Tag: science fiction

Feeding the machine

Following 1998, when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was established, many were concerned that it might become a force for censorship. Critics asked: would ICANN remain the neutral technical steward it was intended to be? Turns out, ICANN wasn’t the right vulnerability.

The desire to force the Internet content to conform to “local ordinances” (as John Perry Barlow once called the US First Amendment) started before the Internet. In 1994, Robert and Carleen Thomas were imprisoned for transmitting pornographic images from their California-based bulletin board over interstate telephone lines to Tennessee, where they were illegal. Today, US companies are outraged at fines and demands for compliance with the UK’s Online Safety Act requirements for age verification.

Now there’s a new twist. In Travis County, Texas, a court has ordered Verisign, the ICANN-appointed Virginia-based registry for .com, to lock a domain belonging to the streaming platform Kick Online Entertainment SA because it has not implemented age verification as required under Texas law.

The technical bit: ICANN oversees the entire domain name system, which ties human-friendly names like pelicancrossing.net to the numbers computers actually use under the hood. Each top-level domain – .com, .net, .uk – has a single registry in charge of it. Registries oversee myriad registrars, which are the companies you pay when you register a domain. Many of the world’s most valuable businesses depend on .com, and US-based Verisign is a critical point of failure for all of them.

The court issued its writ (PDF) in June, after Kick Online ignored both a September 2024 order to implement age verification and a $9 million default judgment. To get it back, Kick Online must both post a $9.14 millionbond and implement age verification. At TechTimes, Mark Rutherford details the history, noting that Dutch authorities ordered its local host to block its site for a week earlier this year when a CNN investigation found content that’s illegal in the Netherlands. It is still under criminal investigation there. The UK’s regulator, Ofcom, has fined it £800,000 for failing to implement age verification for UK users. The Dutch action blocked the site in the Netherlands; the Texas order cuts it off everywhere in the world.

Rutherford notes that the basis for the order was set last year, when the US Supreme Court upheld the Texas age verification law in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton. And he warns: the court has pre-authorized other cases against foreign .com operators to obtains similar writs without court proceedings. And: it opens the way for any state attorney general “with access to a Travis County-style court order” can use this same tactic against any foreign .com operator for any category of violation of civil law.

A local ordinance has gone global.

***

In 2005, Vernor Vinge set out to imagine how the then-prevailing technology trends could enable a society of pervasive mass surveillance. I remembered that and the resulting novel, Rainbows End, this week when reading that a New Zealand used bookstore canceled thousands of orders for niche books when the owner realized they were being bought by AI companies to scan and destroy. Part of Vinge’s setting was a campus library destructively digitizing all its holdings; this was around the time that Google Books was being compiled.

Owners of second-hand book shops care about books for the knowledge they contain, but also as artifacts. Scanning them to provide greater access is compatible. Destroying them is not. Every shredded book is a lost opportunity for someone new to unexpectedly encounter it. The same is true of giant digital collections of scanned books – but it’s not true of AI chatbots, which vanish individual works and their attribution and context under a pile of unreliable summary.

Revisiting the piece I wrote for the Guardian in 2006 about Vinge’s book and his talk at the 2006 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, reminded that Rainbows End was set in 2025. As so often, it’s easier to be right about the direction of technology than its timing. In Vinge’s 2025, wearable computers were everywhere, live meetings included ultra-realistic remote projections, augmented reality was readily available to all, and autonomous taxis were easily summoned from any location. His basis for this projected future was an extension of then-controversial Trusted Computing, a security measure some feared would block open source software. Vinge’s imagined Secure Hardware Environment dedicated some bandwidth and a small portion of every semiconductor to regulatory use, enabling surveillance by providing convenience: speed through security checkpoints, pay taxes, cut crime. Larry Ellison would adopt it in a heartbeat. Vinge himself remained hopeful that friction would defeat the attempt to control and surveil everything.

Friction we have: the growing protests against data centers, some of them successful, are one example. Data centers are physical manifestations of everything people fear and resent about the current direction of travel: Big Tech, billionaires, government and industry conspiring to ignore public needs and preferences, and a growing surveillance infrastructure. Other forms of surveillance – live facial recognition, license plate-reading company Flock, Meta’s smartglasses – are also getting pushback (public campaigns, vandalism, calls to ban).

On the other hand, Vinge also imagined by now we’d have successful treatments for Alzheimer’s and other pernicious diseases. So, wash?

Illustrations: “Burning the books”, by Rowland Thomas (contributed to Wikimedia by Boston Public Library).

Also this week:
– At the Plutopia Network News podcast, we interview Leonie Tanczer, who researches technology abuse and domestic violence.
– TechGrumps episode 3.43: Loaded Laptops at Dawn.

Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Doom cyberfuture

Midway through this year’s gikii miniconference for pop culture-obsessed Internet lawyers, Jordan Hatcher proposed that generational differences are the key to understanding the huge gap between the Internet pioneers, who saw regulation as the enemy, and the current generation, who are generally pushing for it. While this is a bit too pat – it’s easy to think of Millennial libertarians and I’ve never thought of Boomers as against regulation, just, rationally, against bad Internet law that sticks – it’s an intriguing idea.

Hatcher, because this is gikii and no idea can be presented without a science fiction tie-in, illustrated this with 1990s movies, which spread the “DCF-84 virus” – that is, “doom cyberfuture-84”. The “84” is not chosen for Orwell but for the year William Gibson’s Neuromancer was published. Boomers – he mentioned John Perry Barlow, born 1947, and Lawrence Lessig, born 1961 – were instead infected with the “optimism virus”.

It’s not clear which 1960s movies might have seeded us with that optimism. You could certainly make the case that 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ends on a hopeful note (despite an evil intelligence out to kill humans along the way), but you don’t even have to pick a different director to find dystopia: I see your 2001 and give you Dr Strangelove (1964). Even Woodstock (1970) is partly dystopian; the consciousness of the Vietnam war permeates every rain-soaked frame. But so did the belief that peace could win: so, wash.

For younger people’s pessimism, Hatcher cited 1995’s Johnny Mnemonic (based on a Gibson short story) and Strange Days.

I tend to think that if 1990s people are more doom-laden than 1960s people it has more to do with real life. Boomers were born in a time of economic expansion, relatively affordable education and housing, and and when they protested a war the government eventually listened. Millennials were born in a time when housing and education meant a lifetime of debt, and when millions of them protested a war they were ignored.

In any case, Hatcher is right about the stratification of demographic age groups. This is particularly noticeable in social media use; you can often date people’s arrival on the Internet by which communications medium they prefer. Over dinner, I commented on the nuisance of typing on a phone versus a real keyboard, and two younger people laughed at me: so much easier to type on a phone! They were among the crowd whose papers studied influencers on TikTok (Taylor Annabell, Thijs Kelder, Jacob van de Kerkhof, Haoyang Gui, and Catalina Goanta) and the privacy dangers of dating apps (Tima Otu Anwana and Paul Eberstaller), the kinds of subjects I rarely engage with because I am a creature of text, like most journalists. Email and the web feel like my native homes in a way that apps, game worlds, and video services never will. That dates me both chronologically and by my first experiences of the online world (1991).

Most years at this event there’s a new show or movie that fires many people’s imagination. Last year it was Upload with a dash of Severance. This year, real technological development overwhelmed fiction, and the star of the show was generative AI and large language models. Besides my paper with Jon Crowcrosft, there was one from Marvin van Bekkum, Tim de Jonge, and Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius that compared the science fiction risks of AI – Skynet, Roko’s basilisk, and an ordering of Asimov’s Laws that puts obeying orders above not harming humans (see XKCD, above) – to the very real risks of the “AI” we have: privacy, discrimination, and environmental damage.

Other AI papers included one by Colin Gavaghan, who asked if it actually matters if you can’t tell whether the entity that’s communicating with you is an AI? Is that what you really need to know? You can see his point: if you’re being scammed, the fact of the scam matters more than the nature of the perpetrator, though your feelings about it may be quite different.

A standard explanation of what put the “science” in science fiction (or the “speculative” in “speculative fiction”) used be to that the authors ask, “What if?” What if a planet had six suns whose interplay meant that darkness only came once every 1,000 years? Would the reaction really be as Ralph Waldo Emerson imagined it? (Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall). What if a new link added to the increasingly complex Boston MTA accidentally turned the system into a Mobius strip (A Subway Named Mobius, by Armin Joseph Deutsch). And so on.

In that sense, gikii is often speculative law, thought experiments that tease out new perspectives. What if Prime Day becomes a culturally embedded religious holiday (Megan Rae Blakely)? What if the EU’s trademark system applied in the Star Trek universe (Simon Sellers)? What if, as in Max Gladsone’s Craft Sequence books, law is practical magic (Antonia Waltermann)? In the trademark example, time travel is a problem; as competing interests can travel further and further back to get the first registration. In the latter…well, I’m intrigued by the idea that a law making dumping sewage in England’s rivers illegal could physically stop it from happening without all the pesky apparatus of law enforcement and parliamentary hearings.

Waltermann concluded by suggesting that to some extent law *is* magic in our world, too. A useful reminder: be careful what law you wish for because you just may get it. Boomer!

Illustrations: Part of XKCD‘s analysis of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon.