Labour, Tories and Lib Dems ganging up to break ur internets!

The outcome of government policy

At the coming election the three major UK parties will work hard to convince you that there’s a big difference between them, and that they deserve your vote more than others.

But Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems are all united in their desire to make the internet shite. The government’s Digital Economy Bill looks like it will be rushed through parliament before the election because it’s supported by all the major parties.

The bill is a spectacular example of political knobhead-ery. It is a dogs dinner of law, aimed at helping massive entertainment corporations continue to rake in profits at our expense, and potentially limit our access to controversial information online. It shows just how much our political process is controlled by powerful companies that are beyond democratic oversight.

The bill proposes a “three strikes” rule, so that those accused of illegal filesharing more than three times will have their internet connections cut off. That means you, looking for things you wouldn’t otherwise see or hear on megaupload or Pirate Bay. This kind of harmless activity would lead to you being deprived of everything that we use the internet at home for, an increasingly important part of most young people’s lives. A majority of the world’s population now regard access to the internet as a fundamental human right, and are supported in this by the UN.

Let’s be clear-being able to get things for free on the internet is one of the greatest advances of the modern age. Being one of the oldest members of SSY, I can tell you that kids today don’t know they’re born. I remember the days when if you wanted to hear new music you had to save up to maybe buy one CD in a month. Every once in a while you might get a new video, and you were stuck with whatever council telly decided you got to watch. The Dark Ages of Entertainment in other words. Today, that’s all different, and the ability for cultural participation is enhanced unimaginably compared to what it was like growing up in the 90s.

But of course this presents the capitalist market with a problem. Propaganda on the issue of filesharing likes to try and make us think of some poor impoverished artist somewhere struggling by as we take away their livelihood. But we all know that the people who have really suffered are the culture industry, the massive entertainment corporations who monopolise the rights to the works of others so they can parasite off their creativity. These people have now pushed the government into putting forward a law that aims to reduce filesharing by 70%.

But it doesn’t stop there. Anyone providing internet access is to be made responsible for the actions of those using it. What that effectively means is that we’ll probably see the end of wee cafes providing wi fi access, as the government forces them to keep detailed records of what every single customer does, an unbearable burden for small businesses. Community centres, libraries and universities will face the same obligations. The government recognises that many universities already have stringent copyright protection in place on their networks, and wants to expand it. If you’ve ever stayed in uni halls and gone online, you may well know what this will mean-the possibility of arbitrary disconnection for doing things that are perfectly legal, and the internet generally being really slow and rubbish.

But perhaps the worst aspect of the proposed law is that it will make copyright law work like libel laws. Under our libel laws, if you write something nasty about someone else, they can take you to court. It is then essentially on you to prove that what you said was true. In other words, you are considered to guilty until proven innocent of lying. This has led to many ridiculous libel judgments, many involving politicians trying to cover stuff up. But more importantly, it means that unless you’ve got plenty of money and good lawyers, you can’t defend yourself, and so the rich and powerful can often stop things being printed that they don’t like.

Similar principles are going to be applied to websites under the Digital Economy Bill. Companies will have the right to demand the blocking of websites which they argue have “significant amounts” of material that infringes copyright. This could well lead to many people in the UK being unable to look at youtube, for example. Websites could be pulled down by their internet service providers without even knowing. In theory, these applications could be challenged in court, but only if you’ve got the dough for lawyers. The vast majority of small-time website operators won’t be able to afford this, and will just have to go along with it.

This raises the potential that companies could then abuse the system, putting up claims against websites they don’t like. The US, which already has passed some pretty shitey laws, we’ve already seen Microsoft try and block leaks website Cryptome from publishing sensitive documents through spurious copyright claims. In other words, this law opens the door to severe corporate censorship of the internet.

This stuff is all politically bad. It is pro-corporate bullshit, which has the ultimate aim of taking money out of your pocket and putting it in the hands of rich people. But on a more basic level, it will also slow down the internet, prevent some of the best things on the internet from continuing, and generally make our lives a bit more rubbish. With all the mainstream parties lined up behind this campaign for shitness, what can we do?

The Open Rights Group (ORG) is an independent campaign group desperately trying to pull together as wide opposition to the bill as possible. They’ve got details on their site of how to get in touch with the government to express your opposition, and for anyone who’s down south or could make it to London, they’ve called a demo against disconnection on Wednesday 24th March, outside the Houses of Parliament at 17.30. Also, if you join ORG you get a free signed copy of the novel ‘Little Brother’ by Cory Doctorow.

Across Europe (and around the world) the threat to internet freedom by corporate controlled governments has led to the formation of Pirate Parties, particularly in Sweden where the party has been very successful. In the UK there’s a Pirate Party as well, although it looks unlikely to have anything like the same impact on the political system.

For those of us who are socialists, it’s time to get wise on these issues. The right of the working class to get entertainment outside of the market system is well worth defending. Yes, there are some issues about how to compensate artists for their work, but already extensive work has been done to resolve this, and the amount of artists and writers who support groups like ORG shows that the drive for a crappy internet isn’t driven by them.

What gives me hope is that for over 10 years now I’ve seen the evolution of filesharing technologies, and the overcoming by ingenious ordinary folk of all the attempts by governments and their corporate paymasters to stop us doing it. Alongside the political campaigning, the continued efforts of nerds everywhere to overcome internet censorship and damage benefit us all. In the coming weeks, Leftfield intends you to bring you comprehensive guides to how to get stuff online, before the government messes things up.

At the end of feudal society, the invention of new industrial technologies helped make fedualism obsolete, and usher in the new capitalist era. Today, the power of the internet ultimately shows that the monopolistic capitalist market is out of date, because we as a society can do things better if we work together in a non-profitable, collaborative and collective way. It’s a glimpse of how things would work under socialism, and socialists should be at the forefront of defending it.

Bonus: SSY member ‘The Enlivened Bandit’ on the politics of filesharing.