On content filtering and disingenuousness
After getting into a discussion about the degree to which Internet service providers can or should contribute to the enforcement of copyright law, I did some reading as to what means might be available for Internet service providers to make a contribution. In doing so, I discovered that deep packet inspection technology means that Internet service providers can and do monitor and manipulate the data that flows over their networks. This seems completely at odds with the protestations of Internet advocates like Suelette Dreyfus that filtering network traffic is onerous and expensive: it turns out that network providers find it perfectly practical and affordable if they have something to gain from it. Any doubt that network providers are willing and able to monitor and manipulate traffic might be dispelled by the recent hullabaloo concerning net neutrality, which would surely be a non-issue if network providers really did find content filtering uninteresting and/or uneconomic.
Of course network providers aren't interested in the same things about packets as the media industry or Government censors, and implementing filters for these things presumably incurs some cost over and above what network providers have already done for their own purposes. Nor does the technical feasibility of filtering necessarily imply that it's the best way to address the issues involved. Still, allegations of technical impossibility or economic infeasibility might not be sufficient reason to oppose filters, and might be particularly disingenuous if they come from network providers who'd like to do some filtering of their own.
Quite a few legal scholars, such as Landes and Lichtman, argue that some sort of filtering might indeed be the most cost-effective method of enforcing copyright law, since it is much easier to police the relatively small number of network providers than it is to police the extremely large number of network users. If those scholars are correct, the proposals of Dreyfus and others like her would have us pay less for Internet access in return for paying even more for the things that we download from it.
Of course Internet advocates don't see it this way. Assuming that they accept that copyright law ought to be enforced at all, they see it as a question of who has the moral responsibility for enforcing it. The logical conclusion of this approach seems to me to be for the media industry to either implement digital rights management technology, or to sue individual infringers, or a combination of the two. Yet I'm hard-pressed to think of an Internet advocate applauding the media industry's past efforts in these directions.
