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Wikileaks and Distributed Information

Whatever your opinion about Julian Assange and Wikileaks’ release of US State Department documents, the whole affair has become a case study in censorship and open networks. As you’ve probably heard, Amazon kicked the Wikileaks site off their servers December 2 and EveryDNS booted the site December 3. Effectively, www.wikileaks.org is blocked, but if you go to www.wikileaks.ch you will find a working copy of the site. How does this happen?

James Cowie, writing on the renesys blog, does a good job of explaining the global game of whack-a-mole going on now with Wikileaks. As Cowie writes, “To prevent a repeat performance of the EveryDNS experience, the Swiss site [.ch is the Swiss country domain -- ed.] seems to have been selected for heavy reinforcement through DNS diversification. If you ask for the authoritative servers for wikileaks.ch today, you’ll find no fewer than 14 different authoritative nameservers, spread across eleven different autonomous systems, in eight different countries, from Switzerland to Canada to Malaysia.”

In short, the internet is doing what it was designed to do: transmit information even if one or two, or two hundred nodes on the net are disabled. As Cowie notes in his conclusion:

You can’t burn down the Library of Alexandria any more — it will respawn in someone’s basement in Stockholm, or Denver, or Beijing.

Meanwhile, New York Magazine’s Intelligencer column has a pretty smart take on Assange’s emerging social media strategy (hint: check out #cablegate on Twitter).

FCC Takes Half Step Toward Open Net

Yesterday Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski put forward a framework of rules for preserving an open internet. The chairman’s points are outlined in a brief Huffington Post article and can be heard in full in this  video of the chairman’s December 1 speech on YouTube.  “Our rules will protect against corporate gatekeepers prioritizing access to one person’s content over another’s,” Mr. Genachowski said.  In summary, the chairman’s points seem to agree with the principles of net neutrality. However, there is a lot left unsaid.

Unfortunately, Chairman Genachowski said nothing about reversing a 2005 FCC vote that categorized the internet as an “information service” not a “telecommunications service”. Congress has given the FCC broad powers to regulate telecommunications services; the regulation of “information services” is something of a gray area. Also, as noted in this New York Times article, the chairman’s remarks offer weak protections against “paid prioritization” or “specialized services”, two of the latest terms-of-art put forward by the telecoms to make tiered internet service more palatable. Also unsaid in Genachowski’s statement is any attempt to ensure open access to the net over wireless connections.

More can be found on the FCC site. The commission is set to vote on these rules December 21.