In this post, K. Chris Caldwell discussed a censorship law which forces ISP’s to block access to IP addresses because a website under that domain may contain child-pornography. This blocks access to thousands of unrelated websites, which are separate domains under the same IP address. Pensylvania attempted to justify this, saying that individuals could move their website urls to different IP addresses. Aside from the property-rights that are obviously being violated, there is no way to determine the destructive impact (economic or otherwise) this may have.
Business’ that had high-traffic websites under that IP address lose enormous amounts of money while trying to get their url transferred to another IP address. Worse yet, this may have a negative impact on the “performance” of the internet as a whole. IP addresses are actual places. 66.210.65.47 is not just some number that you type into your web-browser that magically gets you to Mises.org. It is the cyberspace address of an actual server — a powerful computer that cranks out the Mises webpage. This is a physical space using actual resources to produce Mises.org for our viewing pleasure. When the government starts demanding that ISP’s block IP address’, it is effectively removing a server from the internet. This reduces the point-to-point distribution of the internet and places more strain on the remaining pool of servers, which now have to start handling the load of thousands of extra web-sites.
Furthermore, it is obvious that government action isn’t any more likely to “protect children from being the victims of child-pornography” or “protect children from pornography” than it is likely to “protect us from spam”. Like others, those hosting child-porn on their websites can move to different IP address’. And there are natural free-market solutions to child-porn on the internet. ISP’s often have contracts that allow them to revoke web-site hosting priviledges if websites contain child-pornography. Many internet browsers offer “Content Rating” to prevent children from entering websites which are offensive in various ways.
And in every computer, there is this wonderful thing called a “hosts file”. In Windows, it is located in “C:\Windows\hosts”; in Unix, it is usually in “/etc/hosts”. A typical line in the file would look like this “mises.org 66.210.65.47”. What this tells your web-browser is that when you type in mises.org, it should go to the IP address 66.210.65.47. This is essentially a short-cut. Rather than having to query your Domain Name Server (DNS), which takes additional time, to get the IP address corresponding to the website entered, your browser simply checks your hosts file and goes to that IP address. The intended use of this file was for that purpose. However, individuals have creatively used the very same file to block websites. If you type the line “aclu.org 0.0.0.0” or “aclu.org 127.0.0.1” in your hosts file, you will block access to the ACLU from your computer, preventing the brainwashing of your children. This is because 127.0.0.1 is the “local host” (your computer) and “0.0.0.0” is an invalid IP address. I use this technique to block online advertising domains (e.g., doubleclick.com), but it can also be used to block any domain you find offensive.
This brings up an issue that’s underlying this entire topic. What is important here is not the vague “right to freedom of speech”. What is important is property rights. Considering property rights, it should be up to the ISP only whether or not to block various websites, domains, and IP addresses. Similar analysis applies to the mapping of IP addresses to domain names (a function done by DNS servers). Government rules and regulations in this area inherently violate property rights, as they essentially force the owner of DNS’ to change an entry in their computer’s hosts file.
For example, it should not be up to some quasi-governmental US-government-created “corporation”, ICANN, to decide whether or not apple.com brings you to the website of Apple Computer or of someone who made a website about growing apples. Ultimately, that should be up to the owner of each DNS server, dependant on contracts he’s agreed to. Apple Computer has no inherent right for every DNS server to point apple.com to their website, because they do not own every DNS server. They only have these rights in-so-far as they contract for them with various ISP’s, which may ultimately have contracts with the owners of various DNS servers.
This brings up the government objection, that if different DNS servers mapped the same domain-name to different IP addresses, the internet would be unuseable chaos. This is partially correct, in that, depending on which DNS server you told your browser to use, you would go to different websites. This would make sharing websites difficult, and would break links from one web-site to another. However, this is only correct if you assume that, absent government intervention, everyone is going to start doing their own thing with their DNS server...one DNS server will have mises.org mapped to 66.210.65.47, another will have doc.gov mapped to 66.210.65.47. In reality, that’s not what will happen. The free market has settled for standards time and again absent government intervention. HTML is a standard settled on absent any government regulation. Likewise, the free market could easily prevent collision between different DNS servers as to which domain corresponds to which IP address, and even come up with solutions to dealing with possible collision (e.g., converting href’s to IP-addresses followed by subdomains, rather than leaving them as a string of text-characters).
Finally, there’s the bald fact that the government’s creation of ICANN hasn’t prevented collisions, but has caused thousands of them. There is a free-market alternative to ICANN called OpenNIC. Those who created OpenNIC purposefully chose not to conflict with ICANN’s assignment of domain-names to IP addresses. Thus, they decided that what they needed to do is create new top-level-domains (TLDs) for alternate use with the alternate rules. A top-level-domain is the last part of a website that you type; the “.org” in “mises.org”, for example. OpenNIC created TLDs such as “.parody” and “.geek”. These TLDs are stricly and privately regulated (e.g., you can’t put a commercial website on .parody). One alternative TLD, .biz, has existed for many years. However, the quasi-governmental “corporation” ICANN decided to make it’s own “.biz”, which conflicts with the .biz that had existed 6 years prior to ICANN’s version. Clearly, ICANN has caused, not prevented, conflicts.
