Free software isn’t about free services or beer, it’s about intellectual freedom. As recent episodes such as censorship in China, the Egyptian government turning off the Internet, and Facebook’s constant spying, have shown, freedom and privacy on the Internet are under constant assault. Now Eben Moglen, law professor at Columbia University and renowned free software legal expert, has proposed a way to combine free software with the original peer-to-peer (P2P) design of the Internet to liberate users from the control of governments and big brother-like companies: Freedom Box.
In a recent Freedom in the Clouds speech in NYC, Moglen explained what he sees as the Internet’s current problems and his proposed solution. First, here’s the trouble with the Internet today as Moglen sees it:
[6:13] “It begins of course with the Internet. Designed as a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control and assuming that every switch in the net is an independent free standing entity who’s volition is equivalent to the human beings who control it … But it never really worked out that way.”
The Software Problem [7:18]: “It was a simple software problem and it has a simple three syllable name. Its name was ‘Microsoft’. Conceptually there was a network which was designed as a system of peer nodes, but the operating software … that came to occupy the network over the course of a decade-and-a-half was built around a very clear idea that had nothing to do with peers. It was called ’server/client architecture’.”
The Great Idea Behind Windows [9:22]: “It was the great idea of Windows, in an odd way, to create a political archetype in the net that reduced the human being to the client, and created a big centralized computer, which we might refer to as the server, that provided things to the human being on ‘take or it leave it’ terms. And unfortunately everyone took it because they didn’t know how to leave once they got in. Now, the net was made up of servers in the center and clients at the edge. Clients had quite a little power and servers had quite a lot … As storage gets cheaper, as processing gets cheaper, as complex services that scale in ways that are hard to use small computers for … the hierarchical nature of net came to seem like it was meant to be there.”
Logs [10:44]: “One more thing happened about that time … Servers began to keep logs. That’s good decision … But if you have a system which centralizes servers, and the servers centralize their logs, then you are creating vast repositories of hierarchically organized data about people at the edges of the network that they do not control, and unless they are experienced in the operation of servers, will not understand the comprehensiveness of [server-collected user data.].”
The Recipe for Disaster [12:01]: “So we built a network out of a communications architecture designed for peering, which we defined in client server style, which we then defined to be the dis-empowered client at the edge and the server in the middle. We aggregated processing and storage increasingly in the middle and we kept the logs — that is information about the flows of information in the net — in centralized places far from the human beings who controlled or at any rate thought they controlled
This ended up creating “an architecture that was very subject to misuse, indeed it was begging to be misused. Now we are getting the misuse we set up…There are a lot of reasons for making clients dis-empowered … There are many overlapping rights owners, as they see themselves, each of whom has a stake in dis-empowering a client at the edge of the network. To prevent particular hardware from being moved from one network to another, to prevent particular hardware from playing music not bought at the monopoly of music in the sky.”
In particular, Moglen has no love at all for Facebook. “The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record. He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. Because he harnessed Friday night, that is, ‘Everybody needs to get laid,’ and turned into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal, namely ‘I will give you free web-hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time.’ And it works.
How could that have happened? There was no architectural reason. Facebook is the web with, ‘I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?’ It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a Panopticon built out of web parts. And it shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at ’spying all the time’, they are not technically innovative. They depend on an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad. I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists we should fix it.”
