Global patterns: It’s not about ultimate truth and reality, any more than a single model of human behavior can explain everything we observe. Detecting a global pattern is simply a way of modeling human behavior on a broad scope.
I’m not the only one who has noticed the Internet is fitting into a known pattern. Something revolutionary splashes on the scene. First it’s the domain of specialists, but their need for convenience means dumbing it down enough for others to use their simplified tools. Then it gets simpler by degrees and suddenly everyone has it and uses it, until even government becomes dependent on it. We had that with other means of communication, starting as far back as the printing press. It’s not just information. The same applies in varying degrees to just about anything people want, where the demand outruns supply significantly. At some point there is a war between government and some non-government force over control of this thing. In the case of the Internet, it’s between corporations using government laws and freebooters.
Right now, the conflict is getting pretty hot. The US grabbed a bunch of domain names so that pirates can’t easily find their favorite suppliers of digital merchandise. But the P2P gang have struck back. I confess I don’t understand DNS that well, so I can’t explain in layman’s terms what this business of decentralized DNS is really all about. I’m thinking most of the P2P users know even less about it. Not every casual user of pirated digital goods will be able to adjust, but there is a broad stripe between geeks and dummies who will pick this up quickly enough to keep the traffic going. How quickly government responds with a more effective measure is anybody’s guess.
What I do understand is the pattern. We’ve had some golden years of relative peace on the Net. At some point the demand outstrips the supply, particularly with heavy multimedia files. As long as technology keeps up, things are okay. But a heavy conflict between supply and demand sides is unstable, and ripe for abuses. So the old media corporations refuse to play ball with the new market realities, such that prices are artificially high. That’s begging for efforts to break outside the official channels. So we have “piracy” and the corporations prod government into action, and a great many innocent bystanders are hurt. The system changes repeatedly in a short time, and that in itself is an open invitation for more government regulation. Regulation under this context will always come loaded with unintended consequences, to which the underground will react. We have hit the point where the whole thing wobbles like a top, which is actually a ton of concrete, spinning along a putt-putt course.
It’s not going to crash all at once, but it will get very messy and folks will flee to some other market. The cellphone industry is trying to capture that, but it’s just not the same, yet simultaneously, too much the same. Given the nature of things, there will have to be a new “drug” to marginalize the whole thing, a whole new way of transmitting information. Then the Internet will fade back into its proper place in terms of market size, but it will never recover the freedom it once offered until most of the world just does not care.
I can’t guess whether this new trick of decentralized DNS is going to result in a real game-changer. I can promise I won’t miss the unwashed masses which currently soil the Internet. The problem is, their passing from the scene will leave the whole thing utterly broken. It’s possible this thing has become so completely essential to a certain class of folks able to rescue it for their own use, but the global pattern can’t account for that. There’s something about information as traffic and market which seems to offer its own twist on the pattern.
But for today, it looks like the Net Pirates win one.
