Access Denied: The online clampdown is beginning

This is the golden age of the internet, a time of glorious anarchy where information is free and anyone, rich or poor, can blog their views to the world. But government and big business are moving in - the clampdown has started.

Rafael Behr
The Observer (London)

Jamie McCoy used to have his own patch on a London street. It was a strip of the Victoria Embankment where he would sit every day and beg. He might have earned enough money by mid-morning to convert his cup of grimy copper coins into a crisp note and then convert his crisp note into a bag of heroin. Then he would go back to work, begging to get some breakfast. He lived on the streets for 30 years.Jamie had a buddy. No one survives on the streets on their own. They had been knocking around together, homeless and wasted for what seemed like their whole lives. Then, one day, the buddy lay down in the middle of the road and died.

'I thought he was just having one of his naps. He used to do that, just lie down and have a sleep wherever he stood,' says Jamie over a pint and a cigarette in an east London pub. 'That affected me a lot.'

Jamie started to feel lonely.

Around a year later, he found himself sharing a hit with a young woman, barely out of her teens. She looked twice her age. She reminded him of himself a lifetime ago. This time, he felt lonely and angry. He threw his last bag of heroin off Waterloo Bridge, wen to a shelter run by Crisis, the homelessness charity, and withdrew from the drug, from his old self.

That was five years ago. Jamie learned to read and write, stuff he had missed at school. He loved it. And sitting at a computer in the London office of Crisis, he discovered the web.

Here was a place where Jamie was not an ex-junkie. Here, Jamie was a one-man publishing empire, broadcasting the experience of homelessness to the world through Jamie's Big Voice, his blog.

'I think of it as an independent newspaper,' he says with pride. 'A newspaper that I can trust, because all the sources in it are mine.'

Jamie's Big Voice gets readers from around the world, sometimes in their hundreds, sometimes in their thousands. He was invited to a party in Westminster where the Speaker of the House of Commons claimed to be a reader of the blog. That pleased Jamie. It could only happen now, early in the 21st century, the time when a homeless bloke with a borrowed computer can have the same reach around the world as Rupert Murdoch. It is a precious and fragile moment, a golden age of web democracy.

And all just under 15 years since the internet ceased to be a thing - a network of computers - and became a place. That was when Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist based in Switzerland, developed a way of linking documents to each other in a big web. That was when the frontier to a new society was opened. That was when it became possible for Jamie McCoy to swap a patch of the Embankment for a plot of the web.

The size of Jamie's audience depends on who has linked to him. And blogging is all about links, a line of code that turns a piece of information into a destination, a refutation, a rebuttal, a recommendation.

One new blog is started every couple of seconds. The total number is hard to estimate because no one agrees on the definition. Around 15 million is a conservative guess. The total number of pages on the web is around 600 billion, or 100 per person on the planet. The number of people with some access to the web is around one billion.

But today's bloggers occupy a special role. They are, in fact, the second-generation web citizens, the first being the pioneer geeks who developed their sites in the early Nineties. Unlike the trailblazers, the new wave needed no significant technical know-how. Most of them don't speak the programming languages from which their blogs are built. They occupy digital prefabs and trailers crafted from easy-to-use, free software. They eke out an audience through the barter of tips, links and files. Their currency is trust. The community is open to all, self-policing, keen on transparency and ruthless about dishonesty.

In an era whose triumphant idea is capitalism, where success is generally measured in the accumulation of wealth, it is hard to conceive of a parallel society established and self-governed on principles of trust and common ownership. But it exists. The biggest aggregation of human experience and knowledge ever created belongs to everyone, it is available on demand and it is free.

But for how long? Ranged against the new culture of digital freedom is a strange coalition of spooks, suits and vandals. There are governments unable to resist the technology that can track our every move; there are corporations lusting after the attention of the 2 billion eyeballs focused on screens; and there are the spammers, clogging up the net with junk mail, hijacking computers to peddle trash.

'The internet, the first many-to-many medium, was going to liberate us from the tyranny of centralised media and the rancid consumerism that says we are merely receptacles for what Big Business, including Big Media, wants us to buy,' writes Dan Gillmor, a San Francisco-based writer, in We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People. 'But the clampdown has begun. Everywhere we look, the forces of centralisation and authority are finding ways to slow and, perhaps, halt altogether the advances we've made.'

Gillmor is a chronicler of Citizen Media, the movement to transform news and entertainment from a one-way transaction (we make, you consume) to a conversation (we all make, we all swap). Taking its form from the web, it is oceanic, vast and shapeless. It has no leadership, although it has some poster children - Wikipedia, the excellent, collaboratively built encyclopedia; Ohmynews, the Korean newspaper written by its readers - but it is bigger than any site.

It is big enough to strike envy and fear into businessmen and politicians. Governments have been slow to appreciate the social changes effected by technologies, but quick to see their potential application for exerting control and invading privacy.

Bloggers have already been harassed and imprisoned by repressive regimes around the world. China has successfully walled off the entire internet for millions of users. The technology that enables governments to hoard emails and trace every click of the mouse across the web is too alluring for liberal democracies to ignore. Web snooping will almost certainly form a part of UK anti-terror legislation later this year.

Then there are the big media and entertainment corporations of the US. They are peeved because their audience is being poached by a DIY army of online publishers and broadcasters. Big Media also own the copyright to most of the English-speaking world's popular culture, a resource that is systematically plundered, mashed up, remixed, copied and passed around the web.

Not surprisingly, the owners don't like it when people share their intellectual property around without paying dues. Stealing, they call it. They will sue if they catch you. If you are too young, they will sue your parents.

Business also lobbies hard for politicians to make that sort of thing even more against the law than it already is. The result, say the citizen journalists, is a repressive intellectual property regime that stomps on creativity. The media companies see the remixers and swappers as apologists for piracy and organised crime.

'Most of those currently in the hallways of power have no clue about digital technologies or the cultural shift now taking place,' says JD Lasica, executive director of Ourmedia.org, an online creative archive. 'The entertainment industries still wield considerable clout on Capitol Hill.'

But for most web citizens, the trench warfare that goes on between digital freedom fighters and Hollywood studios is not the problem. The online party for them is being spoiled by the crooks, pervs and fraudsters.

Sharon Lemon is in charge of policing Web UK and she doesn't let her children visit internet chatrooms. She isn't hysterical about the threat of paedophiles, but nor is she naive. As Detective Chief Superintendent of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, she knows the score. DCS Lemon used to head Operation Ore, the excavation of Britain's underground child pornography network. When it started digging, it found 7,000 people. That was in 1998, when plenty of Britons didn't have internet access. That means it isn't all just a moral panic. There really are a lot of people who use the net for child porn. DCS Lemon is in a good position to see how accurately the web reflects the world that created it. All of human experience is there, including the dark side. And, without any borders, it is very hard to police.

'If anything, the internet works for criminals much better than it does for anyone else,' she says. 'It gives all the advantages of global networking without any of the constraints of the law.'

If you shut down an illegal site in Manchester, the same stuff appears the next day in Moscow. In addition to the paedophiles, police are chasing a new global breed of robbers, blackmailers and money launderers. Meanwhile, creeping up the political agenda is hate crime and the propagation of terrorist ideas by internet.

A technology novice could easily conclude from newspaper reports that the portion of the web not published by reputable media companies has been colonised exclusively by sex offenders, jihadi fundamentalists and a few crackpot conspiracy theorists.

Not so, says DCS Lemon: 'You have to work to the theory that most people are generally good.'

But for large media owners, fear of the poorly lit, sinister back alleys of the web is useful. It drives people into 'walled gardens', safe havens of manicured web content, provided on subscription; guaranteed free of bad guys; well stocked with familiar brands.

The problem with walled gardens is that people get bored. They hanker for the vagaries of life on the frontier. Once there, they soon discover that the dark side does not leap out at you; you have to hunt it down. The medium isn't to blame.

That is what makes the web a 'pull' medium. You make the show yourself, another reason why traditional media are flummoxed. They only know how to push stuff down the pipes. They keep building walls around the garden as fast as the web users breach them.

Rupert is 74 years old and, by his own admission, a bit long in the tooth for this internet malarkey. The next generation, he feels, get it better.

'I'm a digital immigrant. I wasn't weaned on the web, nor coddled on a computer,' Murdoch said in April. 'My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives.'

Murdoch was speaking earlier this year to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He had been invited in his capacity as chief executive of News Corporation.

News Corp had, until recently, generally failed to grasp the significance of the web. Its few ventures online had failed. But, suddenly, there is vim in the old empire.

'The digital native doesn't send a letter to the editor any more. She goes online and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers,' he said.

Deed followed word. News Corp has set aside a war chest of $1-2bn for online developments. It recently bought Intermix Media, owner of Myspace.com, a self-contained community of blogs for teens and twentysomethings. Murdoch is also in the market for a search engine. The News Corp strategy can be simply pieced together: take possession of the web allotments that all but the most hardened geeks depend on to pitch their blogging tents, then rent them out; sweeten the deal with privileged access to music and movies.

Contd...

Part Two

The goal must be to marshal the energy that bloggers currently expend on creating their own content into the consumption of industry-manufactured, pay-per-view content. Big Media want to retain the marketable frisson of Citizen Media and weed out the current culture of activism. The way to achieve this is by monopolising not only the copyright material that web users like to play with, but the tools that make it so easy for them to play.

'Nearly every day brings word of an entertainment company forming an alliance with a technology provider to corral an audience into walled gardens and force it to behave in a certain way,' warns Lasica.

Noam Chomsky, linguist and media commentator, agrees: 'Major efforts are being made by the corporate owners and advertisers to shape the internet so that it will be mostly used for commerce, diversion and so on. Then those who wish to use it for information, political organising and other such activities will have a harder time.'

Within 10 years, there will be no distinction between software companies, phone networks, search engines, movie studios and internet service providers. There will just be Web plc. To experience it, you will have to pay.

It is scarcely credible that, initially, all commerce was forbidden on the internet. Only gradually did the engineers and scientists running the hardware infrastructure of the net relax the rules. Last year, consumer trade online was worth $300bn.

To be fair to capitalism, the introduction of a profit motive created a spurt of innovation and growth. When Google started, it promised in its charter to 'do no evil'. It wanted to organise the world's information and it was good at it. So the web made sure everyone knew about this wonderful innovation. Google has never had to advertise.

But now, there is a growing feeling in the blogosphere that Google (worth around $50bn) has crossed the line. The power that it has over the way people search the web, and the data the company can amass about every individual user, is starting to look less like a project to organise the world's information and more like a bid to own it. The geeks have fallen out of love. Google, they say, has turned evil.

Not that that makes any difference. The web has been haranguing and maligning Microsoft as the embodiment of evil for years, because of the way it won't share anything - its codes, its platforms, its secrets. But around 95 per cent of the world's computers still run MS software. Bill Gates is still the richest man in the world.

And that is the problem for the current generation of web citizens. They are neither the aristocrats, nor the foot soldiers of the net. They are simply its conscience and they will scream and shout as the web is carved up and sold off. Jamie McCoy has few illusions about the current era of great web equality: 'As soon as someone finds a way to really make a lot of money out of blogging, that will kill it,' he says.

Not everyone is pessimistic. In fact, a lot of long-term web users are utopian about the future. All the hyperbole that was first draped around the web has proved inadequate. In the way it transforms and accelerates the communication of ideas between individuals and societies, it is about as big as the invention of the alphabet. And it is free. But for how long? The machinery of government and big business is only just beginning to understand the scale of the web. The culture of common purpose that prevails today is a product of neglect as much as design. The real gold rush has barely begun. To experience the sharing culture of the blogosphere today is like living in a commune built on an oil field. One day, the diggers will move in.

Ours is the last generation that will remember the analogue world and feel the difference between the two realms. For the next generation of digital natives, the web will be a slick, commercial machine. It will be just as big as the world we currently live in and it will be just as ruthless and as corrupt.

I hope I am wrong. I listen to today's web gurus, the people who preach freedom, and am fired with enthusiasm for the new digital society of the future. But I fear the odds are against them. An excess of idealism only seems to prove that the golden age of the web is, in fact, right now.