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ICraveTV "can make a first approximation which will stop most abuses, but that's all," says Paul Vixie, senior vice president of Internet services for AboveNet, a network service provider whose clients include eBay and CNet. "If they're painting it as a be-all or end-all, then they're lying."

In Craig's case, the main problem lies in Canada, iCraveTV's initial market. Because of that country's proximity to the United States, many Canadians have U.S. accounts with America Online and other stateside Internet service providers. So technologies like TraceWare report that they are in the United States. AOL's proprietary network, in particular, makes targeting difficult; Digital Island has worked closely with AOL to gain some insight on how it assigns IP addresses regionally, but when Canadians log onto AOL, TraceWare still places them in Virginia, where AOL is based.

"TraceWare wasn't very helpful for us," Craig admits. "It returned only 57 percent accuracy. When I test it from Toronto, TraceWare tells me that I'm in Buffalo [where his ISP is located]; it says iCraveTV is in Pittsburgh," where the domain name is registered. Craig thinks he can correct these errors and improve TraceWare by taming "ambiguous ISPs" like AOL; his technology "is based on patrolling servers," he says -- but he shares no details. Digital Island's Henry sounds skeptical. "We've got our own internal designs for attacking the 4 percent, but we aren't there yet," Henry says.

Of course, Craig would love to find an answer to the riddle -- and use accurate geographic intelligence to convince the owners of TV shows and films that iCraveTV could pay for Canadian programming rights and stream to Canada only. Studios aren't so sure that even this would work, though. They may not want to negotiate with Craig, says Mark D. Litvack, director of legal affairs for anti-piracy for the Motion Picture Association of America, the studios' lobbying arm. Broadcasters are still smarting from they consider a gross breach of copyright.

But if Craig, or someone, can find a way to prevent proxy circumvention, and solve the location issues with AOL, the consequences could reach far beyond iCraveTV and the desire to watch American MTV in Latin America. Along with giving TV networks and Hollywood studios what they ultimately crave -- the ability to make the Web mirror the established system of national distribution -- geographic intelligence software opens up the possibility for a Web that is local, rather than worldwide.

Steve Cisler, a participant in Nettime.org, a mailing list dedicated to international discourse on technology, ponders how geographic intelligence might change local or national politics. Just before Indonesia's former President Suharto stepped down, a slew of pro-democracy sites -- many hosted outside the country -- offered locals a chance to communicate new visions of the future.

"With this technology, that wouldn't happen," Cisler says. "Those who will be most upset by bordering technology are those who got a taste of the Web's freedom in a repressive environment, then saw it closed back down."

But not everyone sees geographic intelligence as a negative idea; several participants of Nettime said it could actually make the Net more reflective of the world, rather than less.

"For a long time, the Internet's default culture has been U.S. culture," says Bram Dov Abramson, a research analyst with TeleGeography, a Washington group that maps international bandwidth geography, telecom flows and emerging industry structures. "Implementing geolocation forces content providers to think about other defaults," he says. But in all likelihood, the Web can't be segmented quite as neatly as someone like Craig might desire.

"Any one thing can be circumvented by extraordinary means," says Henry of Digital Island, referring to the vulnerabilities of geographic intelligence. "Anybody can fool any application if they're intent on it."

At this point geographic intelligence technology is mainly being used to make the Web more manageable. No clients have adopted an all-or-nothing approach with TraceWare, says Henry, choosing instead to let people opt out of the default setting. If MTV were to adopt such a service, for example, I might get a Spanish-language page when I logged in, but I'd likely have the option to click on an English version as well.

"The Internet has never been placeless," says Abramson. "It's always been a virtual overlay on top of the real world, anchored there by architecture, which is very physical indeed. Now the two worlds are merging. Real geography exists in the physical world; it had to show up on the Internet sooner or later -- if the Internet wasn't to remain a mainly American, mainly rich person's tool."
salon.com | Feb. 28, 2000

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