Imagine There's No YouTube
Some interesting news yesterday: An Italian court has held 3 high-level Googler's criminally liable for a cruel video posted to YouTube by Italian teenagers. The reaction of the blogosphere was predictable, decrying censorship and insisting that the judge was out of touch and unrealistic. This blog post will take the opposite position. I'm aware that there are real free-speech issues at hand in Italy -- I appreciate those concerns, but looking at the silver lining will expand your horizons. I get so tired of hearing the same "internet freedom" mantra coming from all the hackers. To me it sounds like the majority of the web is doing big-industry's handiwork for them. I don't intend this to be flame-bait, but rather the opposite, to help people realize how indoctrinated they've become with corporate agendas.
At issue in the Google case is a legal provision called safe harbor, which essentially states that online service providers are not liable for what their users do, as long as they are responsive to requests to remove or remedy the bad stuff. The argument is that the post-office shouldn't be sued for the the content of the mail. Without safe harbor protections there would be no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Craigslist. (Note: I'm not saying we should strip safe-harbor from ISPs and phone companies -- they really are the metaphorical post-office. Facebook and YouTube, on the other hand, are more like the metaphorical nightclub, and I'm not so sure they deserve safe harbor protection. I'd also maintain that Amazon EC2 and other server-rental services deserve safe harbor. They are like the nightclub's landlord, and shouldn't be liable for underage drinking.)
So let's turn our assumptions on their heads, stop running interference for (aspiring and actual) multi-billion dollar corporations, and imagine a web without safe-harbor protections. We have to remember that we built the web and that we can reshape it into whatever fits us best, not the other way around.
When the web was young, most sites were created, hosted and maintained by individuals, scratching their own itch. They covered any topic, arcane or jejune, and did it all with an individual style and richness that is impossible to simulate with the cookie-cutter web most of use see today. My task here is to imagine a web that is both individual and hand-made, as well as massively popular. I'm well aware there are technical and cultural roadblocks to getting there, but the act of imagining can repay us many times over.
The fundamental difference between the industrial web and the personal web is the scale of services. Safe harbor essentially says, "don't worry, if you get too big to know what's happening on your site, we don't expect you to notice everything that happens." Without safe harbor, sites are limited to become only as large as the operator can fathom. That means your average bulletin board about putting stupid exhaust pipes on four-cylinder sports cars would be unchanged, but at current rates, YouTube would become unmanageable after only a few hours of uploads.
You're probably thinking "Oh noes I needz my YouTubez! How will I ever share Mr. Whiskers piano playing skill with the world?" Many of the online reactions to the Italian Google case saw it as an attack on personal expression and free speech. I'm arguing that it's not. It's an attack on industrial production. The product in this case the aggregation of everyone's cat videos. The reason Google will take down your video if someone so much as suggests that Mr. Whiskers' piano stylings are actually a Metallica song, is that they don't care about your individual free-speech, they care about the ability to farm and profit from the phenomenon of cat videos en mass.
Nearly all business models in the information world are based on artificial scarcity. The online content farms profit based on the fact that it's hard to share your own content, yourself, via a means of production that you control. This is the central fact free-speech activists should be upset about.
Don't confuse Google's freedom with your own. If there is something to be angry about it's that the shape of the internet has conspired to dampen online expression that doesn't go through a 3rd party like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Activists should seize the means of production, not defend the industrial captors of those means.
So what would the personal web look like, in an era when the web has become mainstream? I hear arguments that it'd be missing all the people who are too lazy to do anything other than check a status boxes on Facebook. Firstly, I don't think that'd be so bad. Would we really be less connected without "it's complicated" and Lil' Green Patch? I also hear arguments that technology isn't ready to support a personal web, running at the edges. I disagree with this.
One of the most-cited (and sadly not influential enough) books on economics is E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. The key argument is that growth for the sake of growth is a false path, and that enoughness is a better goal. One quote I'd like share: "The most striking about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed." I'll leave it to the reader to apply this quote to the industrial web.
The number one technology we need to make the personal web, is simple web servers everywhere. The last thing I'd like is to stick to a web run by nerds, so these personal servers be as user-friendly as Flickr or Facebook. There's no reason the wifi box crammed behind your TV can't host your videos and blog posts, and constantly mirror them to the cloud for backup and worldwide availability in the case of power outages at home. Instead of iPhoto offering to upload your photos to MobileMe or Facebook, it could make it simple to publish them to your own web server. This is not a technology problem, it's a problem of imagination.
To really get the personal web off the ground, we need symmetrical broadband connections and DNS that's optimized to treat everyone on the net as a peer. The line from your house, to your ISP, via my ISP to my house isn't designed to serve traffic. It's not so much about the bandwidth (you won't be hosting all of Facebook, just your profile page) it's about reliability. A first-gen iPhone has enough horsepower to serve your "profile" page to your 1000 best friends. But that doesn't matter if your home address keeps changing. Net freedom activists should be pressuring for a return to the original peer-based internet architecture, not defending the content aggregators.
There is already a movement of scholars and activists working on the last mile problem, but they've been largely dismissed as irrelevant to free speech. Hopefully I've convinced you otherwise. Or at least that another world is worth imagining.
The attitude of this post was influenced a lot by Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not a Gadget. I really don't wish the employees of Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc ill will and especially don't like the idea of holding them criminally liable for user's behavior (I consider many of them my friends.) But I don't take well to the orthodoxy that any attack on the configuration of bits or bytes anywhere in the universe is an attack on the hacker soul.
So please, use your imagination, and do more than just echo the Boing-Boing line. Yes, shutting down YouTube would be a short-term blow to free communication. But the world we could create instead might be richer and much more free.
by andy, 2010/02/25 18:14:51 +0000
+1
by Jon Gretar, 2010/02/25 18:48:57 +0000
This goes way beyond free speech. It's about if you can convict someone for a "crime" he had nothing to do with. I can't see anything out of this verdict other than that it is ok now to sue post office employees if you get a threatening letter.
And it is not about Google's freedom. Google lost no freedom as Google was not charged with anything. 4 employees of Google however were charged and 3 convicted. And none of them even knew about the case until after youtube had done everything the police asked them to do.
So it's not about free speech and it has nothing to do with the internet. It's about basic human rights. The fact that your freedom can not be taken from unless you have done something wrong. It's about a justice system gone wrong. It should not be a possibility to hang you if a bunch of people are just angry enough. The fact that youtube and the internet had something to do with this story is really a minor issue to me at least. For me it's about a dangerous path europe is heading down where we all are giving up civil liberties.
by Peter, 2010/02/25 19:10:18 +0000
@Jon: I failed to understand your analogy of comparing Youtube with post office. Youtube videos are public, while the potential letter see nobody but you. Those two are totally unrelated things.
by Peter, 2010/02/25 19:14:59 +0000
And yet you're using Twitter. Hilarious.
by Francesco Gigli, 2010/02/25 19:15:42 +0000
Yes, this is an interesting point of view. But in Italy (where i live) you would be legaly responsible for this comment i posted on your personal web server. IMHO there is a policy problem. Don't you think so?
by J Chris A, 2010/02/25 19:20:14 +0000
@Peter -- I've got nothing against using the tools of the old regime to build the new one.
by reagan Gibbs, 2010/02/25 19:21:13 +0000
Amen to Jon Gretar with his elegant post. I will add this question: How can a professional legalist (like the italian judge involved) be allowed to conflate ethical responsibility and legal responsibility? They are not and never will be equivalent. Congruent. The same. Whatever your flavor.
by J Chris A, 2010/02/25 19:24:47 +0000
@Francesco
There are some deep issues here. If we go back to the real-world analogies of post-office, nightclub, and landlord, we'll see that having a single underage drinker isn't enough to shutdown a nightclub. Having a pattern of underage drinking is.
A sane judiciary would probably feel the same way about blog comments. If your blog or forum is a magnet for defamation (due to a look-the-other-way polict), it shouldn't be protected (4chan). If there are isolated instances, then I'd hope the judge would be content with a warning.
In the end, law strives to be closer to common sense than to computer code (as flawed as it's efforts might be in practice.)
by mikeal, 2010/02/25 19:49:10 +0000
@jon
As I understand it Italian law doesn't treat corporations like people the way US law does and it is traditional for lawsuits to be brought against executives in an attempt to hold corporate officers accountable.
If this was a lawsuit against an energy company we would all be cheering that executives were being held accountable for the actions of the institution even if it didn't need to be proven that they were fully aware of the institutional actions they were charged with. This is one of the ways rich people are never held accountable in the United States, plausible deniability.
This really is about safe harbor and whether or not safe harbor applies to cases that violate Italian privacy laws. The lawsuit is against Google and the executives the prosecutor sees as being responsible for the policy and process that allows Google to, in his view, violate Italian privacy laws for a whopping 10 hours.
by Ryan Paul, 2010/02/25 19:55:53 +0000
It's important to remember that our "industrial captors" aren't the only entities that are protected by Safe Harbor provisions. I have to wonder if your position on this issue would be the same if the Web site in question was Wikipedia instead of YouTube.
It seems incredibly elitist and dysfunctional to argue that people who can't operate their own servers are merely "lazy" Facebookers who have nothing to contribute.
What about the subject area experts who publish valuable information on Wikipedia but don't have the technical expertise to run their own Web sites? Centralized Web services that lower the barrier to entry for sharing content are beneficial to everyone.
I can understand the value of shifting towards a more decentralized Internet infrastructure where there is more choice, competition, and autonomy, but not at the cost raising the barriers to entry and depriving people of access.
by Selena, 2010/02/25 19:59:59 +0000
Peer-to-peer is a civil liberty. When we want to communicate with our friends, we should be able to do it, without mediation or filtering.
I think constantly about what the impact on those who have strong, important relationships around the world with people - but only communicate through third parties - when those third party services disappear.
We need to own our own social networks - and not just in the sense that we have a graph of who is connected to who.. but all of the data, and the method of connecting to those people, entirely.
Unplugging isn't just about turning distraction devices and apps off - it's ultimately about being able to communicate with your friends and family at all, in whatever way you want.
by Hagus, 2010/02/25 20:01:18 +0000
I agree with Jon that the central issue is a legal one. The Italian legal system has apparently gone after some individual Google employees as scapegoats, despite Google making an absolute best effort at handling the situation appropriately. Nobody should be howling about the "freedom" to upload videos, the howling should be about the courts abusing their powers.
And, we centralized our web services for the same reason we centralized our food production, manufacturing, and more – centralizing services brings efficiency and frees up the population to engage in other activities. I don't want to run my own web server or blogging service. I don't even want a device in the house that is magical and does it all for me, any more than I want a corn plantation in my backyard being harvested by robots.
Content aggregators give us high uptime, sophisticated services beyond the reach of any home user or home device, and the potential to interact with them somewhat anonymously if we desire. How would you like to write a subversive blog post about the government and then host it on your home's web server?
Centralization and specialization is a natural phenomenon and just about every human endeavor has followed this path. The best thing we can do is ensure this occurs in a structure that preserves individual rights and freedoms. By ensuring that the laws are not so onerous that they stifle efficiency, but not so loose that the service can run amok and self destruct. And by ensuring competition between centralized services is encouraged!
by Jon Gretar, 2010/02/25 20:23:54 +0000
@Peter: The point of an analogy is not to be the same from every point of view but only from the point argued. Of course there are differences between a post office and a web site. But the point is: don't kill the messenger. :)
@JChris: Well.. If we continue with the post office analogy then the post office has a pattern of delivering threatening letters. :)
In the night club example it would be like saying that a 10 person club with one underage inside is better than a 10.000 people club with 2 underage inside. There is no "pattern" with google they are just popular. They have strict rules and every time a video is flagged it is usually removed within an hour or so. I know as I have flagged a video for youth violence myself.
But what really worries me here is that I can't see how one could be both popular AND legal under this system. Making people(or companies) responsible for every piece of thing that appears on their companies server, without any regard for how long it is there or who put it there, is a ridiculous requirement that can never be accomplished. Laws cannot be written that practically forces people to be criminals if they choose to do a legal thing.
by Apphacker, 2010/02/25 20:58:36 +0000
What happens when GoDaddy (or whatever register you use) revokes your domain because they're afraid of being held liable for your domain? What about the hosting provider you use? What happens when your ISP shuts off your internet connection because they don't want to be liable for your content? Why do you think this would only stop at a remote website you don't upload content too? Lack of imagination maybe. :/
by J Chris A, 2010/02/25 20:59:21 +0000
"Centralized Web services that lower the barrier to entry for sharing content are beneficial to everyone."
@Ryan Paul,
I agree that in the current environment, centralized services make it easier for people to put content online. That is the very fact I'm lamenting.
I see it as a lack of imagination that web service creators still think in terms of centralized services. Let's fix that, it's not so hard to do.
by David Semeria, 2010/02/25 21:00:36 +0000
Your post is a good example of sophistry.
You employ an example (the Google judgement) to support your case (a smaller, more personal web). Unfortunately, they are entirely unrelated.
Indeed, it could be argued that removing safe harbour provisions would actually benefit the larger players - who have the revenues, resources and economies of scale to police their networks.
As to your point advocating a return to the "cottage industry" the web once was - well that's a matter of personal opinion. Two points:
(i) there is no reason why the big and the small web cannot co-exist; there are enough domain names for everyone.
(ii) democracy? There is a reason FB, and YouTube have so many users. People like them. Who are we to dictate to people how the web should look like. It's their web too. Early adopters have no preferential rights over late adopters.
My 0.02 Euro.
by J Chris A, 2010/02/25 21:02:53 +0000
@Hagus
"we centralized our web services for the same reason we centralized our food production, manufacturing, and more"
I think this will turn out to have been the defining mistake of the industrial era.
by J Chris A, 2010/02/25 21:05:33 +0000
@David
I think you are taking the whole thing to seriously. The point is to imagine another way.
by David Semeria, 2010/02/25 21:13:06 +0000
@jon - if your post was meant to be ironic then I apologize for taking it too seriously, but - assuming this is the case - the irony was much too subtle for this particular reader.
by J Chris A, 2010/02/25 22:37:54 +0000
@David
It's not meant to be ironic. It's meant to provoke the imagination. Just because we're currently (mostly) beholden to centralized services doesn't mean we have to be.
The safe-harbor provisions currently empower the industrial web, much like the highway system empowers industrial agriculture. This Hacker News response to the original Google/Italy story shares some of my perspective that things don't have to be how they are (or even a short leap from today's world.)
We can do better.
Just because something is the status-quo doesn't mean we have to agree with it.
by Johan Aludden, 2010/02/26 08:15:48 +0000
If I understood it correct, and with a bit of thought, one thing that you suggest is that the users gets and install there own version of the application and then the origin company can create a search service above it. In that the user owns and are responsible for the information stored but you also gain some of the benefits that the centralized service provides.
In addition if the creator of the service also provides hosting and managing of the application it will be easy to install and upgrade for the end user and according to you the hosting company should not be responsible for the content hosted.
Is that correct and a new solution to the problem that you see?
by Bertil Hatt, 2010/02/26 11:42:32 +0000
I'd love Google, or rather 'Free'-video communities, to offer a system, not a service, to host your own domain (not unlike WordPress does outside of wordpress.com, only simpler). That would empower all users as you call it, however, it would also encourage (like all recent internet laws in Europe) many people to adopt the same behaviour that only the worst criminals had to far.
by Loup Vaillant, 2010/02/26 14:26:08 +0000
@ Jon Gretar: Not everyone on the internet is a messenger. The "don't kill the messenger" principle can't apply to everyone.
Let's say I publish some heinous racist text on my web site. I should go to prison. Now, what if I say (and prove) that I didn't wrote it? It is my website, shouldn't be held accountable for this text anyway? Now what if this text appear on the comments on my blog, and I have few comments? What if I have more comments? What if I have thousands of comments? Where is the limit?
Technically YouTube don't let you publish your videos. They publish your video for you. This is their website, after all. In this respect, they are no more messenger than I am.
My ISP is different. My ISP is supposed to move bits, without looking (unless you accept permanent wire-tapping). If they don't look at my messages, of course they shouldn't be held accountable for them.
Also, "safe harbour for no one except ISPs and hosting providers" is relatively easy to define. If we give that to aggregations sites as well, that could spur legal uncertainty. I think this is a trade-off worth discussing.
by a0n, 2010/02/26 17:53:18 +0000
well put
by Anonymouse, 2010/02/26 18:55:38 +0000
@David said "removing safe harbour provisions would actually benefit the larger players - who have the [..] economies of scale to police their networks."
A tiny bit. But a small community site could recruit it's members for moderation too. But instead of worrying about that, think of the RIGHT architecture of the web.
Currently, the facebook/youtubes of the world are building giant walled gardens (just like AOL and CompuServe used to be). Their only goal in life is to be a useless middleman trying to monetize other people's content. Do we NEED that?
Instead, think of a world where people posted their own content to their own web site, and owned their own data. The facebooks/youtubes would just be search engines, not content hosters. (Ted Nelson imagined this many years ago with Xanadu.)
Our current rules make it easy to build these aggregation sites, but what if that were hard? We'd need some better software, but we could actually do a distributed facebook/youtube without the middleman mining all our data and selling our eyeballs.
by Jake, 2010/02/27 07:19:52 +0000
Great post, got me thinking. I'd always believed that decentralising the internet was a 'good thing', but over the last 3 or 4 years I've swayed the other way, due to services like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter and my own web-server-in-the-house crashing. You, however, provide a compelling argument to get me thinking on the topic again!
Jake
by bcmoney, 2010/07/02 04:47:03 +0000
Excellent points on decentralization and the "web we can make" .vs. "the web we have". Also I see in the comments some interesting arguments from the other camp, in favor of the big data silos... possibly from employees past or present or future (i.e. hopefuls), but that's beside the point...
Where I firmly believe your viewpoint trumps there's though, is the acknowledgement that "Moore's Law" always eventually overtakes "Metcalfe's Law" (to paraphrase). By this I mean that the new things you can do (or computational tasks you can accomplish) easily on your own system thanks to hardware advancements or accelerations always eventually catches up and surpasses the benefits of being part of a particular telecommunications system or network. Some examples are the benefits of IM as opposed to being a member of a single social network, or P2P video-conferencing as opposed to being part of a video sharing network, or how you don't even need distributed attacks to break most encryption schemes anymore, a single computer and parallel processing can accomplish as much as a network of computers could not too long ago. This closely matches the average curve of any new product cycle, "Introduction-Growth-Maturity-Decline"... and of course, the moment a computational limit (whether human or technological) is foreseen, a new network pops up and steals the mind/money-share temporarily by simplifying it and making it easier and thus making it seem more accessible...
However, when you consider the fact that a 32 Gig iPhone holds more computing power and technological capability in it than most full-fledged web servers in the early to mid 90s (and indeed, even in comparison to some still running today), its then easy to see where the concept of our own "personal devices" serving our own personal networks will take us.
What can we accomplish by the end of this decade when our mobile devices have more power than the average distributed Cloud Computing cluster of today? When the collaborative technology that came out all the noise and racket of the "Web 2.0" movement has added Semantics and matured to the point of the blog/wiki/sns/collaboration software being easy enough to install and administer that even my grandma could do it... because by then it only takes 1 click and my "personal agent" will do the rest and make sure it is running properly for my 1000 friends/family, 24/7.
Human ingenuity and recognition of potential and their associated roadblocks (fiscal, political, societal, etc) are truly the only limitations... but one thing's for sure, the future ain't centralized data silos or walled gardens, and the grass IS always greener on the other side.