Scott Bradner

When The Guardian recently interviewed Google co-founder Sergey Brin as a teaser for its weeklong series of articles about the "Battle for the Internet," the publication got a good headline out of it: "Google's Brin: threats to web freedom 'greater then ever.'"

A perfect attention-getter for what looks like a good week of meaty Internet freedom topics. While they do seem to be missing the most important Internet freedom topic -- the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) coming up in December in Dubai -- the topics they have chosen are about real threats to what most of us see as the freedom of the Internet.

Out of the blue, Apple just announced Mountain Lion, the next generation of its OS X operating system. By the time Mountain Lion ships sometime next summer, Apple says it will have lots of new features, some transported from its iOS environment of the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch world. This column will examine just one of the new features, one that, while good, has not yet included all the functions of its iOS prototype.

BACKGROUND: Apple counts down to 25 billion apps

In late January, the European Commission published a proposal "on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data."

The commission also published an introductory statement about the proposal and a staff analysis of the impact of the proposal. The proposal is extensive, more than 100 pages covering every facet of the gathering, processing, movement and protection of data about people. In concept, the proposal does not differ all that much from the existing European approach to data collected by businesses about people. The principles are the same: get permission from individuals before you collect information about them, tell them what the information will be used for, only collect what you need, only keep it for as long as you need to, protect the information properly and do not give the information to someone who will not protect it.

What is it about politicians that makes them believe that they, with a few minutes' cursory review, know better than people who have studied in an area for decades? Whatever the case, it far from a rare condition. The most recent example of this attitude is the copyright protection proposals currently in front of Congress.

Just about universally, the people responsible for the technical development and operation of the Internet have said that the DNS-blocking proposals would break vital Internet technology while at the same time being entirely ineffectual against people who are serious about violating copyright laws and largely ineffectual against those who do so casually. But the warnings of those who actually know what they are doing were dismissed as unimportant. A long holiday break and some White House action may have slowed down the train, but why should it have taken so long?

A year ago I wrote that 2011 would be a year in which the Internet would "be under a multi-pronged attack that threatens to change it irrevocably in ways that may destroy much of the Internet's potential." Well, 2011 has come and mostly gone, and it turned out that my pessimism may have been misplaced but not invalid.

The FCC vote I referred to in last year's column turned out to be generally good for the Internet but it did not take long for a telecom carrier to sue the FCC asserting that the commission had no power to tell the carrier to treat its customers fairly. My worry about the power of the copyright industry, at least in the U.S., was a bit premature but not misplaced.

The Supreme Court earlier this month heard arguments on a relatively common drug case, but there is a chance for this case to set the groundwork, for good or ill, on resolving most of the issues I discussed recently regarding the murky state of privacy protections from the government in the United States.

The particular case argued was the U.S. vs. Antoine Jones, who had been convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine in part on the strength of evidence collected by a GPS tracker that had been installed on his car. The police obtained a warrant to install the tracker, but had not done so within the timeframe specified by the warrant. And although the government argued that people should not expect privacy when driving on a public street, so tracking by GPS should not even require a warrant, a lower court tossed the conviction saying that 24x7 GPS tracking went too far. The current case is a result of the government appealing that decision.

In November 2009 the European Parliament approved a directive on Internet privacy that, among other things, required user opt-in before websites could install cookies on the user's computer.

In theory, any U.S. company running a website that may be used by any citizen of any European Union country would have to follow the rules or risk being brought up on charges by an EU country.

There has been a bit of a splash in the press recently about a mention by former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden of the idea of creating new, extra secure internets for government or commerce. Users would have to give up their privacy to use these versions of the Internet, with a requirement for the use of real names and all their traffic subject to deep packet inspection. The vision seems to be that government would use one such network and services such as banking would use another.

This is neither a new nor a good idea.

For quite a while I've been baffled by the inability of too many members of Congress to understand the importance of the network neutrality discussion. I'm not satisfied that I know for sure, but I may be getting closer.

Let me start out by saying that I'm not all that much of a fan of regulations for the sake of regulations. There are cases where regulations are warranted, prescription drugs for example, but many other cases where regulations have proven to stop any meaningful progress. Most of the regulations empowering AT&T when it was a monopoly were of the latter type. But I feel that regulations requiring carriers to treat their customers fairly are likely to increase progress rather than limit it.

Law enforcement has a problem, and you may be part of it.

If your company makes an Internet application that enables its users to communicate with each other and you do not have a way to hand over those communications in real time to law enforcement, then you are part of the problem. If one grants that there is a problem, as I do, the question becomes: "Is the solution worse than the problem?"

Egypt's decision to turn off the Internet and cell phones in an effort to stop Egyptians from talking with each other and plotting against the government has put businesses in that country in a fix.

Variations on the same theme have taken place in other countries and are likely to happen again. And while maybe it is unlikely that this could happen in the United States, the situation in Egypt does prod us to think about what an Internet-free life would be like for U.S. businesses.

This end-of-year article is a looking forward one -- looking forward to a year in which the Internet will be under a multipronged attack that threatens to change it irrevocably in ways that may destroy much of the Internet's potential.

Also read: 2010's biggest security snafus