Fergus Cassidy

No way for one-way

IT is often remarked upon that the internet wouldn't have become what it is today if it had been governed from the beginning. Instead, it was felt in the United States, that the network should be allowed to grow without the dead hand of regulatory supervision.

It was also a way in which the United States could be seen to act in a hands-off manner. The argument went that the connecting together of many disparate networks throughout the academic and research world, would face suspicion and caution if the grip of the US wasn't loosened.

There is of course no way to prove or disprove such theories. What it does sometimes boil down to is perception.

From the point of view of a teenage hacker who delights in writing computer code and distributing it to the widest possible audience, an internet with no central command or hierarchy is taken for granted. But from the perspective of a parent whose child opens unsolicited email pointing to porn sites, the view is very different.

And that is one of the truly fascinating aspects of the internet. No other mass media communications technology has been able to grow up in an environment where few, if any, national or international laws apply to it.

From the moment that television and radio appeared, they existed in a tightly-controlled and licensed environment. Whether is was broadcast frequency or indeed content. Newspapers are also subject to controls and regulation. In some countries that includes content, but in free market economies there are still laws and statutes that apply to newspapers.

Whether it's advertising standards, libel and defamation or circulation figure accuracy, newspapers have to be careful about what they print. Television and radio has its regulators, who determine, in some cases, the percentage of current affairs being broadcast and in the case of France, what percentage of French music is being broadcast.

But what if, say radio, had been allowed to grow unregulated in the same way as the internet has? What would have happened? Would there be a more diverse range of stations? Perhaps stations would have become more community-based rather than being owned by fewer and fewer. Or maybe an unlicensed regime would have led to disaster and the law of the jungle.

For better or worse, the histories of broadcast media - electronic and print - have evolved around legislation and regulation. Where debate arose was centered around how much legislation - too much or too little - was enacted. There seems to have been no middle ground in the argument. Tightly-controlled or no control at all.

Uniquely, the internet has developed in the opposite way to previous communications media. Throughout it's short and still-evolving history, the net hasn't been a happy hunting ground for regulators or lawmakers. Electronic and print media have been shaped and been effected by laws and regulations.

The internet, however, works the other way around. It's the net that is effecting laws and regulations as they stand. That's why the net is so significant. It is disruptive. The net doesn't fit neatly into a lot of existing legislation across a wide range of areas and there is, so far, no multilateral, globally agreed way of dealing with it.

With issues like copyright, privacy, consumer protection and security coming increasingly to the fore, it might appear as though the net is becoming regulated. This is far from the reality. The calls for Digital Rights Management (DRM) is not coming from the internet community per se. It comes from sectors outside the network - older traditional companies - who fear the consequences of putting their material on the net. That fear has led to more and more legislation that provides cast-iron mechanisms guaranteeing copyright control by the owners.

As far as the unregulated internet is concerned, DRM is more than welcome to come and do whatever it wants to do. In the US, case after case taken against DRM has failed and has lead to the strengthening of the legislation. But what concerns the internet is the effects that technologies like DRM have on the network architecture as it was designed. And anything that would appear to violate that structure is taken as a serious threat to the network. Perception plays a part here also.

So will the network begin to conform and align itself with the same regulatory and legal environment as electronic and print did? Just another form of controlled media where the same rules apply?

Sometimes it does appear to be like that. Look at advertising's experience on the net. For the last number of years advertising was geared toward the amount of 'eye balls' or 'traffic' a site could attract. That model was abruptly abandoned in favour of subscription fees and registration. The amount of visitors doesn't really matter anymore as net advertising is moving over to a more content-based system and a print magazine special interest format.

Those who own and control vast amounts of content - Time Warner, Disney, Sony etc - want the net to revert to form. To become a one-way communications medium, where content is downloaded to expectant and credit-card carrying members of the ever-grateful consumer society.

Blinded by their own objectives, not to mention the possibility of unimaginable profit margins - the traditional media dinosaurs dismiss calls for dialogue and open debate as belonging to a generation of proxy-hippies and anarchists who rant on that 'property is theft' or 'information should be free'.

There are two industries that have continuously warred with the internet, telecommunications and entertainment. It is not a coincidence that they are the most threatened by its existence. It's also not a coincidence that it's these two industries that have had the most run-ins with the law themselves. WorldCom in the US and Vivendi in Europe. AOL/Time Warner took out loans worth $10bn last week. Carrier Qwest is under legal investigation in the US.

Maybe it will take the collapse of some more 'old economy' media giants to finally convince business that the internet cannot be looked at in same way as print and electronic media. What they will be forced to realise is that the net is a two-way means of communication more akin to the telephone network than to the entertainment business. Where one person can make contact directly with another person, without permission or censure from any central control. Content in that environment includes mountains of material that is produced from a pool of over 500m connected today. In the future that figure will grow rapidly as people find ways around connectivity obstacles and go online. More bandwidth will also help significantly.

Within the decade there could be up to 2bn people connected. With those sort of numbers, the odds are hugely increased that the pool of individual 'content providers' will turn into a sea. And getting them to revert or conform to the traditional methods of pushing 'content' at them down a one-way pipe (for a fee of course), will go down in history.

Along with King Canute.