[Foundation-l] keep watching the Italian government

[Ray Saintonge]

Florence Devouard wrote:
> Gianluigi Gamba wrote:
>   
>> Hi everybody,
>>
>> the Italian government has advanced a proposal for a law that - if
>> approved by the Parliament - will oblige all the "publishing
>> productions", regardless of the media they use for their diffusion,
>> therefore web-based ones included, to be registered into the "registro
>> degli operatori della comunicazione" (ROC) - "register of the operator
>> of the communications" (such a register nowadays seem to exist in very
>> few contries in the world).
>> ...
>>     
> Waou. When I read such propositions for law, I always wonder who the 
> governments are asking advice from. Did the consellors ever get to use 
> the net before issuing such a recommandation ?
>
> It strikes me as being one of these numerous laws which will be "non 
> applied" by most (because impossible to apply), but which will bug many 
> italian businesses.
There is a big challenge in that.  These Italian lawmakers are not 
unlike those people who keep wanting to make rules about harassment 
sites.  They all see the problems as something much bigger than what it 
really is.  When that happens the solution becomes the problem. We 
ourselves have a lot of rules which reasonable people believe can never 
be applied, but we also have a small group who have taken ownership of 
these rules and are committed to applying the letter of the law.

We can all very easily agree that there is a lot of very bad behaviour 
on the internet.  Combine that with the fact that most people are 
completely clueless  when it comes to understanding  anything about 
computers, and you have a fertile field for growing the potato minds 
that dream up these kinds of rules. 

The challenge is for internet communities to look at themselves to 
become a part of a real solution.  The rule makers approach the solution 
reactively by looking at the misdeeds and either building technical 
barriers to prevent them from happening or by imposing harsher 
penalties.  How many more centuries will it take for them to understand 
that that doesn't work?  Complicated rules breed more loopholes and thus 
more sophisticated techniques for "gaming" or circumventing those 
rules.  What could be more inviting to a code-breaker than an 
unbreakable code?  DRM techniques do not survive long without someone 
punching a hole in them.

The alternative is to make the users more clueful, but that is not an 
easy alternative, and it is not enough to say that the rewards are 
bigger.  To put the immensity of the problem in perspective, those of us 
who are luddites within this wiki-community, are already tremendously 
more savvy about the internet than the average computer buyer, who is 
himself well ahead of the citizen of a modern society who does not have 
the means for online access. (That does not even get to the point of 
considering what happens in third-world countries.)  We soon come to the 
conclusion that decision making powers are in the hands of the clueless.

The technogeek is often quite comfortable in his world of improvements.  
As long as he makes everything pretty and convenient he has broad 
community support.  This leads to incomprehensible software manuals and 
FAQs that no-one would ever think to ask. We do no-one any favours by 
making things more convenient because that robs them of their ability to 
make decisions and accept responsibility for those decisions.  We can 
have templates that we attach to a sausage machine where editors can 
stuff parameters into their sausages.  From there we can spend a lot of 
time looking at EU directives about what is permitted in those 
sausages.  Somewhere along that path something is lost.  Maybe a little 
less uniformity and a little more general participation would be an 
advantage, for sometimes taking a step back is essential to stepping 
forward.

All the prettiness may make life easier and more welcoming for the 
passive reader, but that does nothing to encourage the humble 
contributor whose knowledge base, resources and abilities may be very 
limited.  To dismiss him because his contributions are not notable is 
tantamount to saying that he is not notable.  For a person who views the 
world in strictly logical terms this is illogical, but then we all know 
individuals here who take any criticism of their views as a personal 
attack.  Is that any different? 

We need to revisit the vision that got us here in the first place.  An 
encyclopedia that _anybody_ can edit.  (This includes the sister 
projects which in many respects fit into a broader definition of 
encyclopedia.)  Not just that they _may_ edit, but that they _can_ 
edit.  This is not a matter of permission, but of empowerment.  That 
needs to be a criterion whereby technical improvements will be judged:  
how does an advance empower the user? If the user is empowered he is in 
a much better position to deal with threats from cyberspace, he is much 
less willing to throw up his hands and say, "I don't understand what's 
going on; do it for me."

That's the challenge of the proposed Italian law.  Confronting it 
directly, even successfully, will not be a real solution.  Akin to the 
curse of living in interesting times is that of living in a paradigm 
shift. Technology has overcome the inability of individuals to express 
their separate views; that is a huge paradigm shift.  The winners in a 
paradigm shift are those who viscerally change along with the 
technology; the losers are the one who keep repeating the old 
solutions.  Our role and vision is necessarily limited in its terms of 
reference; we must trust others to play their role for fear of 
dissipating our energies.  But the vision must remain rooted in an 
empowerment that will make such legislation unnecessary.

Ec