‘Technical measures’ and the government-sanctioned interweb.

If the three-strikes internet law gets passed, I fear we’ll end up with a whitelisted, government-approved, corporation-controlled internet. This cannot be allowed to happen.

Just to restate my position on illicit filesharing. I think it’s wrong for those who can afford to pay, or to wait, to download content for free. I just don’t do it. And, if you can afford it, I’d encourage you not to either.

But, as I’ve said before, we need some perspective here. The industry figures, relied on by the lawmakers, are nonsense. It’s not such a big deal, and our economy isn’t on the verge collapse – well, not because of this kind of piracy, at least.

Further, I’m in agreement with Tim O’Reilly that the facts of piracy make it a welcome progressive force in culture.

I strongly support the reduction of copyright terms to, say, 12 years. Whereupon I’m convinced we’d see the greatest cultural flowering in this country that any amount of arts funding could buy.

We have poor access to our recent British canon of culture today because of the tangle of rights and rightsholders we’ve allowed to grow up in the so-called ‘creative’ industries.

And who can support the way devices are being tied into closed monopolistic schemes of DRM and content control? It’s fundamentally anti-consumer and anti-public.

But others make these pragmatic cases for tacitly supporting illicit filesharing much better than I can.

None of these reasons, though, are at the root of my opposition to the internet cut-off law.

Here’s how I fear the debate in parliament will go…

Very sensibly, someone will raise the fact that the internet is essential now to public life. There’s no way we could ban someone from, say, filing their tax return online, from accessing information published on DirectGov, from getting BusinessLink advice. It would, of course, be wrong to cut these sites off, on principle.

The response, I fear, an Orwellian compromise: the government’s ‘technical measures’ will not be a complete disconnect, but a firewalling allowing access to pre-approved government sites. Yes, that’ll fix it.

Technology, mandated by law, can do this, right? Unfortunately so. And what happens next?

Now we have a fledgling Great Firewall of China in every ISP. A government-controlled fifth estate. But rather than the blacklisting that repressive regimes rely on, this one works by whitelisting – everything is banned by default, unless it’s a sanctioned site. Altogether more reliable and robust, more repressive and controlled.

Repressive technology has a tendency to grow in scope.

First, given this technical capability, it would be nonsensical to cut pirates off from government-sanctioned ‘legitimate’ content providers – say the big four major labels’ websites.

There can’t be any piracy going on from their sites. (oh really?)

Banks might be white-listed too. No sense in stopping people managing their finances online. Yes, that all makes sense.

In fact, this is such a fantastic bit of technology, we can now make our own, government-approved safe internet. We’ll let facebook on there, maybe, and no-one will mind too much about everything that’s gone. It’ll be safe, controlled. Who could possibly object?

And what about a few newspaper sites – just the ones we like. And of course, they could be removed in the face of injunctions or libel bullying.

And you know, we won’t make it impossible for you to publish webpages – you’ll just have to register with us. The fee will be reasonable, we promise.

This would have been an unthinkable development, but we’re already running registers for anyone who works with children. So, not so farfetched, eh? This is something we know how to do, and are big fans of. And, you know, all the ISPs now have this technology installed already so that’s easy.

When David Lammy says “now we must decide what we want balance between anarchy and authoritarianism to be in the digital world of the future,” I get chills.

Do you see why?

We must oppose ‘technical measures’ because building an infrastructure of repression is not what I will allow my government to do.