asked for the music industry's view, but no one asked us consumers.
It's shocking and disappointing how a public broadcaster like the BBC frames the debate in such outdated and simplistic terms. It's at moments like this that it's possible to see just how out of step big media companies and organisations are with the issues that the rise of new media has thrown up for consumers. Their focus tends to always be on the issues new media throws up for themselves- not us. To coin a phrase: it's about privacy, not piracy stupid.
Rarely is consumer privacy raised as an issue in the music industry's war on piracy. Will ISP's be expected to handover personal data of their customers? How will illegal file sharing be defined when, for example, anyone can download mp3s of any music they like from prominent websites like Facebook and YouTube? What sanctions will they take against file sharers? Will young people increasingly see the internet as a constraint on their liberty, rather than liberating?
It's interesting to contrast the broadly sympathetic coverage that the BBC has given to the music industry's efforts to clamp down on file-sharing (hey, it's not just music that people share these days), with it's coverage of the development of deep packet inspection (deep packet what?) by the advertising industry "a system that tracks where people go on the web, and builds up a profile so it can serve up adverts based on what that person has seen" (BBC's Click presenter Spencer Kelly).
Yeh, deep packet inspection (DPI), it's the biggest issue in net neutrality at the moment and most people haven't heard a thing about it outside of the tech pages in old style mainstream broadcasters like the BBC. For the last two years the technology has been secretly trialled and is set to come on stream officially in the next month or so.
Both these issues raise questions of consumers' privacy, and both developments seem to suggest that consumer privacy should be sacrificed in the interest of corporate needs.
In May 2008 on BBC technology programme 'Click', the BBC interviewed Kent Ertegrul and Alex Hanff. Ertegrul who heads up Phorm- a company looking to profit from DPI technology- had his "most notable foray online as the founder of PeopleOnPage, an ad network that operated earlier in the decade and which was blacklisted as spyware by the likes of Symantec and F-Secure".
Alex Hanff wrote his dissertation on the privacy issues of DPI technology with special reference to Phorm and has headed up the campaign against DPI in the UK. Hanff previously hit the headlines after being sacked from his job for airing pro file sharing views on BBC's Newsnight. He's also been the recipient of a lawsuit by Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal City Studios and Warner Bros back in 2005.
The head to head brought together the opposite ends of the spectrum in the modern privacy debate- that encompasses corporate spyware developers and file-sharing facilitators. It's a mainstream debate that is currently marginalised by mainstream broadcasters. But anyone interested in the future of freedom on the internet should be sitting up and taking plenty of notice.
