If this happens, obviously you can kiss Wikipedia goodbye.
Along with all the other major sources of income online: porn sites,
forums that allow anonymity, many blogs, etc.

It's probably relevant that he's from a country where lack of privacy and secret police are the norm.

It's a nonsense proposal, because there's already a system of "licenses" in place - you have your service agreement with your ISP, and they have their agreements with the peers they're connected to. By agreeing to your ISP's policies, in return you get to use the Internet under an IP address belonging to them. ISPs just need to get their act together when it comes to enforcing their current regulations on abusive customers, and ISPs that refuse to kick off their abusers can be terminated by the peers they're connected to. Simple, and no need for a silly "passport" system.

(Same goes for public WiFi networks; the public WiFi proprietor is responsible for everything that goes through, and it's not difficult for even a small cafe to monitor and respond to any reports of abuse over their WiFi, just as the cafe would be expected to monitor and respond to reports of a flasher in a trenchcoat standing in their doorway.)

There is a middle ground because what you describe is there in principle, but not enforced in any meaningful way. The licensing system only affects those with responsible ISPs and other ISPs are not eager enough to block abusive ISPs who willingly and knowingly host illegal activities. There are swathes of ISPs who should not be connected to the net.

I don't subscribe to the meme that there is nothing you can do because the Internet will route round the "problem" - it is a straw man argument and it suggests there is only one view that you can take of a problem.

I'm quite in favour of a two tier Internet - one where only members of the club are allowed to send information into an ISP (without express action by a client) and using such an ISP puts specific responsibilities on its members and ISPs who do not take their responsibilities seriously are either out of the club or forcibly have to give over their services to an ISP that can manage its client base properly. I used to think that it would be sensible to have a second Wild West Internet also accessible - but the simpler solution is that those who want it, just sign up with an alternative ISP.

If that means no Russian porn scams, great; if it means reducing DoS attacks, great; if it means that Wikipedia has to clean up its act to be accessible - great - because in such circumstances, an ethical scrape would have a raison-d'etre over straight Wikipedia.

The downside is that we live in an age where what some companies deem as appropriate and ethical doesn't really distinguish them from the criminal fraternity (he says smarting over how daughter has been scammed by RyanAir for £400 of credit card charges in two transactions).

Everybody who advocates rigid, draconian control over everything, in the name of "the common good" or "decency" or any other value of theirs, should imagine such control being put into the hands of whoever they most strongly oppose. This thought experiment is commonly introduced in articles in libertarian magazines, asking right-wingers to imagine Ted Kennedy having dictatorial powers over everything (well, back when he was alive anyway), and left-wingers to imagine Rush Limbaugh having similar power. In this case, anti-Wikipedians advocating tight control of the Internet should imagine your least-liked Wikipedians (Guy Chapman, David Gerard, David Shankbone?) being on the committee that dictates how the entire world must use the Internet.

I agree completely. However, the thing I would ask Wikipedians to consider is, why are people whose livelihoods largely depend on the internet in some way starting to make these kinds of proposals? In Kaspersky's case it's probably because he realizes that competing private (and in some cases, public) entities can't keep up with the world's ever growing number of hackers and other online security risks. And yet, people still want "no-brainer" ironclad security on their Windoze boxes. So, he's given the matter some thought, and like it or not, this is the best he can come up with.

The point is that many people don't see shades of gray or degrees of risk - the world is basically good guys vs. bad guys, and if it looks like the bad guys are winning, they look to the government (and in the case of the internet, quasi-governmental international standards organizations) for solutions.

It's the same all over: If people don't police themselves, the government will hire police to do it for them, and tax the people for the privilege.

A lot of people on Wikipedia probably think it's unfair that in order to avoid the risk of external policing (or more intrusive user-identification requirements), they should have to police themselves more than other websites, all because they're big and and have high hit-counts. "It's not our fault that we get so many page-views," they say. Well, it is their fault, and there's nothing unfair about it whatsoever.

And how exactly is such a scheme to be implemented and enforced? Let's say each individual is assigned a single unique ID (by whom?) that they must use to connect to the Internet. How, then, is one to actually authenticate that they are using their own proper ID when they connect? Will all PCs, mobile phones, and other Internet-capable devices include biometric screening where one needs to supply one's fingerprint or other such thing before connecting? This can't possibly be implemented securely as long as one can connect using computers owned and operated by individuals and capable of being hacked. All access would have to be via computers controlled by the central entity, locked up so that there was no way to reprogram them to bypass the screening. Even then, how would anybody stop people from getting a friend to log in for them to evade a ban or restriction on their own part?




That seems to be JzG's mindset precisely... maybe my recurring trope of WP's clique vs. WR's being two sides of the same coin does have some truth to it after all.

We already have something like that--the "club" internet could be made up of various private VPNs.

You would not believe how much TCP/IP traffic on public backbone links is encrypted
VPN or SSL traffic. Or even "unknown/other" traffic.

How much is it? What is it? No one knows for certain.
And you won't find many discussions about this online or in trade journals, because
it's a very sensitive subject.

Erm, if it's so simple, why hasn't it happened, yet? Sure, you can complain to a major ISP about some spam-scammer (phisher) and they'll probably kick them off, but that only means they go to some other ISP. The various ISP's don't require ID and don't talk to each other, so it's even easier than socking WP.

Although government-run ISPs are actually more responsive to kicking phishing spammers off their network (exception: Mauritius, Nigeria and the like), at the same time, they don't exactly require ID and thus have somebody "real" to send the cops out to arrest, either. This is so rare that it makes news when it happens.

Not all scammers even have an ISP, because there exist nodes and gateways that aren't ISPs for the public, which spammers get access to, anyway. You've seen the blackhole server ISP numbers assigned by IANA. This is done to keep private intraweb stuff that gets out on the nets, from clogging the system up with reverse DNS lookups that have no answers. The problem being that some of these DNS lookups are looking for spammers, and it would be nice find out whose private intraweb is being used for that, so you can complain to THEM (unless the spammers ARE the owners). Instead, you get the IANA blackhole answer, and who are you going ot complain to then? Not the IANA. They claim it's not their problem.

I wouldn't support the specific suggestions as they are too intrusive and would impair access, free exchange of ideas and discussion in the ordinary (non-libertarian) sense of the words. It is good, however, to see someone challenging the usual and tired libertarian assumption about the internet. I might, for instance, support verification of the users status as an adult or permit restriction which could be overridden by parents. Or provisions to provide verification of users real identity upon a showing of a bona fide need such as a court order for discovery. To accomplish these things some of the thinking behind Laspersky's "internet driver license" might be useful. What I would not support is complete transparency of a persons "movement" and uses on the internet absent a showing of such a good cause. Maximizing the best environment for the exchange of ideas requires a balance of privacy and accountability, not a complete swing in either direction.

I think that there ought to be strict federal regulation of all forms of serfdom, most especially that of Wikipedia.

In other words, you want freedom, just so long as it doesn't make those damn dirty libertarians too happy about it; you'll sacrifice it just to tweak their noses.

People like you make me feel like engaging in projectile vomiting like the fat guy in the Monty Python movie.

Thank you for that mint.

Yah ... its not the serfers who need the license it is the slave owners.


Interesting ... this is off at an inspired tangent but there are another level of "private" information networks, that the the likes of JSTOR and so on.

Just a thought, instead of having them regurgitated along with garbage can contents of numerous blogs or porn sites and thrown up as the Pee-dia ... would the Foundations millions just be better spent enabling free unlimited access to the real thing? The academic data systems that the "encyclopedia" is supposed to be based on (reliable sources).

Out in the real world, folks are charged up to $25 a view for one paper hence the Pee-dia being cribbed out of the page limited version on Google books instead.

Its funny, a Pee-dia history class somewhere in poor Africa in the future ...

student: "sir, so what exactly happened in 1776 on the heights".
teacher: "I don't know, page 196 isn't available for view ... but it does not mean that you cannot grow up to save the world if you only know pages 1 to 195 and pages 203 to 267, girl. That is enough for the likes of you".

In Vikipedya, no license needed to serf you!

And a mighty thin one it was, too.

Razorblade thin, and delivered at high speed.

No, it is about constructing a public space that facilitates discussion and expression in manner that encourages meaningful participation. Doctrinaire simplistic libertarian "solutions" of fanciful invisible hands and unrestrained and unaccountable behavior will leave the internet a spam ridden wasteland catering to the lowest common denominator and providing havens for scams and exploitation. Both privacy and accountability have their uses in any serious attempt at building and maintaining a public space that has discourse friendly features like comfort, reliability, safety and trust.

Your vision of the internet is much like the Birthers bringing guns to town hall meetings. Their "right" to parade around with assault weapons is hardly conductive to orderly discourse.

But it isn't really freedom, is it? And isn't there another saying involving noses, something about your right to make a fist ends at the tip of my nose...?

I believe he's using the word "libertarian" to refer to the kind of unregulated, unprotected society that some people want to establish for the purpose of taking (mostly economic) advantage of other people and their weaknesses, without suffering any real consequences for it. When you (Dan T., that is) use the word "libertarian," you're probably thinking of things like "freedom of speech" and the right to do whatever you want as long as it doesn't directly harm anybody. Nothing wrong with that, and I'm sure there are people who call themselves "libertarians" who really believe in those things, but believing in those things is absolutely not limited to "libertarians."

But in the USA at least, the desire to eliminate regulations and government oversight to allow people take advantage of others without suffering consequences is, for the most part, something mostly associated with people who call themselves "libertarians," whether they actually are (in the traditional sense) or not.

BTW, this entirely depends on the society. You may know that the Swiss reserve are required to keep assault rifles in homes for national defense-- these are kept by army reserve, about 10% of the 2 million home weapons in Switzerland. The ammo for the military weapons has mostly been stored centrally since 2008, but that's rather recent. The worst disaster was somebody with a pump-action shotgun in Zug Canton who killed 14 parliamentarians in 2001, but that was back when assault weapon ammo was still stored at home. Interesing, eh? Essentially all rifles and pistols are registered, but on the other hand automatic weapons are availalbe to most adults in most cantons who don't have some record of crime or unstable behavior.

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/front/Move_to_...392065000&ty=st

The Swiss are still fighting about it. They have 300 army firearms deaths a year, a pitance for 7.5 million people and 600,000 (I kid you not) fully automatic weapons.

You'll have to forgive them, they're still a little shell-shocked since being invaded in 1798.