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

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.?

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:::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: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.

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..