Who controls your internet freedom?
Over the last decade with the rapid development of information communication technology Mongolian citizens have been able to connect to world events and information. The last five years especially catalysed the domestic use of this vast medium; the internet. At present there are 14 internet service providers in the country – this is plenty if not more than we need for the current population of only 2.7 million. More than half of the country’s population live in the capital and a quarter more live in the other two cities Darakhan and Erdenet, where they have easy access to the internet.
New technologies and innovations such as the internet, Wi-Fi, 3G develop extremely fast because of the low population – taking less time for everyone to transition to the new methods and technologies. The quality of the services is rather poor at present – with consistent disconnections from network failures, but because of the competition created by the large number of service providers, this is improving gradually.
Internet freedom is not a talked about subject in Mongolian society. With more pressing matters such as the elections, mining industries and government grants, the subject of the internet and its freedom has taken a back seat. There is no evidence of internet censorship in Mongolia so far, but the cyber freedom of Mongolia is heavily dependent on foreign bodies who want to censor and control the internet. For example, the control measures such as the bills that were sent to the USA congress, PIPA and SOPA, at the beginning of this year.
SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act. It came from the US Senate. PIPA is short for PROTECTIP, which is itself short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property. SOPA and PIPA wanted to raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs.
The way they propose to do this was to identify sites that are substantially infringing on copyright - although how those sites are identified was never fully specified in the bills - and then they wanted to remove them from the domain name system. The domain name system is a piece of software that converts human-readable names, like Google.com, into the kinds of addresses machines are able to interpret: 74.125.226.212.
The problem with this model of censorship; of identifying a site and then trying to remove it from the domain name system, is that it won't work. The reason it won't work is that you can still type 74.125.226.212 into the browser or you can make it a clickable link and it will still send you to the intended website. So the policing aspect around the problem becomes the real threat of the Act.
If we dig further we discover that the SOPA and PIPA, as legislation, were drafted largely by media companies that were founded in the 20th century. The 20th century was a great time to be a media company, because media and entertainment were scarce. If you were making a TV show, it didn't have to be better than all the other TV shows ever made; it only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time - which is a very low threshold of competitive difficulty.
The technology improved over time and at the end of the 20th century, that scarcity started to eroded – not just digital but analogue technology as well. Cassette tapes and video cassette recorders created new opportunities for people to behave in ways that threatened the media business. People not only liked to consume, but every time one of these new tools came along, it turned out that we also liked to produce and to share. This made entertainment abundant and the media companies had to face heavy competition from the general public who were previously just consumers. And so the media industries demanded that the US Congress do something.
By the early 90s, Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 that made it illegal for people to make lots of high quality copies of videos and mix tapes to sell. But that wasn’t all the media industries wanted; they wanted to stop copying all together.
In 1998 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which basically removed the technology to copy from the DVD players, game players, televisions and computers you bought so that you were unable to copy digital content produced by the media industry. The DMCA was more of a technological measure to stop copying rather than a legal measure.
The DMCA was not entirely successful because as it turns out, the internet proved to be a far more popular tool and far more powerful tool than anyone expected. The previous method of sharing such as cassettes and tapes were nothing compared to the Internet. Billions of people share written files, images, audio and video via the Internet. Some of the things we share are things we've made, some are things we found and some are things we've made out of what we've found. And all of it is a competition and a threat to the media industries.
PIPA and SOPA were the next stage of their endeavour to stop individuals from copying– they took the concept, innocent until proven guilty, and reversed it to, guilty until proven innocent. In other words you can't share until you show us that you're not sharing something we don't like. Suddenly, the burden of proof for legal versus illegal falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities. And if it costs even a penny to police one user, then this will cripple a service with a hundred million users.
The problem was that the Mongolian Internet users were largely unaware of the fact that their online freedom was at a peril and even if they knew about this, they had no direct power to influence the outcome. Though some might argue that these bills are outside the jurisdiction or influence of the Mongolian people and government, it is also plausible to say that the bill if passed would have affected the internet service as a whole, along with the Mongolian people’s freedom. Though the bills were not passed because of the outbreak and protests from the online communities such as Facebook, Wikipedia and Youtube, the fact that the US congress is able to pass bills that concern the cyber freedom of other nations is troubling.
New technologies and innovations such as the internet, Wi-Fi, 3G develop extremely fast because of the low population – taking less time for everyone to transition to the new methods and technologies. The quality of the services is rather poor at present – with consistent disconnections from network failures, but because of the competition created by the large number of service providers, this is improving gradually.
Internet freedom is not a talked about subject in Mongolian society. With more pressing matters such as the elections, mining industries and government grants, the subject of the internet and its freedom has taken a back seat. There is no evidence of internet censorship in Mongolia so far, but the cyber freedom of Mongolia is heavily dependent on foreign bodies who want to censor and control the internet. For example, the control measures such as the bills that were sent to the USA congress, PIPA and SOPA, at the beginning of this year.
SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act. It came from the US Senate. PIPA is short for PROTECTIP, which is itself short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property. SOPA and PIPA wanted to raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs.
The way they propose to do this was to identify sites that are substantially infringing on copyright - although how those sites are identified was never fully specified in the bills - and then they wanted to remove them from the domain name system. The domain name system is a piece of software that converts human-readable names, like Google.com, into the kinds of addresses machines are able to interpret: 74.125.226.212.
The problem with this model of censorship; of identifying a site and then trying to remove it from the domain name system, is that it won't work. The reason it won't work is that you can still type 74.125.226.212 into the browser or you can make it a clickable link and it will still send you to the intended website. So the policing aspect around the problem becomes the real threat of the Act.
If we dig further we discover that the SOPA and PIPA, as legislation, were drafted largely by media companies that were founded in the 20th century. The 20th century was a great time to be a media company, because media and entertainment were scarce. If you were making a TV show, it didn't have to be better than all the other TV shows ever made; it only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time - which is a very low threshold of competitive difficulty.
The technology improved over time and at the end of the 20th century, that scarcity started to eroded – not just digital but analogue technology as well. Cassette tapes and video cassette recorders created new opportunities for people to behave in ways that threatened the media business. People not only liked to consume, but every time one of these new tools came along, it turned out that we also liked to produce and to share. This made entertainment abundant and the media companies had to face heavy competition from the general public who were previously just consumers. And so the media industries demanded that the US Congress do something.
By the early 90s, Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 that made it illegal for people to make lots of high quality copies of videos and mix tapes to sell. But that wasn’t all the media industries wanted; they wanted to stop copying all together.
In 1998 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which basically removed the technology to copy from the DVD players, game players, televisions and computers you bought so that you were unable to copy digital content produced by the media industry. The DMCA was more of a technological measure to stop copying rather than a legal measure.
The DMCA was not entirely successful because as it turns out, the internet proved to be a far more popular tool and far more powerful tool than anyone expected. The previous method of sharing such as cassettes and tapes were nothing compared to the Internet. Billions of people share written files, images, audio and video via the Internet. Some of the things we share are things we've made, some are things we found and some are things we've made out of what we've found. And all of it is a competition and a threat to the media industries.
PIPA and SOPA were the next stage of their endeavour to stop individuals from copying– they took the concept, innocent until proven guilty, and reversed it to, guilty until proven innocent. In other words you can't share until you show us that you're not sharing something we don't like. Suddenly, the burden of proof for legal versus illegal falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities. And if it costs even a penny to police one user, then this will cripple a service with a hundred million users.
The problem was that the Mongolian Internet users were largely unaware of the fact that their online freedom was at a peril and even if they knew about this, they had no direct power to influence the outcome. Though some might argue that these bills are outside the jurisdiction or influence of the Mongolian people and government, it is also plausible to say that the bill if passed would have affected the internet service as a whole, along with the Mongolian people’s freedom. Though the bills were not passed because of the outbreak and protests from the online communities such as Facebook, Wikipedia and Youtube, the fact that the US congress is able to pass bills that concern the cyber freedom of other nations is troubling.
Internet should not be controlled by anyone for political purposes.
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