If one is able to find any
privacy or anonymity in this New Internet,
it will be because of some undiscovered
security hole, which will be
quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision.
Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out
is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n,
peer-to-peer filesharing and
left-wing political activism.
Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's
technology base
and to the
campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new
technology and extend it in such a way that the development and
dissemination of Open Source
software will be, if not mathematically
and physically impossible, at least as intractible as factoring a 2048-bit
public key.
Imagine, if you will,
Trusted Computing implemented at the router level,
in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified
not only to support only protocols whose
patent licenses are fully paid-up and
on file with the legal department in
Redmond, but whose content is
compliant with the
Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a
Public
License,
GNU
or
otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the
individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file
transmission, but, within microseconds, the reporting of the
physical location of the
offending server to responsible law enforcement personnel.
The identities of its
rogue
administrators will be
fetched instantly from the database maintained by the
Department of Homeland Security.
(You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to
obtain a
Windows
server license, as after all,
Internet servers can be
used to disseminate
explosives
recipes or the formulas for nerve gases.)
The supercomputers that constantly monitor
the cameras mounted on every
lampost in the United States of (
God Bless It!)
America
will be ordered
to recognize the
criminals' faces, and when they are spotted trying to
flee to the
Amazon jungle,
orbiting lasers will vaporize their bodies,
leaving nary but a whisp of smoke.
When a close family friend tries to comfort one of the grieving mothers for
the loss of her son, she will desperately proclaim "No, I have no children!
You must have mistaken me for someone else. Please leave me alone!" as
she scurries rapidly away.
National firewalls such as those employed by The
People's Republic of China
are expensive and difficult to maintain. They are notoriously leaky, and
easy to circumvent by anyone
determined enough to
find out how. But worse,
they impede the economic potential of emerging economies such as China,
which necessarily bottleneck technical data and eCommerce in order to have
a single chokepoint for their
Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse (Taiwan,
Tibet, Dissidents and Pornography).
Imagine, if you will, the potential of our
New Internet: not only by
technical design, but by international treaty (enforced by the threat
of military intervention on the part of the UN Security Council), each
country will have a national firewall which is as transparent as the air
to fully-licensed Windows Media Video files of Barney the Dinosaur and
paid-up Wal-Mart orders, yet absolutely impenetrable to content not
sanctioned by Homeland Security, the Republican Party, the 700 Club
and the Boy Scouts.
I, for one, am weary of our present Internet, cesspool that it is of
moral depravity
and
copyright infringement. I long for the days of
yore, when men were men, women wore hoopskirts, and racial minorities
were separate but equal. And so, I raise my right hand and shout with
an enthusiastic "Heil!":
I welcome my new
Internet overlords!
Copyright © 2005 Michael David Crawford.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
