The Domain Name System – which much of the internet is built on – is a system of servers which turn friendly names humans understand (foo.com) into IP addresses which computers understand (111.222.333.444).

It is hierarchical and to a large extent centralised. You will be the master of *.foo.com, but you have to buy foo.com off the .com registrar.

These top level domain registrars, if not owned by national governments, are at least strongly influenced and increasingly regulated by them.

This of course makes these registrars a tempting target for oppressive governments like China, UK and the USA, and for insane laws like SOPA and the Digital Economy Act which seek to control information, and shut down sites which say things the government doesn’t like.

Replacing this system with a less centralised model is therefore a high priority for anyone wanting to ensure the protection of the free internet.

Turning text into numbers isn’t the real problem

It may not be an entirely new observation here; the problem of turning a bit of text into a set of numbers is, from a user’s perspective, not what they’re after. They want to view facebook, or a photo album on flickr.

So finding relevant information is what we’re really trying to solve, and the entire DNS system is really just a factor of search not being good enough when the system was designed.

Consider…

• Virtually all modern browsers have auto complete search as you type query bars.
• Browsers like Chrome only have a search bar
• My mum types domain names, or partial domain names, or something like the domain name (depending on recollection) into Google

For most cases, using the web has become synonymous with search.

Baked in search

So, what if search was baked in? Could this be done, and what would the web look like if it was?

What you’re really asking when you visit Facebook, or Amazon or any other site is “find me this thing called xxxx on the web”.

Similarly when a browser tries to load an image, what it’s really saying is “load me this resource called yyyy which is hosted on web server xxxx on the web”, which is really a specialisation of the previous query.

You’d need to have searches done in some sort of peer to peer way, and distributed using an open protocol, since you’d not want to have to search the entire web every time you looked for something. Neither would you want to maintain a local copy of the Entire World.

It’d probably eat a lot of bandwidth, and until computers and networks get fast enough, you’d probably still have to rely on having large search entities (google etc) do most of the donkey work, so this may not be something we can really do right now.

But consider, most of us now have computers in our pockets with more processing power than existed on the entire planet a few decades ago; at the beginning of the last century the speed of a communication network was limited by how fast a manual operator could open and close a circuit relay.

What will future networks (and personally I don’t think we’re that far off) be capable of? Discuss.

There was a small ripple around the internet this morning caused by the Home office opening up the Beta terrorist reporting tool.

To what extent the reports from this tool are monitored is unclear, but I suspect this will cause more problems that it solves.

Even before we consider the rather broad definition the government has for illegal material (which on the face of it could cover a number of science and religious texts), I can see the tool quickly becoming buried under false positives – whether through over sensitive citizens or through plain vindictiveness – which would need to be investigated.

Even if no further action is taken after the investigation, the cost in both time and resources must surely represent a significant risk that things that are actually a threat will be missed.

Anyone who has spoken to me for more than a few minutes knows that I am very much a civil libertarian at heart, and believe that the so called compromise between freedom and security is one of the worst kinds of politically motivated false dichotomy.

Having grown up under the threat of IRA bombings and soviet nuclear annihilation, I honestly don’t feel terribly threatened by a bunch of disgruntled religious fundamentalists – despite government assurances that they are they deadliest thing since the Ebola virus.

The UK government’s latest crackpot plan to spy on its population – the announcement that along with monitoring all Internet usage, phone and SMS communication (including content via deep packet inspection) that they plan to monitor social networking sites such as Facebook comes as no real surprise, but has made a bit of a splash in the tech press and even made it onto the BBC.

The government has of course made the usual assurances that it is necessary to combat the threat posed by [terrorists/criminals/paedophiles/tax dodgers (delete as appropriate)] and that they won’t be looking at the content – just who is talking to who (bringing us back into the Stalinist purge era fallacy of  “guilt by association“).

However, other than being an example of the ongoing salami slicing of the privacy and hard won freedoms necessary for the proper running of a healthy democracy, I don’t believe that Facebook monitoring or even Streetview are in themselves the greatest threats to our life and liberty. Certainly when compared to all the other countless and more sinister intrusions into our liberties that the government is undertaking.

Indeed, the coverage this is getting may start to draw people’s attention to the fact that these networks are public and indeed anything that you put on the internet should be thought of as publishing. It is quite likely that it won’t be just your friends who see that unfortunate drunken picture of you, or your iPhone reported GPS  location.

What is worrying is what the prevailing governmental attitude means for the Social media and tech industry as a whole, which seems to be “regulate and control first, think later”.

What this measure does is add another expensive regulatory overhead (in this case archiving and logging user interaction to be sent to the government) for what is one on the few potential areas of growth in the UK economy – despite the recession, lack of government support for small business, ruinously expensive cost of hosting, the UK’s crippling tax regime (both business and personal), and its hidebound attitude to innovation.

The combined effect is that anyone who is going to be hosting a social network (or even starting a business) is going to be doing so overseas – increasing the already frightening flow of capital and talent out of the UK economy. Surely what we should be doing, especially in the current economic climate, is encouraging the growth of small business and an innovation culture rather than smothering it with expensive and unnecessary regulation?

Of course this was all conceived to appear to be Doing Something, and to target the big established networks. These networks would be told that in order for them to do business in the UK they must submit to this regulation – but this too could backfire.

As Youtube’s recent decision to block UK access to music videos goes some way to illustrate, the UK market is simply too small for us to be throwing our weight around in this way.

We are not China, and many companies are perfectly prepared to forego a slice of the UK market if they can make more money elsewhere and with far smaller overheads. Therefore we will likely be destroying a much needed area of growth in the fatally crippled UK economy for no reason whatsoever.

That is unless you buy into the idea that this will catch the mystical terrorist boogeyman – at least the ones who are smart enough to pose a real threat – who I imagine would use another method of communication… like for example, sending a letter.

Image: ‘One nation under CCTV’ taken by Mayu