Web Thinkers Warn of Culture Clash

Passacaglia writes "The Washington Post is carrying an article describing some stimulating discussion from the Internet Society meeting this week, including comments from Vinton Cerf, Eric Schmidt, about the clash between freedom and commercial interests."

Comments

Duh

[pope nihil]

The reason that the internet has become so accessible to the common man is because of big business. What does big business want in return? They want you look at their popups and they want to track you and they want you (in the end) to buy their products or services.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope popups and cookie abuse and all that crap is coming to an end, but I don't think that spells the end of doing business on the internet, which I am not opposed to. Think of this, over at kuro5shin Rusty puts out a call for some emergency funds--and it works! Meanwhile portal sites like Yahoo are getting uglier and more useless by the week, "content providers" like Salon and nytimes.com just don't seem to ever learn. Sooner or later I think the sites that don't get on the cluetrain will go under. Even the giants, because they cannot sustain a losing business model forever. It will take time, but for those that can stick it out, there will be financial rewards for those outfits who understand the internet and work with it. Well, that's my hope.

Status Quo

[houston_pt]

"But many participants said government agencies and businesses can't afford to wait on issues such as privacy, junk e-mail and copyright controls."

So, it's spam first and check the legislation later as usual...

There's no clash

[Anonymous Coward]

You want freedom, we want to sell it to you.

Culture of openness

[Anonymous Coward]

The medium which we affectionately refer to as "the internet" never had a culture of openness. It is a technocracy. Those who operate the communication lines say what goes over them. It has always been that way and those who have differing views of what the network should be used for have experienced how far from open that situation can be. The problem is not so much that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press", it is that very few own a press, metaphorically speaking.

Bandwidth is the key

[The Cat]

Companies are inhibiting innovation, Cerf said, by letting users receive information faster than they can send it.

This is the most important statement in the article. Bandwidth is the main component of every Internet policy discussion. Upstream is probably at least as important as downstream. To seperate the two significantly is an attempt to confine people to the role of consumer: i.e. "stay on the couch."

Upstream bandwidth allows people to become *producers* too, which is a good thing(tm).

Re:Bandwidth is the key

[Gryffin]

"Companies are inhibiting innovation, Cerf said, by letting users receive information faster than they can send it."

There's an old saying: "Freedom of the press only applies to those who own one." Besides the issue of bandwith limits, most broadband ISPs block ports 21 and 80, and specifically prohibit running any sort of server, i.e., publishing on the web.

George Orwell's "1984" got one thing wrong: it's industry, not the government, that's now playing the role of Big Brother. In the US at least, this makes sense; the government is bound (well, to some degree) by the Constitution; corporations have no such limits on their behavior.

With fewer and fewer corporations controlling more and more of our lives, and with huge profits to apply towards influencing government policy, is it any wonder we're heading towards Dystopis, Inc.?

::sigh::

[DarkZero]

He pointed to the current "balkanization" of instant messaging, where a lack of standards prevents America Online users from communicating with people on rival services.

The people in this article made a very good point when they mentioned the problems that arise from upload speeds that differ wildly from the download speeds on the same service. However, the above point was just absolute stupidity. AIM and ICQ are COMPLETELY different services that function very differently from one another. They have differing levels of privacy, different ways of conveying information, and even very different ways of sending and receiving messages (AIM only receives messages when the user is online, while ICQ effectively acts as a short message equivalent to an e-mail account). A forced standard in this situation would do nothing but annoy those who have chosen AIM or ICQ specifically because they prefer the very different functions of whichever one they chose.

They're both referred to as "instant messaging services" (or some such), but that's where the similarities between AIM and ICQ end. Trying to force AIM and ICQ to conform to a standard is like trying to force ham radio companies and phone companies to conform to a standard. On the surface, they're very similar, as they're both forms of solely verbal communication between individuals or small groups. But the similarities stop there and the two services should be kept completely independant of one another for that reason.

Re:::sigh::

[transiit]

Trying to force AIM and ICQ to conform to a standard is like trying to force ham radio companies and phone companies to conform to a standard.

You do understand that AIM and ICQ are both products of AOL, right?
I think it's become apparent through the efforts of Jabber, Trillian, etc. that the technological side of getting interoperability between the networks isn't impossible. The problem is companies such as AOL changing their protocol whenever they feel threatened.
-transiit

Re:::sigh::

[infiniti99]

so far all of the "universal instant messenger" services that connect with anything that they can find display the same sort of problems that you would find in a Swiss Army Knife, i.e. they do everything "okay" or "pretty well", but overall don't do the job as well as a service or tool that is tailored to one specific job.

Maybe the users of these multi-IM programs are not interested in the extra service-specific features you speak of, otherwise these types of programs wouldn't be so popular. It is abundantly clear that the general public does _not_ like the segregated world of IM we live in.

Communications standards would not preclude an AIM-lover from using the official AIM client if they want the bonus features. Consider AOL internet services, which gives you all sorts of other things in addition to a TCP/IP connection. Consider AOL email, which uses a proprietary protocol internally, but talks SMTP to the rest of the world.

What we need is for AOL (and others) to agree on an IM standard, if only for the basics, so that we can tear this wall down exactly like what happened with email 10 years ago.

The Jabber protocol has achieved RFC status, and will likely be accepted by the IETF. There's our standard. Unfortunately, there are powerful market forces at work, so I won't place any bets on AOL running a Jabber server anytime soon. Too bad, really..

Upstream and Downstream

[Beautyon]

I am not overly concerned about the upstream downstream issue. We have already seen tools that combine small amounts of bandwidth from many different users to make an "on demand fat upstream pipe", as long as all the upstreaming users have identical files on thier system.

People collaborating to share their upstream bandwidth with the inevitable second genration swarming tools that will follow the like of Open Cola and its brethren will completely solve this "problem".

I say inevitable, because whenever a situation like this is artificially created, wether it be censorship (Freenet) or email privacy (PGP), the small group of creative software writers that fix these problems always come up with a tool to redress the balance, and sometimes, change everyones thinking permanently (gnutella).

If I consulted for these media companies, I would advise them to let everyone have the bandwidth that they want, because trafic shaping, contention and other evils will force the creation and evolution of tools that will make it easier to share content, which is precisely what they are trying to restrict.

Re:The Role of the Common Consumer

[PinkSchizoid]

I agree with the merits of your statement completely. However, I wonder how many "Joe Shmuck's" surfing the net at home really care about upstream bandwidth? I have to assume that the number of people who simply turn on their pc, check their email, and see what the Weather Channel(tm) website has to say about their local forecast is the largest percentage of typical users of the internet. A good chunk of the rest are mindlessly wandering around AOL (no further comment).
This would imply that the minority consists of we who read sites like Slashdot and care about upstream bandwidth. I have to stress the word minority here because if you:
A) care about bandwidth
B) want to be a producer or host
C) even know what the word "bandwidth" means
then you are definitely in the minority. Something I think we are all too quick to assume is that there is some type of universal intelligence on the part of web user's when there defintely is not. Again, (IMHO) I think most user's want to be a couch potato because they don't know or don't want to know anything more that would further complicate their lives.
Someone's previous observation that P2P software has changed this is assuming that all recipients of data equally want to be sources of data. I don't know about you, but uploaders really cramp my style on KaZaA. My downstream bandwidth gets killed because I have a 56K ISP uplink and a satellite dish downlink. I don't want to share data in this case as I can't get those cd's fast enough.
I've presented a case for the merchandiser/consumer model here. As long as the majority of user's stay stupid then marketers will increasingly seek alliances with service providers to affect the largest number of users possible. This is not only confined to the web - it reaches much further. Does Microsoft's recently announced partnership with Verizon bother anybody? It bother's me. As a Verizon customer (which I am), do I now have to face another outlet for "Windows" to be in my face on my phone? To hell with the contract cancellation penalties. I'll use two tin cans and a string the day I see ANY ad, service, etc... from MS on my cell phone.
Back to the web and the original article in general: perhaps the most troubling part of the reality to me is the admonishment of government influence/control. Perhaps I'll be labelled as a "terroristic threat"(tm GWB) for saying so, but with the level of paranoia up within an already visibly bipolar Bush adminstration I think we can expect certain government affects on our freedoms on the web (will the "right" to cruise the web soon become a revokable "privalege"?). But, for the majority, it's not a problem because they can still get their email and they can still check the weather channel as long as they behave themselves. HELLO !!!! Does anyone have a problem here or is it just me being paranoid again?

Make an Open Net

[Monoman]

"We are actually at a point where we can make some very wrong decisions, and the Net will just kind of become like any other industry"

I think it is already too late for that. Once something is used by the common people it is an industry... an industry is mostly customers and people trying to make a buck off of customers. There are a few exceptions but I think we seeing the "almighty dollar" ruining the Internet in some ways(spam and pop-ups come to mind).

I think a new network based on openess is the way to go. Maybe Internet2(I don't know much about it) could be that network. Only allow organisations that adhere to a few mandates:

1. Apps and protocols that use Open standards.
2. Open source applications/protocols so they may evolve into open standards.