Internet: In the Battles of SOPA and PIPA, Who Should Control the Internet?

 There is a war under way for control of the Internet, and every day brings word of new clashes on a shifting and widening battlefront. Governments, corporations, criminals, anarchists—they all have their own war aims.
In February, the Swedish Supreme Court refused to hear appeals from three founders of the Pirate Bay, the world’s largest illegal file-sharing Web site, who had been sentenced to prison for copyright infringement. The same day, one of those men issued an online call to arms, urging users to abandon the entertainment industry: “Stop seeing their movies. Stop listening to their music.... Remix, reuse, use, abuse.”

Shortly after that, Google was discovered to have been secretly bypassing privacy settings on Apple iPhones and computers that use the Safari browser; the company was monitoring Web activity by people who believed they’d blocked such tracking. Around the same time, the European Union proposed that companies such as Google must obtain explicit consent from individuals for data collection; but these regulations would not take effect for years, by which point digital dossiers on almost every Internet user will have been bought and sold by marketers many times over.

Meanwhile, the F.B.I. has been distributing “See something, say something” flyers to Internet-café owners in the U.S., warning that the use of certain basic cyber-security measures could be considered grounds for suspicion of possible terrorist activity. In response to the F.B.I.’s growing preoccupation with virtual insurgents, guerrilla hackers operating under the name Anonymous posted online an audio recording of F.B.I. and Scotland Yard officials discussing how to handle Anonymous attacks.

Then Interpol, together with American and European authorities, busted 31 suspected Anonymous hackers—including the one who covertly recorded that conference call—and an F.B.I. official declared victory over LulzSec, one of the most prominent Anonymous splinters, with the boast that “we’re chopping off the head” of that faction.

The War for the Internet was inevitable—a time bomb built into its creation. The war grows out of tensions that came to a head as the Internet grew to serve populations far beyond those for which it was designed. Originally built to supplement the analog interactions among American soldiers and scientists who knew one another off­-line, the Internet was established on a bedrock of trust: trust that people were who they said they were, and trust that information would be handled according to existing social and legal norms. That foundation of trust crumbled as the Internet expanded. The system is now approaching a state of crisis on four main fronts.

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