A MODEST PROPOSAL

Dick Pountain/Mon 13 October 2003/9:05 am/Idealog 111

Back in 1968, the American bioethics professor Garrett Hardin wrote his famous and much-reprinted essay 'The Tragedy of the Commons' as a contribution to debates then raging about economic freedom, regulation and population control. The gist of his argument was a hard-nosed economic observation about the way that property held in common ownership must inevitably be abused. Imagine a country where a pastoral tribe grazes its flocks on land held in common: the incentive to add a sheep to your own flock is great because you get the whole selling price of that extra sheep; the penalty for adding a sheep is very much smaller because the over-grazing that extra sheep causes will shared among everyone. Ergo everyone will keep adding sheep until the commons are grazed into a desert. Extend this principle across whole agrarian (or industrial) economies and you understand how the Mesopotamian desert or the polluted wastes of the Soviet Union came about. Hardin's argument has since been taken up at both ends of the political spectrum, from deep-green ecologists to right-wing free marketeers, and all the attempts by economic optimists to refute it have not made it go away entirely.

The reason I mention it here is, of course, because of its relevance to the Internet, which can be seen as a commons in bandwidth rather than in grass. We're currently witnessing its utter degradation by spammers, hackers and malware morons, to the extent where business confidence is approaching collapse: email may soon be rendered extinct as a means of communication for anyone but schoolkids in Internet cafes, while the Web as retail outlet continues to suffer from primitive and inadequate payment systems, (confidence in which could evaporate overnight given one big scandal). The huge potential the electronic communications revolution once showed is being frittered away - and anyone who's ever found a long-sought book on Amazon, or solved a tricky problem via a Google search knows how real it is - which really is a Tragedy in the sense of the word used by Whitehead and quoted in Hardin's paper, "...the solemnity of the remorseless working of things."

Hardin went on in his paper to show that appeals to conscience could never be effective as a means of preventing such Tragedies - those who exhibit a conscience must inevitably lose out to those who have none and so grab all the cookies. The only way to guarantee temperate behaviour is through coercion. Hardin toys with other words, but decides in the end to hang tough: "A Madison Avenue man might call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of the word coercion." However this coecion must be "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected." In essence all modern government and management is about the discovery, invention and agreeing upon of such forms of coercion, plus the construction of effective feedback mechanisms to stop them running away or becoming subverted by corrupt practices.

That suggests that the way to save the Internet is by curbing its much vaunted free-for-all ambience, by one means or another. The problem stems basically from the way the Internet grew up: it was invented from the very first to be an open and resilient system, and one with no conception of costs built into it. That has to stop. Technically there isn't much that can be done, because TCP/IP is now in such widespread use that it can't realistically be altered in any drastic way. Incidentally, that's typical of a Tragedy of Commons type problem - they tend not to have technical solutions, only social and political ones (and quite often no solution at all). The economic infrastructure of the net, the mass of Internet Service Providers, offers a more promising line of attack. ISPs emerged throughout the '90s in a Wild-West style land grab and have never really suffered much in the way of regulation or certification. It's about time they did.

Hence my modest proposal. My preferred solution would have been to hand over Internet services, lock-stock-and-barrel, to the gross monopoly of the telecomms companies. (Ooh, Mummy, come quick, he used the 'm' word!) That's right, those great sluggish leviathans we all love to deride and despise. The ones that quietly and without hype spent much of the twentieth century wiring up the world with one of the least-appreciated technical marvels of the age, the international STD analog telephone system. The ones who already have the apparatus in place for collecting payment from the vast majority of the population of western countries via their phone bills. The ones whose very caution and conservatism would have nipped all this SoBig malarky in the bud. Unfortunately it's far too late for this solution because a couple of decades of free-market fundamentalism have dissipated the power of these magnificent beasts (in many cases bringing them to the edge of ruin.) As our reward for aquiescing in this, most of us still don't have the digital broadband phone lines we were promised 20 years ago.

My real modest proposal is therefore that we regulate the !**&*ing %*!ox off all these ISPs. Regulate them till their pips squeak and beyond. Regulate them until they beg for BT to come and buy them out of their misery. Make them legally responsible for intercepting all spam, for collecting and accounting micropayments for website access, and for filtering out viruses at the server-end of your connection. That isn't very fair, but mutally-agreed coercion can only ever be 'fair' to the majority. (Gentlemen, you may now ignite your flames...)