Flushing the Net Down the Tubes 329
netcetra writes "From a post by on CircleID by Phillip J. Windley: 'Doc Searls has written a brilliant piece framing the battle for the Net at Linux Journal. ... if you take the time to read just one essay on the Net and the politics surround it this year, read this one.' Quote from Doc himself: 'This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future. Even optimists agree that the Net's future as a free and open environment for business and culture is facing many threats. We can't begin to cover them all or cover all the ways we can fight them. I believe, however, that there is one sure way to fight all of these threats at once, and without doing it the bad guys will win. That's what this essay is about.' Also see additional background on the piece on Doc Searls blog."
Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you vigilant?
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:4, Insightful)
In the old days of mom and pop ISPs, when profit margins were (relatively) high, and the Internet was more of a wild frontier, the ISPs often fought tooth and nail to keep from giving away even the most innocuous of customer data to anyone. These days, however, the mom and pop ISP is virtually nonexistent, and the margins in the ISP business are not sufficient to allow any ISP to protect the rights of its clients.
The Internet is still the most "free" of all available media, but that status is definitely under threat. As more powerful and wealthy interest groups bring more pressure on ISPs and other content publishers, the more difficult it will be for the average Joe to find a place where his voice can be freely expressed online.
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:4, Insightful)
How longer can I criticize the government before I get sent to Guantanamo?
A hell of a lot of people do both EVERY DAY on the internet. The majority of people aren't getting sued or sent to Guantanamo Bay. It doesn't appear that there will be a large amount of people going to either place.
Coercing people by threat of litigation or wrongful imprisonment IS wrong. But that doesn't really have anything to do with the internet. It's a problem in American society, that has moved onto the internet. You can't solve it for the internet only though, without solving it for the rest of society.
this is just silly (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look throughout history, in all cultures, if people find something to be useful, no amount of government or corporate intervention or regulation will dissuade those people from doing what they want. Despite most citizens not giving a shit about voting in government elections, very few people will stand by and allow a government or corporation to take away something they want. It just does not happen. This happens all over the world, in all cultures, and when this stand-off becomes a big enough event, it makes the news as a "revolution".
So no, the internet isn't going to be flushed down the tubes by ISPs or whatever, because consumers will not allow it.
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, anecdotally I'd say that at least a third of the population condones non-commercial copyright infringement (and I'm being conservative in my estimate, and taking into account the propaganda of the RIAA).
The point is, when an act is accepted by a significant proportion of the population, chances are that act is ethical -- in fact, it can be argued that ethics only exist relative to the population. So yeah, if murder and copyright infringment were performed at the same rate, then either both would be acceptable, or neither would. Of course, if a third of the population condoned murder, we'd have a society more similar to the Roman Empire (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Your use of absolute numbers are meaningless, and borderline FUD -- 12,000 out of 12,000 means something completely different than 12,000 out of 296,000,000.
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:5, Insightful)
Running a personal wiki or having a photo-share server for friends seems like a technical imposibility to most lay people because of this. The truth is, most of it can be done with easy to use software today. It should be trivial for the end user. Run an installer and start going. I seem to remember dreams of this being what the internet was for - back in the day... Remember when having a webcam wasn't mainly just for IM?
Yes I know that script kiddies have made this idea a playground for malware and things need to be blocked upstream for authentication-less ports sometimes. I do firmly believe that if everyone knew it was initially prety much their right to add their info to the internet, MS would have never been so lax and security would have had the focus by all of us that it should have gotten. The software that enables a home desktop to be a server would be way more mature due to popularity. In some ways, IM epitomizes this need to share with eachother.
You mean the **AA? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, before we do that, let's look a little deeper. Copyright used to last only 14 years. Now it is 70ish years beyond the death of the creator. It has been extended and expanded well beyond it's useful function, and is a horrid aberration of its original intention.
Murder today only applies to the willful killing of a human being. Should this law be extended the way copyright law has been extended
If ALL those things were now considered to be murders, then you would definately have a murder rate comparable to the rate at which copyright infringement occurs.
If all that were true, then yes
To properly answer your question, I would successfully argue that both laws were bad.
While I will agree that this argument initially sounds ludicrous
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:2, Insightful)
Regards,
Steve
Re:Greed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Further, it isn't just technology that is interconnecting. The entire world is interconnecting. China, EU, and the US are all so dependent upon each other that any sort of conflict between them is unthinkable to the point that loss of one could lead to a collapsing (or at least crippled) society in the others.
Look, I am not saying that everything is rosy colored and wonderful, but point to a time in history that was better. Do you long for the brutal dictatorships that existed almost exclusively up until the past few centuries? Do you miss the wonderful days of the industrial revolution when it was common place to die early and lose a hand in hazardous machinery? Maybe you miss the days of American expansion westward and European colonialism that chewed up the natives they got in the way. Do you long for the days when a married woman couldn't own property, much less vote? Maybe you miss the good old days of New Deal, complete with withering racism and World War. Maybe your nostalgia only reaches back a couple days and blindly forgets the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the ever present and very real threat of nuclear annihilation, and starvation in the millions that afflicted pretty much everyone on the Asian content. If this is the Dark Ages, what the hell exactly was everything that came before this time?
This is only "The Dark Ages" is you are a jaded liberal who has some how managed to shrink his view of history down to the past 6 years or so. Stop, take a deep breath, and realize that 6 years is a hiccup in the grand scheme of things. Further, even in those 6 years things have gotten better despite Bush's ham fisted blundering. Further still, things are better now then they were at any other time in history.
Honestly, take a deep breath and realize that the world isn't so bad. You can post angry rants on Slashdot, you clearly have an Internet connection, chances are you can vote, and I imagine you probably are not starving. Those four things alone make this time in history better then all the times before it. Relax and don't let today's day to day politics get you all worked up and taint your view of history in the long term.
Re:this is just silly (Score:3, Insightful)
If we want to get through to the people, one thing we need to do is banish "consumer" from the public vocabulary. I, for one, am not a "consumer!" No, I am a customer, and more importantly, a citizen! I WILL NOT BE FUCKED WITH!
Now, who's with me?
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:5, Insightful)
What percentage of the 18 - 40 year old public (roughly the heart of the burglary market, I would guess) engages in burglary?
What percentage of the 18 - 40 year old public engages in copyright infringement?
At least an order of magnitude difference there, right?
If murder were at the same rate as copyright infringement, would you argue that both were bad laws, neither were bad laws, or only one?
Both. I'll avoid the straw man you've set up by mixing the moral issue of murder with the legal matter of homicide. Ask yourself this - in societies where the percentage of the population that engages in homicide reaches double digits, isn't it obvious that the laws are broken? South Africa, Tombstone, Yugoslavia, Boston in the 1770's, Nicaragua, South Central LA, The Gangs of New York, Paris before The Revolution - in every case homicide became commonplace because the laws were enforced inconsistently and/or prejudicially. What is more wrong in those cases; fighting for your way of life or letting the injustice stand? We celebrate the people who committed homicide in the name of The American Revolution. So yes, when homicide becomes as commonplace as copyright infringement is today, it loses it's objective, absolute "wrong"-ness.
I Have ADD (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Demonizing CEO Whiteacre? (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll see about that.
They pay for transport to their local provider. That it isn't SBC does not matter.
What SBC seems to want to do is to require everyone to be their customer in order to carry their traffic on SBC's network.
Look at it as if it were telephone traffic. In that case, it is as if they would not complete any telephone calls unless the calling party and the called party were both customers of theirs.
Or, more accurately, they want to charge long distance tolls. I guess for your $30 per month, you will be able to connect to your local town without paying additional fees. If you want to connect to the next town, you're gong to have to pay more.
I never understood the rationale for franchise fees other than just another way to stick it to the public.
When I meet a single person... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:this is just silly (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Greed... (Score:3, Insightful)
I suppose it all depends on whether you look at the glass as being half full or half empty. In this day and age we have the power and the technology to ensure that nobody is starving, that nobody has to die from poverty or war or famine. All it takes is a little money and little will.
The control freaks often get control. (Score:5, Insightful)
The control freaks often get control. In the past, their power over the Internet has been limited by their extreme technical ignorance. Now, more and more, they are hiring technically knowledgeable people to corrupt and diminish the freedom.
If the healthy people don't assert their authority, the corrupters will debase the Internet as they debase everything else they touch.
The ceaseless activity of those whose only life is money and who want to make one more dollar has already caused limits to VOIP, for example. The communications companies want to protect their easy profits. They use VOIP, but they don't want us to do it without their permission or without their profit.
Re:this is just silly (Score:3, Insightful)
Read some history books. Apartheid, Slavery, The War of The Northern Aggression (and its aftermath), Native Americans, The Strikebreakers (the early 1900s ones), The East India Trading Company, The Aborigines. Heck, I don't even know much history and I can rattle off that list of corporate backed and long-lived oppression. Those things lasted decades, centuries. Heck, Native Americans and The Aborigines are still unresolved and festering issues of connected money co-opting government to screw those with less influence. The repurcussions from every one of those issues still rumble deeply through the global economy. This great self-righting machine we all believe in may work in the extremely long run, from a macro perspective, but massive catastrophic periods of regression are almost as common as periods of advancement.
I'd even say that the "almost" in that last sentence may only be there because we seem to be in the midst of an up trend at the moment. If a few untimely terrorist nukes take out any 2 or 3 of LA, NYC, Paris, Berlin, London, and Tokyo, we would be on the fast track to a new dark age - not just from the ensuing panic, but from the carte blanche we would give the military industrial complex. Halliburton has wet dreams about it.
All that is not to say there is no hope, but that freedom isn't free. Speaking from the US perspective, it is our duty to defend our nation against all aggressors, foreign and domestic. At the moment there are domestic aggressors that are, IMO, more dangerous to our economy and technological advancement than the foreign aggressors with whom we are openly engaged. If we act now, it doesn't have to reach the level where a revolution is necessary. If we just believe it will all come out OK and do nothing, a revolution will happen, and nobody wants that.
And it's not that far off. The sabre rattling is deafening; the Internet governance battle, severe rifts in NATO, US pundits calling for the UN to be dismantled, US refusal to join the Hague. If we continue to flip the world the bird, they are going to gang up on us. Now look here at home; talk of "the nuclear option" in congress, the no-quarter battle over ID, laws blatantly purchased by corporations, and equally blatantly ignored by huge swaths of the populace. If the world gangs up on us, a big chunk of "us" is going to side with "them."
Re:The ethics of numbers. (Score:1, Insightful)
No. Prices have gone down. It's easier NOW than THEN to create IP because the technology is more available.
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, more recently, the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s?
Or, currently, the systematic violations of your rights that occur at airports every time that you want to make a trip on a commercial airline?
Or the killing of non-human animals for sport?
Or the killing of pre-natal children?
Or the forced indocrination of religion on post-natal children (in church , Sunday-school, etc.)?
Or the idea that it's OK for a government to take a huge chunk of your income and spend it on things to which you are ethically opposed (like war, or Welfare (or both, depending on your point of view))?
Or the idea that Britney Spears has talent and deserves her fame?
Or the idea that it's O.K. for stupid football games to repeatedly preempt a great T.V. program like Firefly, eventually leading to the latter program's demise?
Wait, I appear to be drifting off-topic.
The point that I'm trying to make is that a popular belief is not always ethical, especially by my standards, which are the only ones that I care about anyway.
That's why the U.S. government was created as a republic, not a democracy, and why we have a Supreme Court to curb the excesses of a supposedly popularly-elected Congress.
Re:Greed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't take my comment that liberals think the world is coming to an end as a statement against liberals. My point was more that liberals are more inclined to look for the doom and gloom over the past few years and declare that the world is about to come to an end. Pick a broad liberal ideal; civil rights, health care quality/coverage, infant mortality/life expectancy, hunger, tolerance, wages / hours, whatever, it is better today then it was 50 years ago. We are even more well off if you look a 100 years back. Look 200 years back and the difference is so stark that it isn't even a meaningful comparison. The liberals are winning.
If anyone has reason to cry doom and gloom it is actually the right wing folks. All of their 'morality' issues are being hacked to pieces. There is more sex for non reproductive purposes, greater acceptance of homosexuals, proportionally fewer marriages, more broken homes, and all of the bread and butter of a conservative platform. Hell, the fact that we are at the point where we can even have a gay marriage debate is rocking conservatives to the core. Just 15 years back, talking about gay marriage would illicit roughly the response of talking about bestiality.
I suppose it all depends on whether you look at the glass as being half full or half empty. In this day and age we have the power and the technology to ensure that nobody is starving, that nobody has to die from poverty or war or famine. All it takes is a little money and little will.
There certainly is more that could be done, but the relics of the past do not easily die. There is no amount of money, technology, and will that could make North Korea a happy place unless by 'happy place' you mean 'war zone'. War and famine are political problems. No one in this world should starve. Not only do we have more then enough food for everyone, but we are trying to get that food to the people. Somalia is a perfect example of this. Somalians are not starving because the rest of the world is unwilling to feed them. Somalians are starving because short of going in guns blazing, we can't we can't keep our aid out of the hands of warlords. In fact, this very dilemma is what resulted in the US invading Somalia. We wanted to give them food. We had the food and the means to get it there; we just needed to keep warlords from taking it. If you recall, things didn't go so well when we tried to intervene (IE see Black Hawk Down).
So sure, we could certainly do more, it just boils down to disagreement as to how to do more (does globalism hurt or help?), and the problems with humans some times sucking no matter how much power and technology you have. The larger point is that even though we certainly screw up, fail politically, and in general act like the imperfect humans that we are, we are still steam rolling forward. Things are getting better. A political charged look at the best 6 years might make you think differently, but the second you look at this era from a historical point of view, it quickly becomes clear which direction things are headed. Now is a great time to be alive.
This article SHOULD have more comments, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but it is obvious that even the large readership of the slashdot community is either ill informed, indifferent, or uncertain about this issue. Even the article posted at 230am has more activity! This should frighten you!
Make no mistake...the governance of the Internet and the fight for its control is the most important issue currently at stake. Period. Wars will subside, politicians will be replaced, the world will keep turning. However, if the core principles driving the Internet are not preserved, we as diverse citizens of all nations will forever have lost something magnificent.
I have been on the Internet for a long, long time. I remember BBSes at pathetic baudrates, when emails didn't travel between ISPs, when there weren't any advertisements online whatsoever. Those of you that remember these changes and are able to see the Internet --- not as it is nor for what it has become, but for what it must be --- please educate the masses. It must exist as a free, uninhibited enity and REMAIN independent of the infrastructure through which it is accessed. Should the day come when borders and binding structure is imposed upon the Internet, we will all have truly lost the most important medium for communcation, commerce, and culture ever created.
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are missing his point. The world's ethics are not set by you, or me, or any individual. They are the current mood of the population. Sure, now the whole concept of slavery seems barbaric, but back in the day, slavery was deemed acceptable/ethical. That's the whole point!
We can look back and wag our fingers about how awful our ancestors were, and not just slavery, but witch burning, any number of religion-based attrocities (nobody expects ...), animal welfare, treatment of indigenous people, the list is probably endless, but at the time, most of the actions were deemed acceptable. As I understand it, if we burnt someone at the stake, we thought we were saving their soul!
I'd say that by definition, the popular vote defines the popular ethical values. Just be thankfull that we have moved on from the time when having different ethical values from the norm might mean you were burnt at the stake for heresy!
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:3, Insightful)
"No matter how you slice it, dice it, or spin it, it all boils down to the fact that copyright infringement involves the acquisition of something of value, without the permission of, or compensation to, its original creator(s). People who want change in the business models used by the content providers NEED TO STOP FUNDING THE CURRENT MODEL."
This makes a great deal of difference. The creators never owned the copy that the infringer recieved, nor did they own the copy that was used in infringing the copyright at the time of the infringment. And often they never owned that copy at all.
This situation has nothing to do with ownership. (see TFA) Copyright is about privledges granted by restricting others actions. Not rights, and not ownership.
Re:Greed... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think both you and the grandparent are right: to me you seem to be discussing different things. Indeed we are seeing great advantage, but if mankind is still alive 750 years ahead in time, the humans living in that age will think we were a bit silly and 'medieval'.
If grantparent would have made the same argument in the middle ages, you could have succesfully made the same sort of counter argument: "Look at the cities, our churches! We have the Word of our Lord now! And we have a justice system!"
IMHO grantparent tries to look at how we are now through the eyes of someone from the future.
Re:Getting rid of the trash. (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. Block port 80. boom - most of the sites on the internet are gone.
And that is exactly the sort of thing TFA is talking about. Pay us, or your site goes bye-bye.
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:1, Insightful)
Nobody likes it but that's the way things have been in history.
What a windbag (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe this guy should leave computers alone and go far away and do something completely different for a year. Great way of clearing the head. Perhaps he'd get some new perspectives on life and find he'd gotten a better writing style too.
Bob Young, who recently stepped down at Red Hat, made a very important point the other day. The present generation of lawmakers may be clueless about IT, but they are reaching retirement age now. The next generation is a lot more knowledgeable about IT having grown up with it for most of their adult lives. Over the next 5-10 years, expect lawmakers to show a more sophisticated approach to IT legislation and a lot less indulgence towards big corporations and cartels trying to pull a fast one. If this is true - a big if but not unlikely - then Searl's dire predictions are not going to happen.
Re:Greed... (Score:1, Insightful)
War (Score:2, Insightful)
I personally believe the internet is worth fighting for, perhaps not physically, but logically.
Re:Greed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Toys.
Where is any mention of _culture_?
Aren't we in a war right now on the excuse that our nation can march in and replace another nation's 4,000 years of culture with our own as easily as Epcot Center would replace one national exhibit with another? Barbarians. Our leaders don't have a clue what culture _is_ or that it exists as a force to recognize.
And they hate science on top of it. Anyone with cable now has access to documentaries on the mating habits of Amazonian tree slugs. So what? I remember when Mr. Wizard used to both entertain and teach scientific _method_ at the same time.
And they want to mold our economy into a new feudalism. Look back six years? Let's look back thirty. I heard yesterday that it takes two wage earners now to maintain the family standard of living that one wage earner could produce in 1975.
Health care? Well, we can talk some more about cool tech toys, but the facts are that the average Cuban is healthier than the average American.
Voting? Doesn't mean diddley compared to _counting_.
No, there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic. What could be a better definition of a Dark Ages than governance by an elite class of barbarians?
(tech toys notwithstanding -- nerd allusion: Damon Knight's A for Anything)
Whoever subsidize media will control it! (Score:1, Insightful)
If media is subsidized by advertisement then advertisers will control the media. We know this from past experience with other media like print, radio, TV etc.
Many companies already tried running free advertisement supported ISP's and failed. If they had succeeded WWW already would have flushed down the tubes....
We can see the effect of Google advertisements on the WWW! 1000's of made for google adsense scrapper sites with poor content has started appearing! Current success of adsense is temporary since lots of new net users coming on the net think adsense ads are site navigation links and click on them! Soon advertisers will understand this and start bidding lower for google ads and hype and adnonsense will die natural death like earlier web 1.0 banner ad models!
Internet will retain freedom of expression only until advertisement models fail.... the moment WWW becomes truly ads subsidized, freedom of expression will get flushed down the tubes.....
Re:Searls overstates his case (Score:3, Insightful)
Once, we had DSL choice here in Southeast Texas. There were at least three companies with DSLAMs (DSL modems) around Beaumont. Then SBC went crying to the FCC, paid off both major parties, and got permission to block anyone else from using their facilities and to remove wholesale prices that local ISPs used to resell DSL services. So now, DSL service runs only about twice as fast as ISDN for about the same price as the RoadRunner service (avg. 6Mbps), and is nowhere near as stable.
Damn, that's a fierce ecosystem we have goin' here. The problem is that we have predators who won't die when they kill all the prey. They have the ability to buy laws, which creates an ecosystem of unnatural selection.
Re:Greed... (Score:4, Insightful)
On most of those fronts, we are in poorer shape than we were in 1970. Tolerance is a little better now. Health 'coverage' is up, but in 1970, you could afford routine care on just your wages.
Literacy is down. Truth in government is down. Government spending has gone to the point of self destruction. The government asserts that it can lock you up forever without a trial and without even access to lawyers. The PATRIOT Act's effects still haven't been fully understood. Civil rights, in other words, have never been in worse shape in this country. Average wages and living standards in this country are WAY down.... a small segment of the population is doing very well, while most folks struggle harder and harder with each passing year. Infant mortality is way up. Hunger is way up.
This country is broke, way past broke, and it's only the largesse of strangers(foreigners buying dollars, mostly) that allows us to continue functioning at all.
Re:Internet freedom isn't going anywhere. (Score:3, Insightful)
The absence of ethics isn't itself a form of ethics. And ethics isn't a "mood".