Two coincidental threats to end-to-endism have appeared on Slashdot recently. The first says that AOL are planning on blocking access to the retail web sites of spammers. At first sight this makes one want to whoop with joy as the baddies get a good kicking. But it sets a dangerous precedent, because at what point will AOL deem some commercial or political speech off-limits to its users?
The second is about how the FCC is looking to extend its regulation of profane speech. The focus is on traditional non-interactive media. (Hey, you can still remember the stuff you used to watch to zombify your brain, before you found the Internet, can’t you?) It isn’t a big leap to imagining these sorts of speech-impeding regulations arriving on-line. Whilst the USA may have first amendment rights to squash such government intrustion, much of the rest of the world does not. The end-to-end nature of the Internet is as much threatened by misguided social regulation as technical filtering.
The end-to-end network isn’t supposed to (overtly) discriminate against any particular message passing over it. But network is not just a set of cables and routers; the highest layer of abstraction is a connection of people and ideas. Unwanted filtering can occur at any level of the stack, even levels not modelled in the traditional network architecture stack.
UPDATE: This article on how the CAN-SPAM act has done nothing but legitimize spam contains a related nugget.
The Can-Spam Act gives spam recipients no recourse against spammers, even when a message does clearly violate the law’s requirements for legal unsolicited commercial e-mail. Only government agencies and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have any enforcement rights under Can-Spam.
That means the end points have been dis-empowered in favor of placing control in the hands of those at the center. Again, end-to-end is subverted by social and legal means, not technological ones.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:51 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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