First: apologies for the long delay between posts. I was on vacation.

Now, to the topic at hand: should ISPs be forced to monitor traffic on their networks in order to prevent piracy?

Internet service providers are increasingly the target of the frustrated entertainment industry, which sees no effective technology solution to the problem of piracy. They’re also, increasingly, the target of lawmakers who are looking for an easy way to placate these intense lobbyists and major donors. The push is just starting to intensify in the U.S.: the entertainment industry is making noises about wanting mandatory ISP filtering, while some members of Congress, like Rep. Mary Bono Mack, believe ISPs should voluntarily filter their traffic for piracy. AT&T is, in the U.S., already hinting at just that.

The UK is taking the strongest tack, introducing legislation this week that would Internet service providers to monitor traffic on their networks and take action against anyone found to be illegally downloading copy-protected material. The proposal echoes one written by IFPI, the music industry’s international arm, which was enumerated in January by longtime U2 manager Paul McGuinness, who gave an impassioned speech demanding that ISPs “start taking responsibility for the content they’ve profited from for years.”

On its face, asking ISPs to look out for illegal downloading seems like an understandable logical leap. Internet traffic flows through the pipes and into your home. The ISPs control the pipes and charge you for receiving and sending that data. They can shape their traffic, they can see what’s flowing over the network, and it seems easy, if you’re a band manager or a member of Congress or a desperate music industry executive, to say the ISPs should simply look at all the mail coming through the slot and either stop the illegal stuff or find the folks who’re downloading it and turn off their access.

There are about a million analogies to try to explain why ISP-level filtering is a bad idea–it’s like asking gun makers to track down murderers, it’s like asking construction companies to catch thieves inside the buildings they put up. Look to today’s episode of Buzz Out Loud for quite a few more. More importantly, there are just as many reasons why it’s technically a bad idea that is, like all technical solutions to morally based problems, destined to fail. Determined hackers can get around any filters, and some ISP will always come along with a cheaper, unfiltered service (hey, maybe it’ll be ad-supported, and they’ll be so greedy for ads that they’ll sell pop-up downloads that infect computers with adware or even Trojans that build ever-larger botnets that are eventually turned loose on unsuspecting governments!).

Mostly, the entertainment industry needs to stop, for just one tiny second, being such flaming narcissists. The Web isn’t all about you. Music and movie downloading isn’t the only thing people do online, illegal or otherwise. Ars Technica puts it best, here:

“the IFPI’s own numbers show that in the US, for instance, 17.6 percent of all Internet users regularly share files. If 30 percent of those users buy less music, that means that file-swapping only leads 5.9 percent of all US Internet users to buy less music. The number is even lower if we take the US population as a whole.”

Safe Harbor laws and “common carrier” provisions exist so that the builders and providers of the infrastructure that delivers us Web access don’t have to get sued every time someone is libeled on the Internet, every time a terrorist plot takes place on a Web site, or every time child pornography appears online. They exist because a little bit of filtering very quickly becomes a lot of filtering. It’s like grammar school: you bring a little bit of gum to class and pretty soon everybody wants a piece. Safe Harbor provisions are what allowed the Web to become the teeming metropolis that it is today, and we all know that no big city is free of crime. You want cops on the Net? Get cops. Not the guys who put in the plumbing. Stop talking about breaking the entire system because you can’t figure out a better way to protect your tiny little slice of the pie.

Theft is a social problem. It’s not a technology problem. Stronger locks don’t stop theft in high-crime areas and a lack of locks doesn’t cause break-ins in a low-crime area. Filtering Internet traffic won’t stop piracy, it’ll just change its form, and in the meantime, it’ll retard the progress of the technology revolution.

But this is where I have to sigh and risk your wrath, dear readers: Internet filtering is almost certainly coming (Ars has that right, too). Why? Because, frankly, there aren’t any better ideas. And there isn’t a sea change in Web morality coming for this generation–we’re used to instant access to whatever we consume, we’re accustomed to pirating, and we’re not quitting it fast enough.

And the entertainment industry is a huge force in the U.S. economy and, let’s be realistic, they’re going to win this one because they’ve got the clout, and they don’t have the time for a massive social re-engineering project. They won’t filter forever, and the technology will fail at first and drive us crazy and probably set us back a couple of decades and falsely accuse a lot of people. But then it’ll get better or we’ll get used to the rules or heck, all music and movies will be freely distributed, supported by advertising that sees right into our brains, plucks out every little secret, and targets us to within an inch of our little lives. But either way, it’s going to happen. The Web gave us whatever we wanted for quite a while there, and like little children with no sense of consequences, we took and took and took. Now, I think, we’re in for a little time-out.

Filed under: Information, News, Rant, filtering, IFPI, ISPs