Metadata Retention and the Internet

The Metadata Retention measures being considered in Australia make some sweeping assumptions about the semantics of IP addresses and their association with individual subscribers to the Internet. But are these assumptions warranted? The exhaustion of the free pool of IPv4 addresses has prompted a new generation of Internet services that treat IP addresses as ephemeral shared conversation tokens, and retaining address use metadata in such an environment is an exercise in futility. The regulatory...