An ethico-judico-technico-philosophical account for the
- responsibilities of actions,
- posibilities of operations,
- utilizations of power
around
- owning,
- developing,
- using
an Internet-enabled application.
- Engine
- Initialization
- The Internet Principles
- Grounding of the 1st Internet Principle
- Grounding of the 2nd Internet Principle
- Grounding of the 3rd Internet Principle
- The Regulatory Principle
- Grounding of the Regulatory Principle
- Critique of Regulatory Systems
- The Being in Being-Above-the-Law
- Notes
How do we stand in the gaze of future others? Do we appear as mere barbarians or barbarians striving for something, if unclear, better? Why should we care how we seem to the future others? Why should we be interested in the grounding of our self-assessment?
The Internet Principles stand under a ramification of natural law (ius naturale, lex naturalis, dikaion physikon, δικαιον φυσικον) which might be called dignity law (ius dignitate, lex dignitatis, dikaion axioma, δικαιον αξίωμα).
If we are to use the Internet in a form of togetherness, for else we would not have the Internet, then what must stand at the root of our interactions, with others, with the network itself, and, not least of all, with ourselves, must be dignity.
As example to what dignity law would clarify: to read someone else's private conversations is an offence, first of all, to the dignity of that person.
The word Internet from Internet Principles should be discoursed in such a manner as to become interchangeable, if not even conflated, with the word Intelligence, and therefore to have the Intelligence Principles, because what is the Internet if not our Collective-Externalized Intelligence?
There should be no Regulatory, Administration Agency or Organization of and for the Internet.
There ought to be a Regulatory Principle to the Internet.
There should be no pain or cost to have security of
- identity,
- data,
- transactions,
or as question-marks
- who,
- what,
- how.
If we are to think of the project of the Internet as the manner in which we expose Intelligence both at an individual and at a societal level, then it must be clear from an evaluation of history and from the futuristic viewings of the literature that a Regulatory Agency would not only be hard to implement, but it would also cause way more damage than actual work. Examples are abundant, from the dictatorship of Nero, to the banishment of certain books in Medieval times by the Church, to Stalin's regime, Orwell's 1984, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
If the 1st Internet Principle might appear to argue in favor of no regulation, it must be reminded that there are no paradises of absolute no regulation. And again as both history and literature have shown, deregulation can do the same if not more damage than pure regulation.
The sole reason technology exists is to have zero-cost, pain-free, always present&active security.
Free actions always suspend the ethical. Be that the free action is to have a social account which will be data-mined, or is the free action of generosity which generates an open-source tool used by anyone that wants to use it. (e.g., Let's Encrypt)
And there are operational costs, for now. But operational costs are no cost, for any current requirement (energy-wise, intellectual-wise) can be in the future envisaged as being surpassed (solar energy, machine automation).
There should be no data outside the reach of the entity that generated it.
The Regulatory Principle implies that the user should be able to view the data he/she generated in the same manner that the database administrator can see it, if not even better (the database entries should be encrypted with the public key of the user even in the database so that the database admin or anyone else does not have direct access to user data). The user should have always at his/her disposal a tree view of everything related to him/her.
Further more, we can dream at a future where the user will be asked to define his/her own personal schema for the database and the third-party systems between users will only be suitable for temporary caching, molding the services by the data of the user-defined schema.
Change Password/Delete Account/Cancel Billing and other account operations should be not only transparent, easy to use, intuitive, but should be under a common API, e.g. /.well-known/, on a standalone service, for access regardless of the state of the application.
or What is wrong with GDPR (and other similar State-operated endeavours)?
The State is an organization of the past. Whatever social organization will come next, on Terra and on other planets, it will be as dissimilar from the current State as the current State is dissimilar to the ancient Roman Republic (if not even unimaginably much more).
Due to the conflict of essence between the State (everything controlled) and the space of the Internet (everything decontrolled), a mere legislative-regulatory operation over the Internet from the position of Authority (i.e. monopoly over Violence) could only falsely hit at the matter at hand.
If all the law can do when we break it is fine us, imprison us, or, in more direct regimes of power, kill us, then that is not a powerful law. A powerful law would require tremendous amounts of energies to be broken, if it wouldn't be downright impossible to be broken. Think of the law of universal gravitation. Can you break gravity? Yes, in some way, one can devise a rocket which unleashes tremendous amounts of raw, directed energy to be able to escape from the prison-like gravity well of the planet. But this is mere escapement from the law. Gravity has not yet been broken. To break gravity would mean to devise completely new forms and new understandings for the laws of physics. And yet, how quick and easy can humans break human-specified laws. Run a red-light and you have broken a law, refuse to pay a certain amount of money at the end of the month/year to the State and you have broken one or many laws. How are the laws so weak and fragile? Maybe it would help if the law system wasn't designed specifically in order to be broken, if it cared more for the law and not for the fines, imprisonments, or killings that breaking the law unleashes onto the breaker.
If one is to learn something from the Heideggerian analysis of being, and following Heidegger, from the entire history of thinking over&under being, is that we never pay enough attention to the being, and we are always nothingness-happy to push being into being-as, being-such, being-for. What is more important is that this unthoughtfulness which should give us so much to think gives us the most little, if not nothing to think. We always take being for granted. There is no surprise then that "being above the law" is quickly dismissed as being the state of the outlaw, without any particular regard for what this kind of being might entail. Whereas "being under the law" is just as quickly clarified as the state of the respectful subject.
However, as anyone that ever created something knows, generating from the primal nothingness of ideas, being able to create means first of all being able to stand above-the-law. To one hominid, hundred of thousands of years ago, the law was 'You shall suffer the cold', and it was his/her power to stand above this law which granted to him/her the ability to make a fire, to be warm and safe from cold and night forever.
And on the Internet, if you know it or not, every millisecond amounts to creating something: the user creates events when the cursor is moved or clicked, when the page is scrolled, when the input boxes are being filled with text, when the images captured by the camera are being sent over the network. Being on the Internet means first of all being in a state of perpetual creation of data. And it is this state, if one is to take hold of it, to start generating data in a purely creative manner, which grants access to being-above-the-law. Because the law today is not anymore 'You shall suffer the cold' but 'You shall suffer the information', and just as the cold was put out with fire, so information must be put out with (and only with) the power of the user to control it's presence.
There should be an Explicit Uncertainty in the Objective* of any Internet-based system.
*The Explicit Uncertainty in the Objective
- Wandering Wonder
- Wondering Wander