Alex Zaharov-Reutt
A news report says Kevin Bermeister, of Kazaa fame, thinks major network equipment providers could easily use a “global file registry filter” to “reduce piracy” – but surely censorship could easily rear its even uglier head?
It seems ironic that Kevin Bermeister, who was involved in the paradise of file sharing that was Kazaa, only to later turn anti-pirate, is advocating for a “cleaner” Internet.
Mr Bermeister’s thoughts appear in a self-penned Huffington Post article, which talks about the fight against SOPA and the surprise takedown of the “alleged $175 million worldwide Internet piracy operation, Megaupload.”
Amongst a range of thoughts, Mr Bermeister says: “In 2012, the rapidly shifting technology at the forefront of the piracy battle now has the capacity to offer an automated global file registry filter -- which would reduce piracy to a very small problem using equipment that already exists from vendors like Cisco, Juniper, Hauwei and others -- and which enables ISPs to divert customers who are seeking to view or download illegal or pirated content to a legal source without breaching their privacy.”
Later, he notes that: “With a customer-sanctioned, ISP-based copyright filter that can also be used to stop child pornography, viruses and other criminal communications that warrant filtering, ISPs are fast approaching the ability to gain control over the Internet's traffic -- a real and valuable proposition.”
Naturally, it is worth reading the article in full for yourself.
However… the chance that these technologies could be used to filter out dissent, political protest or other law abiding views that ISPs or governments-gone-bad don’t like, and want to squash, are only all too real.
Mr Bermeister, of Kazaa fame… how did you make so much of your “brilliant digital” money, again? And how much of Kazaa's file-sharing technology made it into the now massively popular Skype?
Perhaps in a parallel universe, Mr Bermeister is under the same scrutiny that Megaload’s Kim Dotcom is under.
In this universe, however, Kevin Bermeister is advocating for a system that, on the surface, would “filter out” pirate content, porn and other “nasties”, but what protections are there that this system wouldn’t be used against the Internet citizens of the world?
We’d only have a “promise” the system wouldn’t be abused. After all, the right to free speech only exists in the United States of America – we certainly don’t have that specific right here in Australia, and neither is it available in many parts of the world.
From the stopping of SOPA to the delivery of content control directly via the world’s networking equipment – or at least, in the world that Mr Bermeister imagines.
Is this supposed to be a victory for freedom on the Internet, or yet another way for the Stephen Conroys of the world to extend censorship, embrace Orwellian boots to the face, and extinguish the hard-won freedoms of the last couple of centuries?
http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/fuzzy-logic/52507-a-cleaner-internet--or-a-censored-internet