Should the United States federal government decide that they
wanted to create either a Terms of Service
(TOS) document, they would find it difficult to enforce. As it TOS
agreements are constantly disregarded by end users now. They are commonly
countered by jailbreaks and key generators. Any attempt to instate such type of
agreement for the internet as a whole will see methods designed to bypass or
eliminate the restrictions imposed by the contract. This is not even taking
into consideration how many ways currently exist for this document to be
bypassed or ignored.
One of
the easiest ways for this contract to be ignored is for a US citizen to use a Wi-Fi
hotspot in another country. As the US is the only country which would have an
internet TOS contract, the hotspot by default would not forward the user to the
“Please accept US TOS” page. As there is no way currently for a wireless access
point to know that this new device belongs to a US citizen, they would be
allowed to access the internet without agreeing to the US TOS.
And even if there was a way for the
wireless access point to know that the device belonged to a US citizen, you
would need every other country to force all of their citizens to configure
their devices to perform the necessary checks for any US citizen connecting to
their access point. It is very unlikely that every other country would force
their citizens to perform this reconfiguration of their devices considering
some of the countries are antagonistic towards the US. They would take offense
if the US tried to make and enforce laws in their countries possibly leading to
further hostility and perhaps even attacks on the US for our interference in
the way their countries are run. Then even in the countries that might comply
with this, there would be problems having the owners of the access point
perform this reconfiguration as not every citizen has the technical knowhow to make
the change on their equipment. This would mean that all a user needs to do to
bypass this restriction is connect to an internet connection outside the
country.
The
next way I can easily think of is using a service such as the onion router (TOR)
or a virtual private network (VPN). These services would create a secure
channel between your computer and another computer. If the exit computer or
exit node of this channel was outside the US, then any web traffic sent from
the exit node would be seen as coming from a non-US host and therefore would
not be subject to the US TOS monitoring.
As VPNs are used extensively in businesses
across the world and TOR was produced and distributed by the research
laboratory of the US Navy, there is no way for the US to ban or block these
services. Banning TOR would be counterproductive as it assists in providing
people with access to socially sensitive topics such as chat rooms and web
forums for rape and abuse survivors. Banning VPNs on the other hand would cause
an economic nightmare as international businesses would be unable to transmit
data from the offices in the US to another office securely and easily. This
might cause a few businesses to move out of the US and therefore possibly cause
an economic recession or even an economic depression if enough businesses move
out.
These are just two examples of how any attempt
by the US government to create and enforce a TOS agreement on its citizens
could be bypassed. Should this actually come to pass, I am sure that other ways
would be quickly found. This would make the purpose of the TOS agreement moot
as the only people which would be using it would be the law abiding citizens. Overall
this would just be an extreme waste of time and money for our government as the
people that the TOS were aimed at would use work-arounds such as those
mentioned above to invalidate any monitoring brought about by the agreement.
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