[freehaven-dev] micropayments and economical issues

[Felipe Bergo <bergo@seul.org>]

Free Haven looks very worried about people being able to post anything
and, if the document is interesting, no Government, Agency, Party, 2600
l33t war3z group will be able to either track the author(s), the reader(s)
or take the document down. (I guess an alien with a box capable of
solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time will do, but I wouldn't
worry about this for now)

And you have been talking about accountability and payments for data
exchange among peers.
Let's extrapolate a little. Some years from now Free Haven is deployed
world wide. By then everyone will be running 24/7 computers at home with
decent bandwidth plus some wearable/portable gadgets, so there will be
peers everywhere and anyone will be able to run a peer (I can just foresee
IDG publishing World Wide Data Haven Peers for Dummies). Everyone loves
the P2P system, it becomes so important and wastes so much of each worker
time and bandwidth that governments find the perfect opportunity to tax
the service and write laws upon it to restrain citizens from being so
happy as they could.

Said that, questions:

Won't the granularity of payments be a backdoor to system security and
offer an way for documents to be tracked ? Or aren't payments attached to
per-document (or per-document class), and attached just to gross bytes in,
bytes out on the pipe between two peers ? Even if authors can't be linked
to documents, can the act of authoring a document be tracked/taxed ? If
yes, when an author posts a new document on the system, even though it
will be distributed, it will come from a single source at first, and if an
accounting record says peer X added a document to the network, won't the
physical medium provider be able (with enough tapping strategy) to link
documents to authors ?

Content selectability

Suppose Catholic Church runs all Vatican with fiber, likes Free Haven and
wants to run a cluster of nodes. However, pope can't stand child
pornography and Marilyn Manson MP3 passing through his bandwidth. This
argument is extendable to every single person and company, from Computer
Scientists not wanting Microsoft stuff passing through their nodes to
record companies avoiding illegal audio data. Does FH allow the peer to
filter content at all ? If no, can you guesstimate the in efficiency loss
due to people who "40% of everything on the Net is crap, so I'll just
"miss" (neither forward nor store locally) 40% of everything that comes in
and pray to the bit-flipping gods to throw the right 40% out" ? [people
like this do exist, worry]

The main concern here is how an uncontrollable, uncensorable medium will
be, sooner or later, controlled and censored by the usual economical means
like taxes, government, religion, etc, etc.

[sorry if those questions have already been answered somewhere, RTFT
(Read The F... Thesis) answers are acceptable, but please narrow it down
to chapter/section]

.........................................................................
who:     Felipe Paulo Guazzi Bergo, undergraduate in Computer Engineering
what: Linux/FreeBSD developer and advocate. Working to ensure our freedom
mail:    bergo@seul.org || bergo@linuxstart.com || guazzibe@ic.unicamp.br
web:                                   http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~guazzibe
where:                           Unicamp - Campinas - SP - Brazil - Earth
  
* NT is VMS's vengeance, with the worst of VMS. (Cesar Cardoso)