[liberationtech] GeoIP is a threat to democracy

[Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes]

Amen
On Jul 11, 2014 12:36 AM, "Nicolas Bourbaki" <nicolasbourbaki at riseup.net>
wrote:

> It seemed logical that old-world media companies would want to restrict
> access to content on the Internet. GeoIP was then used to induce
> distribution barriers analogous to those found offline so that existing
> models of rent extraction could survive. And while this is something
> most of us would be fine with leaving to the invisible hand of the
> market we can not take the same stance when governments start to use
> these measures to dictate who is a citizen, and who is not, and who is
> provided civil liberties and who is not. This is what the XKeyscore
> rules made clear was happening and will continue to happen in the future.
>
> The internet standards and governing bodies cannot relinquish themselves
> of political responsibility any longer. The structure of a protocol will
> dictate our behavior and in this world there is no such thing as an
> agnostic protocol. The term "neutrality" is false. In the context of
> service providers battling with media providers over who gets a larger
> share of rent from consumers, "neutrality" may be the agreed upon term
> but the policies that result from this debate will have real impact on
> our behavior, the ethics of the protocol, and our liberties.
>
> Once a neutral protocol is understood as an oxymoron standards bodies
> with charters claiming to serve the betterment of all nations,
> corporations and consumers should be clearly seen for what they are: a
> new Tower of Babel. Those of us still placing stones one on top of the
> other within these institutions should take a moment to look at our work
> and ask what are we actually doing.
>
> In 2010 the DHS went against their own charter and hijacked ICANN's to
> take down hundreds of domains for unclear copyright claims. Why is ICANN
> still relevant when decentralized models could easily replace them when
> supported by either the EU, Google or Firefox? And when the NSA can with
> absolutely no oversight claim that the location of an IP in some table
> dictates who gets civil liberties, why have we not replaced BGP or at
> least begun to build parallel models within universities or like minded
> corporations that could support reverse tunnels through collision free
> identities similar to Tor's onion service handles?
>
> The number of protocols that falsely advertised as agnostic are many. We
> should be ashamed that it took such a scandal as pervasive western
> surveillance to awaken us to this falsehood when so many, living under
> more hostel regimes, have lived with the tools of oppression we built
> into these protocols from the very start.
>
> If we cannot convince our institutions to take fixing these falsehoods
> seriously by considering civil liberties within the protocol, and
> overcome the obstacles of legacy systems, and work for support for
> parallel models, than at least we can hasten the demise of this Babel to
> start anew. Indeed this may sadden optimists such as Larry Page and
> others that are waiting for technology to become our messiah. But as
> Benjamin Franklin would say, those who would trade liberated networks
> for efficient networks deserve neither.
>
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