Blog

A few years ago, at a conference about the Internet, I heard the testimony of a European judge about a child pornography case that he had tried and that left me thinking about the interaction between justice and the Internet.

This judge had in hand the case of a family against an ISP (Internet Service Provider) that hosted pornographic photographs of one of the family's children, and the judge's obvious decision was to remove this content. However, to comply with this sentence, the court needed to contact the competent authorities of the ISP's country of origin and handle all the formalities required by them, so that they finally and formally proceed with the removal of the illegal content.

However, as described by the judge, this process was too slow, complex and inefficient, so, in order to circumvent these circumstances, he chose to apply a local control measure and ordered the local ISPs to block the DNS (Domain Name System) of the target domain name. Finishing describing what happened, the judge himself said he realized that the measure he had taken was not the most effective and that it could easily be circumvented, thus appealing to the Internet community to think of a way to resolve this type of dilemma definitively.

This case is an example of many domain name blocking decisions that have been made, around the world, by law courts or national governments to prohibit access to certain content made available online. However, this type of measure is easily circumvented by anyone who knows how to use Google!

And why is that so? The Internet was created as an end-to-end communication mechanism, through which all those who were connected to the network, through a certain device, were able to communicate with each other. As an example, in a public IP (Internet Protocol), on a TCP type connection, there are 65,535 different ports that can function as connection points between users and between them and a certain online content. If we consider the global character of the Internet and the countless connections that the network allows to a certain content, we easily perceive that the measure of blocking of domain names that has been adopted proves ineffective.

 

Let’s talk about the case of VPN’s (Virtual Private Networks) that proliferate throughout the cyber world and started out as purely corporate systems that allowed access to the company’s private network by authorized employees, regardless of their location. Today, however, given the fact that they allow changing the virtual location of a user, VPNs are no longer limited to a strictly business use to allow anonymous access to content that is not available in a certain country, for example Netflix or access to child pornography.

There is, however, a case of success in the effective control of online content: the Great Firewall of China. This system is implanted in the points of exchange of traffic with the foreigner and has effectively controlled the entire flow of information according to national rules, however, it gives total control to the State over what is happening and can be seen on the network of the country, compromising the basic principle of Internet uniqueness.

It also contributes to the fragmentation of the Internet the fact that, as has been reported many times, large platforms threaten to abandon or limit access to certain online content following judicial decisions or laws that have been approved in some countries.

All these situations contribute exactly to the opposite of what was the ideal of the Internet, participating more and more in the fragmentation of the network and in the creation of "mini-internets”, making the coexistence between a global network and the application of local laws increasingly fragile. and giving rise to serious doubts about what the Internet of the future will look like: a set of "mini-internets” that interconnect at some points or a unified global system?