The Uncomfortable Implications of an Open Internet

June 24, 2013

In one of the great ironies of our time, the single largest repository of information in human history, the Internet, itself contains no clear record of when, how, or by whom it was invented.
 
A Google search retrieves dozens of contributors to what we now know as the internet, from Leonard Kleinrock, who wrote about the concept in 1961, to Tim Berners-Lee, who developed HTML in 1990. It reveals that Al Gore invented the Internet, and also that he may have never actually said that he did. It reveals that the guy who invented the wind-up radio thinks that the Internet is melting kids’ brains.
In essence, it reveals everything even marginally related to inventors, the Internet, or both.
This depth of genuine knowledge, crammed into an industrial-sized blender with equal parts misinformation and self-serving lies, for better or worse deprives us of the concise “Thomas Edison” answer we’re looking for. Perhaps this is more realistic; in the real world, almost nothing is binary. When you empower everyone, everywhere to contribute their perspective, virtually every topic suddenly becomes many times more complex than the history books of our youth may have let on.
Such is the state of the modern Internet. Regardless of what Leonard Kleinrock or Tim Berners-Lee intended for their creation, it has evolved into an organic extension of the best and worst attributes of humanity. If it ever was a carefully engineered utopia, all semblance of that order has been shattered, like Jurassic Park when the power went out. We’d like it to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. What we get instead is the truth, the whole truth, and everything else that someone with a keyboard wants to say.
Many aren’t comfortable with this arrangement. From the hilarious but somewhat unsettling Matthew Inman saga to the dark underbelly of Reddit, the Internet illuminates and magnifies the unseemly elements of society that have always existed. For the most part, it pays no heed to the laws or customs of civil society. When a New York newspaper compiled and published the addresses of every registered gun owner in the greater New York area last year, there was plenty of outrage, but no legal action. Instead, a Connecticut lawyer responded by publishing the home addresses and satellite overheads of everyone working at the paper.
I’m not sure who’s on the right side of this nasty exchange, or if there even is a right side. What I can say about it is that in the Wild West, disputes often end in this unique and ruthless brand of vigilante justice. The Internet is a place that is truly free, where the term ‘freedom’ is wholly unqualified and stripped of any positive connotations. Anyone who operates there (myself included) should be aware of this, particularly if you make a habit of pissing people off.
Businesses, too, must adapt to these new standards of freedom.
There once was a time where a good IP lawyer could protect you from even your most uncreative competitor. Sometime in the vicinity of the Napster lawsuit, however, it became apparent that businesses can’t rely on previous standards of IP alone to protect them. The Internet won’t, and probably can’t, work that way, even if there is one day a serious attempt to strengthen Internet IP laws. Its dynamic, international, and anonymous nature, combined with a lack of legal precedents, will still leave a tremendous gray area in which IP violators will seek refuge.
That doesn’t mean there’s no way to protect your business from the ravages of the Internet. The Wild West may not have had a powerful central authority to keep order, but it did have its own brand of self justice, administered by the victims and their neighbors.
In the Internet age, justice is enforced in part by IP address reputations and security. But more importantly, order is kept by giving preferential treatment to people who play by the rules. A controlled API, for instance, can give select partners access to your data while putting their seedier competitors at a huge disadvantage. If your data’s truly that valuable and piracy is sufficiently expensive, the economics should put a pirate out of business without any legal action whatsoever. Spotify and Pandora may not have eliminated audio piracy, but they have presented would-be pirates with an attractive and reasonably priced alternative.
That’s the Internet we live in, whether we like it or not. We long ago lost the ability to centrally control who can use the internet, and for what purposes. If you’re an Internet-enabled business, especially one based on trafficking data, you have little control over what happens to that information once it leaves your four walls.
The most savvy inhabitants of this environment use the open Internet to their advantage while enforcing their own protective policies, manipulating the economics to make piracy, at best, marginally profitable. When bandits ride into their town, they don’t wait for lawyers to come to the rescue. They give a silver deputy star to the nearest developer and saddle-up.

Behavioral Data Analyst

Nick is a Behavioral Data Analyst at <a href="https://www.betterment.com/">Betterment</a>. Previously he analyzed OpenView portfolio companies and their target markets to help them focus on opportunities for profitable growth.