A great anomaly: the non-passive Internet: the campaign to quash freedom on the net is moving into top gear.

Each of the following stories is true, fairly recent and a bit scary. See what you make of them.

1. Electronic voting machines are expected to loom large in the coming US elections. How easy are they to rig? Last year, students at Swarthmore College published on the Internet some candid and revealing emails circulating inside Diebold Election Systems, the largest US manufacturer. Accusing the students of copyright infringement, Diebold demanded that the material be removed from the students' web page. Swarthmore College duly removed it.

2. Russian Dimitry Sklyarov wrote a program to crack Adobe's eBook encipherment, allowing users to move eBooks from one machine to another, and enabling blind consumers to hear the books read out loud. The code Sklyarov wrote was legal where it was written, but when it was sold by his company in the United States it became illegal. When he came to the United States in July 2001 to talk about that code, the FBI arrested him and Sklyarov faced charges carrying a maximum sentence of twenty-five years. Later reverberations included his employer firm withdrawing--on legal advice--from an Amsterdam conference at which it was to discuss 'the flaws in digital rights-management software'.

3. One day after Brianna LaHara was sued by music executives for trading songs over the Internet, her mother agreed to fork out over $2000 rather than go to court. Brianna also issued an apology, on Recording Industry Association of America (IAA) stationery, as detailed in the New York Daily News. While Brianna's mother may be breathing easier--the RIAA had sought up to $150,000 for each of the 1000 songs Brianna traded--thirty other New Yorkers named in the suits are sweating it out. Brianna, an upper West Side Catholic schoolgirl, is just twelve years old.

4. When you download a text from an Internet site, it is the person running the site who can specify exactly what you are allowed to do with it. This can now be far less than the 'fair usage' usually allowed by 'printed formats' (books). For example, even a text well out of copyright and long in the public domain can carry the restriction: 'You have no right to read this aloud'. This actually happens with a downloaded Alice in Wonderland, for instance--you are breaching copyright if you read it to your child. So will you actually face a prosecution? Well, not if the mere threat of a suit has been enough to make your internet service provider (ISP) remove the material already--which is what generally happens.

Do these incidents have anything in common? I would say yes, they do, and it is this: each of them is a step in a campaign to rid our social arrangements of a conspicuous anomaly.

To have this interpretation explained, you need to entertain the suggestion, I hope not too far-fetched, that our social institutions obey a sweeping and fundamental Rule that can be roughly stated thus: the overwhelming majority of citizens are to be citizens in name only, playing out a passive role typified by (though by no means confined to) the freedom of the consumer--the freedom to exercise choice among a variety of goods. The range of goods and the conditions on which they are available are to be decided by usually anonymous 'others', sometimes well- or ill-disguised as 'the market', a powerful entity beyond the influence of an individual consumer.

When the choices available are between different models of very similar cars it is not so grave a constraint as those better-hidden and more far-reaching 'choices'--such as those that rule out social solutions, where the writ of the individual consumer is presumed not to run.

One piece of evidence that this Rule of Passivity indeed exists is the prevalent, much-commented-on feeling of powerlessness within the community. It is strikingly demonstrated by the social forms that new technological developments tend to take--forms that must comply with the Rule. Take television, for example. In principle, it could have unleashed a multitude of new opportunities for social interaction between individuals and groups, an explosion of creative communication and social identities. Instead, we have millions of individual boxes obediently displaying at any one time the same handful of images coming from the same handful of program selectors.

The Rule that produced actually-existing television did not need the services of any conspirators plotting in a smoke-filled room; it was shaped by much more effective and far deeper forces. Undoubtedly there are rich rewards (or at any rate, a lot of PhD theses) to be gamed by analysing what these forces were and how they operated. It is more pertinent to ask: are these forces far-sighted and omnipotent? And is new technology fatally doomed to serve the goal of mass passivity?

Once we look at the anomaly mentioned above, obvious and heartening answers emerge to each of these questions: no and no again. The exception that yields these answers--the modern piece of applied high tech whose social configuration is unashamedly anomalous and Rule-breaking--is the Internet.

The Internet was designed to be open to everyone with minimal equipment needed to use and augment it. As Lawrence Lessig writes, the Internet took off precisely because core resources were not 'divided among private owners'. Instead, the core resources of the Internet were left in a 'commons'. It was this commons that engendered the extraordinary innovation that the Internet has seen. A 'commons' is a resource to which everyone within a relevant community has equal access. It is a resource that is not, in an important sense, 'controlled'. Private or state-owned property is a controlled resource; only as the owner specifies may that property be used. But a commons is not subject to this sort of control.

Thus, the new technology embodied in the Internet took on a social form that blatantly broke the Rule of Passivity. It was inviting unrestrained use by any individual or interest group willing to master the minimal degree of skill needed--and if they lacked other means to acquire these skills, they could quickly turn to a convenient source of information in the Internet itself. This invitation to communicative activity was taken up with gusto, resulting in the many billions of net pages that are online today.

When the Zapatista uprising in Mexico first hit the mass media, in reports not generally friendly, those reports were not the only information available--the Zapatistas' own accounts and manifestoes were already there on the Net for anyone to read. It was not only organisations that could profit from this new outlet--isolated individuals could join a chat group and discover that people halfway around the world thought much as they did. This process of linkage into a 'virtual community', and consequent emancipation, was open to all--the revolutionaries, the wrongfully repressed, the lonely resisters (as well, it must be noted, as the holocaust deniers, the far-right militias in the US, the paedophiles everywhere ...).

Perhaps even more important has been another phenomenon in which the users withdraw from any hierarchical structures that could contain them by entering into interactions that are purely horizontal: 'peer2peer' (peer-to-peer) transmission. The activity drawing the most attention here has been the 'swapping' or trading of music directly from one PC user to another, but other varieties are common--the most traditional is the swapping of expensive programs at a substantial discount (usually 100 per cent). In an age where 'information' tends to increase its share of a commodity's value, it hardly needs stressing that this kind of reciprocal exchange constitutes a serious threat to the commodity form of exchange.

Mainly because the authorities were slow to appreciate the spectrum of threats from the Internet until it had already gestated into massive maturity, they were tardy in launching their counter attack. But today the campaign to flatten out this anomaly in the societal structure is in top gear, with governments and corporations forming a 'coalition of the willing' to bring the Net into line. Siva Vaidhyanathan has described the crisis that threatens the existing hierarchy as follows:

   The prospect of sub state violence, executed clandestinely
   front within, has haunted state officials for centuries. But
   now the most authoritarian states are faced with a different
   challenge: communicative technologies that seem to inspire
   independent thought. The communication of such thought is
   often irresponsible, sometimes dangerous, and always of
   concern to a centralised power.

How can authorities foster the commercial potential of networked communication while stemming its more troublesome aspects? American officials seek to empower private corporations to monitor and block unauthorised transmission of copyrighted files; Burmese officials ban public internet access altogether. The essence of the challenge facing these states is the same: re-engineering a set of otherwise anarchistic media so they can be harnessed for the benefit of the state. Every restrictive effort the Chinese government has made--regulating internet access through approved and licensed internet service providers; stifling the use of proxy servers; and quashing the use of encryption by private citizens--has been done in partnership with major American commercial software firms.

One could query whether this is really such a 'different' challenge--obviously, violent resistance can benefit from access to information and from opportunities to confer that are independent of distance. This linkage is real enough to enable measures that stifle the free flow of information to be sometimes disguised as a front in the 'war against terrorism'. And, while Vaidhyanathan is undoubtedly right when he includes the bigger software houses in the 'coalition of the willing', he seems to assume that 'the benefit of the state' will coincide with the benefit of the corporation. This neglects, among other things, the capitalist sector that profits from the openness of the Net and even makes a living from it.

But he is not, I think, overestimating either the danger presented to hierarchical systems (he prefers the adjective 'oligarchic') by unregulated communication and information access, or the determination of the hierarchs to tame the Internet. A crucial step here was taken in 1998 when the US Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which, in Lessig's words, '(in)famously banned technologies designed to circumvent copyright protection technologies and also created strong incentives for ISPs to remove from their sites any material claimed to be a violation of copyright'. All four cases mentioned at the outset of this article exemplify actions taken relying on the DMCA.

The European Union is also about to adopt its own equivalent. One critic has written that:

   ... most of the problems the DMCA has also exist in the proposal
   for the European version of this law. It also tries to
   outlaw circumventing encryption in any way. It even makes
   any tools designed for circumventing encryption illegal, no
   matter if it's fair use or not'.

As for Australia, we will need the free print in the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement to learn how many of the DMCA provisions are proposed to bind us also.

It is hard to think of another civil rights issue that rivals this one in its global import or its significance for humanity's future. The governmental--corporation offensive is by no means assured of decisive success, even in the US; it is so blatant an attack on fundamental rights, including people's right to know what is being done to them, that backlash effects have already appeared. In particular, while there is wide-spread agreement that a creator's rights deserve protection, the attempts (in, for example, the DMCA) to thus justify the stifling new interpretation of copyright have been well and truly exposed in analyses by Lessig and others. Take the cases mentioned at the start of this article, for instance. Sklyarov is still a free man and an outraged reaction forced Dieboldt to withdraw the demand for censorship in the interests of its public image.

What will eventually become of the Internet is not already written in the stars, but depends on our own understanding of what is really going on, and how determined we are to preserve an unprecedented tool that, among other things, counters passivity and helps to build a truer, non-corporate globalisation.

For further information, use your favorite search engine to find links to any of the following: Lawrence Lessig; Creative Commons; Campaign for Digital Rights; Vaidhyanathan.