Where Internet Safety Laws Ultimately Lead and Why Having a Choice Matters

BlockStamp is a crypto project, so it is our duty to hate censorship and get our libertarianism on at the drop of a hat, right?

To some extent yes — but things are a little more nuanced than that :)

To understand why, let’s take a look at some news from the UK, the land of a surveillance camera for every 11 citizens. New internet porn regulations and plans for social media sanitization are going into effect there.

Here’s our take.

Practically speaking, online content “safety” regulations are not such a big deal in the medium run but will ultimately lead to transnational regulations in the long run.

The splinternet is real. Basically, it means different countries have different approaches to online content regulation.

The Great Firewall of China is the example all internet freedom supporters love to hate. But there’s also Runet alternative Domain Naming System. And now there’s the UK internet porn regulations.

In principle, we think governments shouldn’t be imposing these sort of restrictions on everyone. But in practice we all know that governments exist to impose regulations like this. They’re part of the world as we know it.

Also from a practical perspective, however — we don’t think state-level internet regulations are such a big deal. They’re too easy to circumvent.

For the time being, you can use a Virtual Private Networks (VPN) to access the internet from an IP address in another country. We don’t think VPNs will be a good solution forever: they will be too easy to detect with advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence.

But peer-to-peer residential IP networks like hprox, a BlockStamp partner project, are going to be the next big thing here. Detection tech may theoretically catch up with it somehow but it will take much longer than with VPNs.

In the medium run, that means internet users are simply going to “border hop” to another jurisdiction where they can access content they want to. hat means, for example, if you don’t want to follow the UK’s internet regulations, you can simply connect to web via a United States IP address. Or if you don’t like the Runet DNS, you can connect to another one via a German IP address. And so on.

Obviously governments won’t appreciate that. Such things tend to take a loooonnnnng time but ultimately their reaction will be to impose transnational regulations via global working groups and the like.

Look at international taxation for a good example of how this sort of thing plays out.

In the world of international taxation, you can perform a similar “border hop” by pushing some papers around and making sure you fall under the regulations of a jurisdiction you like.

That’s basically what you are doing with privacy tool like hprox — but instead of pushing papers you’re pushing buttons on your computer.

Governments are wise to this “tax optimization” trend. Response have include been various important sounding initiatives like OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Inclusive Framework and the European Union Code of Conduct Group (EUCoCG) — the Forum on Harmful Tax Practices (FHTP). All of them are set up to discourage people from simply moving from one jurisdiction to another to avoid taxes.

In fact, 2018 was a big year for these initiatives. Many offshore jurisdictions that have historically played things fast and loose tightened up their domestic legislation to make jurisdiction shopping less attractive.

Who knows how long it will take global governments to do the same thing for the internet. But maybe one day we’ll get a global working group called CENSOR — the Center for Entire Network Safety, Order, and Regulation :)

Sound discouraging? Actually, we’d say restricting information isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Just consider who is restricting it!

Most people would agree that it is not a good idea for young kids to view pornography. So to a certain extent the new UK internet regulations make sense.

But there are also a lot of other things that they would agree are not good ideas for kids to do either. There’s watching 4 hours of TV every day, losing sleep to play video games, or eating too much junk food. That sort of thing happens every day in households around the world. You’re probably guilty of something like that yourself!

So where do you draw the line between what is worth regulating and what not?

It’s up to you! We’d say the key point here is that as long as you consciously draw a line somewhere in your own life — and not mess with anyone else’s.

The big problems happen when you don’t draw the line at all, i.e. blindly let someone else draw it for you. That someone else could be a government, for example.

Don’t get us wrong. There are plenty of laws that practically everyone agrees make sense and reflect societal good will. For example, Israeli and Brazilian laws allowing pregnant women to move to the head of lines might restore your faith in humanity ;)

But there are plenty of other laws that not everyone would agree with.

So here’s the point we’re trying to make:

In the medium run, state-level internet content access regulations create opt-in “parentally controlled content zones.”

You’ve probably seen “parental control” options on TVs or in video games etc. Most people would agree that they serve a noble purpose.

You might have also heard about browser plugins that you can use to restrict your own social media access for a period of time or turn off Youtube video recommendations and so forth.

You might even think about a magazine your subscribe to, online or offline. You are paying for someone to curate and prepare content about a specific topic that follows certain editorial guidelines and so forth.

All of these scenarios involve putting restrictions on the content you or your family are seeing — by your choice and because you think they are beneficial somehow.

For the time being, state internet restrictions are basically variations on this concept. Sure, not everyone will realize they have a choice. It’s like they bought a TV with parental control enabled and never realized it was on. Or read the instructions at all ;)

Remember that there are going to be plenty of supporters for government-led internet controls like the UK online porn regulations. Think about how American Prohibition — one of the most spectacular regulatory failures in history — had significant support from many parts of society beforehand, e.g. the temperance movement. That’s why the regulation was made in the first place!

And that’s fine. People should be able to choose to exist in these “content zones” if they want to. For example, parents might choose to turn on the parental controls provided by their TV manufacturer and the porn “identification firewall” provided by the UK government via their Internet Service Provider. And hope their tech-savvy kids don’t figure out how to circumvent them ;)

You might also imagine that Russians might actually trust a Russian-controlled Domain Naming System more than a US-controlled one. Or maybe everyone might like to compare the news on both internets.

The point is to know you have online content choices and to make these choices in an informed way.

BlockStamp is involved with two solutions supporting your online content choices.

One is the BlockStamp censorship-resistant Domain Naming System. Who knows? One day you might check out the American (ICANN) DNS and Russian (Runet) DNS before stopping by the BlockStamp DNS for an independent take on the news.

And then there’s hprox, as mentioned above. It’s your long-run ticket to the internet content zone — curated one way or another or not at all — that you want.

Watch this space for more news!

About BlockStamp:

BlockStamp is a multipurpose Bitcoin blockchain fork developed to promote liberty, transparency, and sovereignty in areas of the digital economy where these fundamental values are most at risk. BlockStamp hosts a radically fair gambling platform, a digital tool for transparently sealing data, a censorship-proof internet Domain Naming System, and the BST crypto coin.