Tuesday 26 December 2017

Internet Sheriffs. We the people... we need to make the law online

I am surveying the state of the internet with regards to law, and the state I find is something akin to the law found in the Wild West of America during it's worst years of corruption.

I was considering the matter, and we, all the peoples of the internet are letting ourselves be implicitly ruled and overruled by greedy corporations.

What I decided needs to happen is we need to establish some decent and publicly agreeable laws in an online crowd supported fashion and popularise these decent and people serving laws in a way that they can be presented to governments around the world as a fait accompli complete and with massive support and popular backing, so as the American constitution was founded so, we the people, being the people of the planet earth can establish an internet which doesn't support greedy, money grabbing techniques and practices but is a return to form of a place of freedom of speech and protection of human rights and dignity.

So, I figured I'd try starting the effort here and see if I can't bring some of you good people along this journey.

To start this great en-devour (which I admit might die right here on this first blog post if insufficient people care about this issue) I will state a simple set of aims:

  1. To establish a set of laws and principles to protect the dignity, privacy and rights of the individual to control and ensure any published works concerning themselves are accurate, factual and written with a balanced perspective.
  2. To provide a structured method of legal recourse to combat and eliminate propagandist and unscientific publications which can shown to be an untruthful attack on an individual or an unreasonable breach of their rights to privacy (to wit, the right to have their address not be publicly available excepting agreed lawful usage).
  3. To restrict the freedom of expression act to matters provable to be either strictly true in the scientific sense or purely a matter of opinion relating to some provable truth and where matters are non-provable the article must emphasise such fact clearly and unambiguously.
  4. To re-establish responsibility upon publishers, especially corporate publishers, to require to provide physical copies of paid software which can be installed and used from a physical medium without recourse to require internet activation and also to force said companies to always provided any paid update in a similar manor.
  5. To prevent and deny online rental and licensing software agreements which seek to force the customer into a monopoly relationship with the vendor (aka Cloud Computing). 
  6. To establish a stable system of online purchase tied closely only to actual demonstrable costs published for the customer to review (for example, if the software vendor is required to pay a fee for hosting their solution, it should be disclosed to the customer and be the only exception to the rental / licensing agreement).
  7. To restore to consumers statutory rights regarding paid for softwares such that no legal agreement can cancel or otherwise dismiss those right by contract and the consumer cannot surrender the rights.
  8. To make software giants responsible for and conscious of issues of customer privacy and choice.
  9. To deny artificial requirement for internet connection for services and to prevent the creation of internet services specifically and singularly designed to deny the end user the ability to run the solution in an offline manor.
  10. To enforce ALL software providers to provide a valid and manned contact email address and a minimum turn around on responses to queries with legal ramification (indicated by some simple tag within the email subject), giving them 28 days to respond before they enter an illegal stance there by denying the "noreply@" style email addresses and other mechanisms to ignore so called "troublesome customers".
  11. To define "lock in" solutions in the form of App Stores as de-faco monopolies and therefore to be regulated and controlled by local government to ensure fair representation within the medium of all peoples.
  12. Force solution providers to provide a base license agreement containing minimal legal content designed purely for the insurance of meeting legal obligation which is mandatory and deemed reasonable. Then any additional 'agreements' must be optional and not impact the primary use of the service, there by providing fair use and not an 'everything or nothing' agreement as we find today.
I realise these are lofty aims and they undermine present (I argue institutionally corrupted) business practices.

Who's with me?