The theme of most of the proposals to correct the perceived deficiencies of the Internet is centralization and control. The acknowledged result of the end-to-end design is that there is little control over the packets that enter the network. This lack of control is seen as the problem.

The initial culture of the Internet was one of trust and honor. When the users were primarily academics researchers, the community was trusted to honor the limits of the systems. As the number of users increased, as the web became commercialized, and as the Internet infrastructure became a foundation of corporate networking, the peer pressure of a small community of users could no longer enforce proper behavior.

Centralization and control is coming in two forms. One group of measures imposes specific legislative/governmental restrictions at the end points and attempts to control the content of the packets. The second group of measures attempts of insert authority into the network by changing the architecture of both the PC and the Internet itself.

Controls.
There are two significant pushes to control the packets. One is the extension and enforcement of copyrights. The other is the imposition of content filtering. Both efforts have legitimate aims. The enforcement of copyrights is directed in the Constitution "...to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings...". And putting some restrictions on porn and hate is a natural thing to do. The concern is that there is an unwarranted spillover into other areas of society and the economy.

Copyrights.
The specific controls tied up with copyrights are the issues of free expression. The open design of the Internet breaks down barriers and makes it very easy for anyone to publish. There is a loss of control because now any crackpot can publish any hare-brained scheme or tortuous conspiracy theory. But even more insidious is that now, anyone with a PC and an Internet connection can publish that the emperor has no clothes.

It's not surprising that copyrights are being used to wrangle this openness. Copyrights were first created in England to control the spread of the printing press. The government determined what could get a copyright and only copyrighted materials could be published. Such is what is happening again today. What is surprising, and troubling, is the wider impact that copyright control is having.

The RIAA and the MPAA have been very successful in drumming up much hoopla about copyright controls, peer to peer networks, and piracy. Since the late 1990's they have been relatively successful in getting their agendas enacted by Congress. The Copyright Extension Act of 1998 not only added at least 25 years to the term of a new copyright but reached back and extended the copyrights that had already been granted. For all intents and purposes, the Act makes these copyrights permanent. In doing so, the Act does something more: by making these rights essentially permanent, it has formalized a new, synthetic form of property, called intellectual property, where the expression of an idea is the property.

More importantly for the Internet, in 1998 Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This legislation focuses on copyrights and digital materials and specifically on the technologies of protecting digital materials. What the DMCA does is makes it illegal to fabricate or possess tools to defeat the copy protection schemes of copyrighted materials, not matter how simple that copy protection may be. On the surface, the act dictates that only the copyright holder is allowed to make copies of the work. However, in the implementation, the DMCA is being used to also dictate the specific device that can play or display the copyrighted material.

While the emphasis of the legislation is to protect copyrights, it seems that copyrights are being used as a stalking horse to impose a broader control on both the Internet and the digital economy at large.

• Copyright laws are being used to quell discussion and dissent. All over the Internet, ISP companies are disabling web sites because of  unsubstantiated claims of copyright infringement. Because the DMCA protects ISPs from litigation if they take immediate actions to mitigate a potential violation, the ISPs tend to act without review. The net effect is to switch from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt.
• Whistle-blowing is squashed because what used to be an internal memo is now copyrighted intellectual property. When every jot, doodle, and musing has copyright protection unless explicitly NOT copyrighted, then the control of the information is absolute. The public sphere is constrained and the public interest is extinguished to the copyrights of private enterprise.
• The Lexmark printer company has been granted an injunction against a competing toner supply company based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Lexmark designed their printers so that a chip on the toner cartridge has to communicate properly with a chip on the printer in order for the printer to recognize that there is a toner cartridge installed. No toner cartridge and the printer won't work. More to the point, no communication between toner cartridge and printer and the printer won't work. In the past, it was sufficient for the printer manufacturers included a little pressure switch which a properly installed cartridge would trip so that the printer would know there was a cartridge in place. With the DMCA, it is illegal to  break the digital protection scheme of copyrighted materials. Here, the provision is being twisted to protect a whole market segment from fair and legitimate competition.

Next up: Filters (in progress)

References:
Timeline: The History of Copyright in the United States
Lawrence Lessig. the current keeper of the flame