Making the Agora Vanish into Cyberspace

[Tim May]

At 10:36 AM -0700 4/12/01, Greg Broiles wrote:
>According to the article at 
><http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010412/wr/tech_fraud_dc_1.html>, 
>the International Chamber of Commerce's Commercial Crime Bureau and 
>Cybercrime Unit - which apparently "polices all financial and 
>intellectual property rights breaches on the Internet" - has 
>identified "the problem with the Internet", specifically -
>
>"The problem with the Net is that it is not secure because Internet 
>service providers don't run identity checks on their clients . . . 
>[i]t is very easy to set up an email account and web page on an ISP 
>offering free web space and no checks are done on the people setting 
>them up."
>
>That's funny. I was just thinking that the problem with the Internet 
>is that it gives every control freak with a tinfoil badge and an AOL 
>account the idea that they ought to "police" people and things 
>they've never seen or heard of.

Also, we are seeing the effects of "concentration" (similar to 
"monoculture") in online marketplaces. A handful of highly-visible 
marketplaces are now being pursued by various leftist groups like the 
Wiesenthal Center and various rightist groups like the anti-abortion 
and Arab groups. More and more lawyers see chances for lawsuits . 
Various governments see that Yahoo and Ebay will back down if enough 
threats are levelled at them (we'll seize your assets, we'll arrest 
your officers when they vacation in our country, we'll deport your 
people from nearby countries if we can, we'll demand that the U.S. 
Government apply its many powers to force you to change, we'll get 
U.N. treaties to ban you).


For example, where once there were thousands of small souvenir shops 
and bookstores selling "politically incorrect" material (Nazi 
memorability, Confederate flags, Paladin Press books, etc.), the 
trend in recent years has been for consolidation and concentration.

(Needless to say, I am not a lefty arguing against the rights of 
companies and bookstores and such to consolidate. Just noting a trend 
which has important implications.)

This makes Yahoo, Amazon, EBay the easy targets for lawsuits by 
foreign governments, lawsuits by PC groups in America, boycotts 
(which are OK, of course), and even direct actions against corporate 
officers. How long will it be before corporate offices at EBay are 
bombed because birth control stuff is sold on EBay? How long before 
the President of Amazon is assassinated one night for "allowing" 
books like "The Satanic Verses" be sold on his system?

These three companies are representative of the trend toward a 
corporation, readily traceable to a physical location, acting as the 
"marketplace" location. Even more abstractly, Napster only 
distributed an _indexing_ application and then provided a forum for 
indices to be published. And yet what has happened with Napster is 
and was predictable.

(If you set up a music pirating system, as seen by others, and paint 
your name and address on your back, you _will_ be sued. A bunch of us 
pointed this out at a CP physical meeting in early 2000, when Napster 
was just starting to become known.)

There's a better solution to this "big targets problem": 
peer-to-peer, a la Gnutella, Mojo, etc. No identifiable nexus of 
corporate control. Online clearing. Reputation intermediaries. 
Digital cash (not strictly needed, if N (number of sellers and 
buyers) is large enough and there is no central clearinghouse which 
can be sued.)

Making the agora disappear into cyberspace, whether by sheer numbers 
of sellers and buyers (peer-to-peer) or by robust encryption (a la 
BlackNet) is an important goal.

"The Theory of the Corporation" needs revisiting.


--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns