Last week, over on our Step 2 discussion platform we kicked off a discussion on what an "innovation agenda" might look like for a US-politician for 2012. What kinds of regulatory changes should they be focused on? This effort, done in partnership with Engine Advocacy, has already kicked off a nice discussion over there with some interesting ideas being tossed around. If you haven't yet, please join in the discussion. I'm not surprised that copyright issues and open internet issues top the list of things most interesting to folks -- the SOPA/PIPA debate has pretty much guaranteed that. I am a little surprised that issues around helping skilled entrepreneurs -- the folks who create jobs -- was seen as less of an issue compared to some of the others on the list. Either way, the discussion is still going on there, and we'll be taking it further over the coming weeks and months, so feel free to join in.

It's not like this wasn't easily predictable, but as the entertainment industry has "succeeded" in taking down Megaupload and continues to move against The Pirate Bay and others, anyone who's followed this space had to have known that file sharing would just move one step further underground. We've seen the same thing after every single "victory" against file sharing since Napster was shut down. Each time, it moves to a system slightly more underground and more distributed. The early ones were still easy to take down but as they get further underground, it just becomes worse for the industry (and makes it that much harder to win back those users). The latest news is that there's been massive uptake of a growing number of anonymous, decentralized file-sharing tools. As is pretty typical in these "shift" periods, it's still not clear which systems will "win" out over the others, but the leaders are starting to emerge. The Torrentfreak article above mentions players like Tribler and RetroShare. People in our comments have been discussing both, as well as Ares Galaxy. Who knows if any of these apps are actually any good, but it seems pretty clear that people are continuing to file share -- they're just finding ways to do so that are even harder to track down and stop. How long until the legacy entertainment industry starts publishing articles about these evil anonymous, decentralized file sharing systems and demanding new laws against them?

Join the discussion over at Step 2 In the last few months it's become clear that it's no longer acceptable for politicians to "not get" the internet. The internet has become such a key part of our lives that anyone who is trying to regulate it without understanding it doesn't deserve to be in office. Of course, there are some politicians who really do want to do the right thing, and it's time to help them out. In association with Engine Advocacy, we're looking to do a little "crowdsourcing" around what an internet "Innovation Agenda" should look like for any politician in 2012. We're starting with this basic principle:

New businesses are the key to job creation and economic growth, and the Internet is one of the most fertile platforms for new businesses ever established.

We believe deeply in the value of decentralized, emergent, bottom-up innovation, and we want to shape public policies that will allow it to flourish.

From there, we have a list of twelve topics that we think are important -- but we want your input. So we've posted this same thing both here and over at our Step 2 discussion platform. Over at Step 2, we've also posted those initial twelve topics, with each one as a separate comment on the original post, so you can vote them up and down. If you want to really participate, please head on over to Step 2, where you can do three separate things (and, yes, your Techdirt login works there too):

1. Suggest your own topics that should be part of an innovation agenda by responding to the main post.
2. Vote on existing topics to show which ones are more important... and which ones are less important.
3. Comment on the existing topics to provide feedback or suggest ways to improve them.

Please help us shape a comprehensive Innovation Agenda for 2012. Engine Advocacy is working closely with the internet community and helping give them a voice in DC, and this is one way to take part, as your suggestions may help shape what politicians are hearing.

We've discussed in the past how the whole Wikileaks response from governments has only helped to expose areas of internet infrastructure that should be decentralized and distributed, but are not. Of course, much of that is now being cleared up. For example, there was plenty of talk -- what with the US government seizing domains and all -- about setting up a distributed web system that bypasses a centralized server (and potential censorship choke point), such that it can't easily be filtered. It appears that this may already be happening and as was just announced, it's being undertaken by the W3C. That ought to add plenty of legitimacy to the concept, which many anti-Wikileaks folks have insisted was merely a geek pipedream.

We already posted Glyn Moody's response to Jaron Lanier's critique of Wikileaks, but I also wanted to point to and discuss an excellent rebuttal/debunking to Lanier's piece by professor Zeynep Tufecki, who notes that, contrary to Lanier's claims, Wikileaks hasn't exposed "the hazards of nerd supremacy," but rather the "dissent tax." The dissent tax is a great way to summarize the point I've been trying to make about how Wikileaks has really exposed corporate intermediaries who are too centralized. In Tufecki's explanation, the "cost" of avoiding those intermediaries is the dissent tax:

What the Wikileaks furor shows us is that a dissent tax is emerging on the Internet. As a dissident content provider, you might have to fight your DNS provider. You might need to fund large-scale hosting resources while others can use similar capacity on commercial servers for a few hundred dollars a year. Fund-raising infrastructure that is open to pretty much everyone else, including the KKK, may not be available. This does not mean that Wikileaks cannot get hosted, as it is already well-known and big, but what about smaller, less-famous, less established, less well-off efforts? Will they even get off the ground?

These developments should alarm every concerned citizen, even those who are thoroughly disgusted by Wikileaks. This is the issue that the Wikileaks furor has exposed, not nerd ideology. This is the story and likely will be more important than the release of diplomatic cables (which were already available to millions of people) through major newspapers after scrutiny by journalists. This question will stay with us even if Wikileaks dissolves, and Julian Assange is never heard from again.

This does such a nice job of summarizing the point I'd been trying (and probably failing) to make over the past few weeks that it's worth reading again. Of course, the real question is what happens next. And what we're seeing is that the response is for a lot of smart people to start looking at all these chokepoints that have created that dissent tax, and look for ways to route around them, and build more distributed, more censor-proof infrastructure pieces, such that any such dissent taxes in the future will be minimized.

The classic line about how "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," is certainly being proven true yet again these days, but there is an interesting corollary that might be worth considering in this as well: which is that sometimes these attempts at censorship expose the need for new routes, and those routes are quickly created.

We've been pointing out repeatedly for a while now that the real issue we're witnessing with things like Wikileaks and Operation Payback is the confusion a centralized/closed system has when it comes up against a more distributed and open system. Much of what we've seen concerning both Wikileaks and Operation Payback over the past few weeks is exposing the cracks in the system where things that should be more decentralized and distributed are not.

However, it seems that each time new centralized intermediaries spring up to cause problems, all it's really done is to drive more people to figure out ways to create more distributed and decentralized alternatives. We've already discussed a more decentralized DNS system, but now the EFF is listing out a variety of distributed and decentralized projects that it hopes will help people route around censorship attempts.

As the EFF notes, many of those individual projects probably won't succeed or catch on, but others will. In a few years, it will be interesting to look back and see just how many new, more distributed and decentralized infrastructure systems really came out of the "fights" we're seeing splashed across the news today. The real shame, of course, is that the US government, who has been speaking so forcefully about being against online censorship over the last year or so, may ultimately be the leading cause for these new infrastructure tools to be built, and not because it supported them directly, but because of its current attempts at censorship.