Mr. Kapor's words of wisdom. I will not comment except to say that I don't think he has accurately characterized the Cypherpunk position. ===cut=here=== Date: Sat, 20 Nov 1993 11:46:50 -0500 From: mkapor@kei.com (Mitchell Kapor) Rich Karlgaard <0005096930@mcimail.com> wisely observes:
...the range of political opinion in the U.S. is not always spread along a single axis of left to right. I believe there is another axis ascendant. It is authoritarian/libertarian. Try this exercise. Draw a left-to-right line across a page. Then draw a vertical line from top to bottom, labeling it Authoritarian on top, Libertarian on bottom. You have just created a grid with four quadrants.
I have tried to illustrate his point. My deficiencies as a graphic artist are equaled only by the impoverished of ASCII as a graphical medium. Karlgaard's two axes: -----------authoritarian------------ | ^ | | | | |<----left------|------ right----> | | | | | v | -----------libertarian-------------- I want to substitute "anti-authoritarian" for "libertarian", as follows: ----------- authoritarian---------- | ^ | | | | |<----left------|------ right----> | | | | | v | -----------anti-authoritarian------- Doing this permits distinguishing two varieties of anti-authoritarian, the decentralist and the libertarian. -------------------------------------- | | | | | | |-------------------------------------| | decentralist | libertarian | | | | --------------------------------------- In my terminology Libertarian is used to refer more specifically to the right quadrant of the anti-authoritarian position. The left side of the anti-authoritarian space I have chosen to call decentralist. As Rich indicates, on some issues, like NAFTA and, I might add, the Clipper Chip, the opposing sides are divided, not on liberal-conservative political lines, but on the horizontal axis. I would claim that the lower half of the political space simply be called anti-authoritarian and that it is divided into two quadrants: on the left, the decentralist, and on the right, the libertarian. You can see how this works on Clipper chip and other privacy issues related to encryption. EFF chairs a coalition of 60 organizations, from the American Petroleum Institute to the ACLU, which opposes government control of encryption. You have cypherpunks and corporate interests aligned on this issue, because they all want decentralization of control over encryption technology. On issues where the goal is to remove government-imposed barriers, like privacy, there is easy agreement between left-leaning decentralists and right-leaning libertarians. The coherence of EFF's Board resides in the libertarian-decentralist commonality of interest which is more important than conventional divisions of left-right politics. On the other hand, the sometimes fractious nature of the public interest community, of which EFF is part, can be seen to in splits along the same horizontal axis. EFF supports private sector ownership and operation of the National Information Infrastructure,, Many other public interest organizations share the same general goals of openness for the NII as EFF but prefer approaches lying above the horizontal midline, e.g., through direct government ownership or operation of the NII. Infrastructure is a trickier issue than privacy. All anti-authoritarians would agree that a government-built NII is the wrong approach. However, there seems to be more willingness among many on the net who think of themselves as libertarians to leave it entirely to private industry to build the NII, where government abandons any role, even as referee. If we wound up with an NII controlled by an oligopoly of enormous corporate interests which resulted in centralized control over content, it would be a bad thing. If independent content providers can't easily get on the network, it would be a huge catastrophe. It seems to me that, in principle, corporate authoritarianism is as dangerous as government authoritarianism, and this is an issue which may separate left-quadrant and right-quadrant anti-authoritarians. A libertarian would argue that if government got out of the way, e.g., deregulated telecommunications and let everybody compete, it would be sufficient to achieve the right kind of NII. Personally, I think that's naive. A more considered libertarian view would be that either the market will produce the desired result by itself OR IT WON'T, but there is nothing anybody can do to alter the outcome. Thus government should stay out of it, and the public interest community should go home. To me, this is both fatalistic and simplistic. A decentralist would say that deregulation alone is not necessarily going to be sufficient to produce a decentralized NII. It might be and it might not. But if it is not, we do not need to be fatalists about it. We have the opportunity to try to influence the outcome both by working at the level of raising consciousness and through the possibility legislation which ratifies some sort of hard-fought compromise that achieves certain goals (e.g. for new common carriage or new universal service). This embodies the EFF approach. We may all get lucky in the sense that the architecture of consumer broadband networks winds up following a model which is more, rather than less, like the Internet in its openness and decentralization. This appears to be the general direction Bell Atlantic is taking. However, while their system is open (in terms of common carriage or system architecture), it is heavily asymmetrical with a big downstream pipe and a small upstream pipe, at least for the foreseeable future. If the TCI merger goes through, and if they are able to rationalize two different networks, business models, and corporate cultures, what obtains for BA will hold for TCI too. There are some mighty big ifs here, and in any event Bell Atlantic/TCI only serves 25% of the country. Other carriers, who have a different business model which does not emphasize revenue from transport a la Bell Atlantic, but revenue from content, may choose to go with closed, channelized systems. We have to see what other cable companies and telcos actually offer. Increasingly I am going to focus my efforts on understanding the likely architectural deployments of the carriers and how close they come to EFF's model of an open platform. The pragmatic question which faces us as we fill in the picture with details will be what, if anything, can be done, to nudge the system into providing alternatives which are closer to open platforms. All in all, I'd prefer to try to catalyze any necessary changes in mindset of carriers in order to secure voluntary moves. But as a pragmatist I believe that government action, or certainly the threat of it, may be useful or, in the worst case, necessary, to achieve the desired end. Further, since the whole process is already highly politicized, I think involvement to prevent bad governmental solutions from being imposed and screwing things up is clearly necessary. Thus politics is inevitably involved to carry out a an anti-authoritarian mission. At least in my view. ................................................................... Mitchell Kapor, Chairman <mkapor@kei.com> Electronic Frontier Foundation *** Join EFF!!! Send mail to membership@eff.org for information ***