MAKE 'EM PAY

Dick Pountain/14 February 2008/14:28/Idealog 163

No doubt the government's Green Paper about forcing ISPs to disconnect persistent illegal file-sharers will stir up a rant-storm on the blogs of net libertarians, but as I'm not one of them my calm remains unruffled. On the contrary the paper may just be a sign that government has finally "got it" about the internet: got, that is, the fact of its own impotence and inability to regulate undesirable net activities in the way that committee after committee keeps recommending. They may have finally twigged that the internet is *almost* unregulatable, but if there is a point of traction at all that point is the ISP.

Whether or not you believe the internet needs regulating depends upon whether or not you believe that it's a Public Good. Readers under the age of 30 can be excused if they don't remember what Public Goods are, because little more than lip-service has been paid to them during most of their lifetime. Public Goods are services we all share which are important for our collective well-being: they include the roads, defence of the realm, police, and once upon a time the Health Service, the railways and the busses. Fashionable ideology has it that such iniquities inhibit initiative and must all eventually be privatised. Nowadays you're far more likely to hear the word Good used as the opposite of Evil, in that return to medieval metaphysics for which we can mostly thank R. Reagan, G.W. Bush and Luke Skywalker.

That non-metaphysical Goods exist is beyond dispute - they're simply the conditions that any particular sort of living creature needs in order to thrive. Most living creatures share a small set of basic Goods which are, in order of priority:
1) Space. A human needs around 3 cubic feet of space, and if deprived of this by, say, a hydraulic press or a falling concrete slab will die in less than a second.
2) Air. We die in around 3 minutes without that.
3) Moderate temperature. If exposed unprotected to temperatures above the boiling point of water or below its freezing point we die within hours.
4) Water. Without it we die in days.
5) Food. Without it we die in weeks.

Beyond these five, Goods start to differ between species and to clash, the lion's Good being the antelope's Very Bad Indeed. There are some weird bacteria that don't like air, while others love being boiled, and I'm very happy for them so long as they stay out of me.

So is the internet a Public Good or not? I'd say that it is, but I also say that content producers as well as consumers are a part of the public and deserve to have their interests defended (the fact that I'm one may be an influence here). I've heard the analogy with roads used against net regulation, claiming that road agencies can't be held responsible for the way people drive: a dodgy argument because road agencies do have a duty to permit police onto their roads to chase bad drivers. Anyway a railroad would be a closer analogy to the net - if a train operator were carrying boxcars full of illegal heroin into a city everyday, most people would probably accept that action should be taken against that operator.

The haphazard and unpredicted way that the World Wide Web took off in the 1990s created a structure that leaves ISPs as the only institutions in a physical position to impose regulation. They don't currently see it as part of their job, nor could they afford the revenue hit, but they could in principle check every packet that came past them down the net, they know the identity of its recipient and most of them already have a mechanism for billing those recipients. If any government really wanted to eradicate law-breaking on the internet - whether child pornography or theft of copyrighted materials - what they'd need to do is:

a) Make ISPs legally responsible for the content that they convey (as a publisher currently is, but a telephone company is not).
b) Make ISPs legally responsible for collecting micropayments for any copyright material they convey.

These measures might require new hardware and modifications to TCP/IP protocols in order to flag copyright and price information, so governments would need also to lean on ICANN and W3C to introduce such facilities. The money ISPs collected this way would be sent to existing copyright collection agencies like MCP-PRS and the Public Lending Right to distribute as in the non-digital world, and ISPs would keep a slice to defray their costs.

I'm not saying that any of this would be either easy or cheap, but unless something of the sort is done the future prospect is for far worse things to happen, up to and including total monopolisation of net content by mega-corporations. A workable  micropayments system with a real means of collecting them would accelerate the transformation of media industries already under way, allowing musicians to release and profit from their own records, or writers to publish their own books free from middlemen (as for middlemen, perhaps they'd have to learn to sing). Asking you to send me 5p to read this column is a non-starter, but if it went straight on your broadband bill I doubt that you'd notice...