During the holy week of Passover, families gather around a table of unleavened bread to ask the question, “Why is this night different from any other?” The Jewish holiday is more than six weeks away, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Seder table had been set this week.
Bill C-30, the Conservative government’s attempt to regulate privacy on the internet, has left many political commentators and columnists asking around their own figurative dinner tables, “Why is this bill different from any other?” “What led to the #TellVicEverything hashtag generating more than 40,000 tweets from Canadians and the Twitter account @vikileaks, sharing documents that were always readily available, but not reported by traditional journalists?” Most importantly, “Why did the government not see this response coming?”
To find the answers, one has to understand the history of the internet.
The internet was designed as a network of networks. A partnership where neighbours pass ‘packets’ of 1’s and 0’s through hundreds of intermediaries before they reach their intended endpoint. As Lawrence Lessig described in his seminal book Code V.2.0:
“Brutally simplified, the system takes a bunch of data (a file, for example), chops it up into packets, and slaps on the address to which the packet is to be sent and the address from which it is sent. The addresses are called Internet Protocol addresses, and they look like this: 128.34.35.204. Once properly addressed, the packets are then sent across the Internet to their intended destination. Machines along the way ( “routers”) look at the address to which the packet is sent, and depending upon an (increasingly complicated) algorithm, the machines decide to which machine the packet should be sent next. A packet could make many “hops” between its start and its end. But as the network becomes faster and more robust, those many hops seem almost instantaneous.”
To use the oft-quoted Marshall McLuhan line, if the medium is the message, then it is not difficult to understand the culture of the internet. It is an unwieldy network of anonymous citizens who implicitly agree to do their part to continue passing their packets across the ecosystem. It’s not always perfect and some packets may find their pathway blocked, but others will always be there to pick up those packets and send them on their merry way. It is this code that defines the culture. John Perry Barlow defined this culture in his 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:
“Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.”
In other words, mess with the code and face the wrath of the anonymous internet masses. Barlow’s declaration is a gripping read that every politician and pundit should be reading this week. In essence, Barlow states that the rule of law on the internet is written in the code:
“Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”
There is no question that regulation on the internet is needed, but you cannot regulate the internet without understanding the foundations upon which the internet was created. Lessig argues that any legitimate attempts to regulate the internet must take into account four forces always in struggle with each other within the system: Law, societal norms, the marketplace, and the architecture or code of the internet.
Put too much pressure on one of these forces, and the other three will counteract. In this case, the government overstretched its ability to regulate solely through the law.
So, when we sit down at our Seder table in Ottawa and ask, “Why is this bill different from any other?” We shouldn’t look for the answer by comparing Bill C-30 to any legislation that preceded it; we should instead take a passage from the real Passover Seder and recite the history of our people. In this case, the citizens within the network that the legislation targets.
For all of its attempts to gain access to IP addresses in the noble attempt at reducing crime, Bill C-30 tries to plunge a dagger into the heart of the internet. A heavy hand in regulation that restricts privacy or fundamentally attempts to alter the way Canadians interact will always result in the internet masses rising up to have their voices heard. It is what the culture of the internet was built for, and frankly, I’m surprised no one who proposed this bill saw it coming.
David Skok is the Managing Editor of Globalnews.ca, on sabbatical as a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University
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