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

Organized Crime, and Interesting Links

[peatbakke]

The article doesn't go into much detail about the discussions, and leaves a lot of questionable assertions dangling. For example, the claim that "Going too far one way would restrict freedom of choice, while the opposite could foster organized crime." The more you restrict freedom of choice, the more actions become criminal. And doesn't organize crime really take a foothold when undue restrictions are imposed upon the masses? The Prohibition in the United States is/was a pretty stark example.

That aside, check out the conference website for a full list of the subjects they're covering. You might also be interested in reading an interesting report from the US National Research Council and Eric Schmidt (the CEO of Google) about how the Internet is growing up, so to speak.

Re:::sigh::

[transiit]

You do understand that AIM and ICQ are both products of AOL, right?

I don't see how that matters, other than to drive home my point that they are two (almost) completely different things.

I think I'm still going to have to disagree with you on this point. ICQ was developed, as my memory serves, by a company called Mirabillis. AOL bought them, and for whatever reason, never merged ICQ in with their product, AIM. Some features have shown up that didn't used to be there, like multiple users in the same chat session, etc., but the only thing that's keeping them apart at this point is the whims of AOL. (although some could say they're dealing with the problem by making ICQ increasingly more crapulent, but I've not used it in years. Couldn't say.)

Oh, of course the technological side isn't impossible. But I was talking about the usability side, and 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.

If your argument is to hold true, the whole situation is self-defeating. Either the gateway services are to cater to the lowest common denominator, or they aren't going to work. If they don't work, they fail. If they don't support every stupid addition to every possible client/protocol, they fail.

I'd also like to point out that analogies still suck. I've had a swiss army knife for years. Works great. Does what I need it to. (mainly, it cuts stuff, has a screwdriver, and keeps me from having to open cans with my teeth).

This differs greatly from programs that deal with the differing standards and manage to lump them all into one program. Accepting differing standards and packaging them together allows you to keep most of the purity of each standard by keeping them mostly seperate from one another. Forcing the services themselves to conform to a standard, however, would force the groups behind AIM and ICQ to decide whether or not they, for instance, wanted messages for a user that is offline to be stored and then sent when the user logs on. They wouldn't be allowed to make seperate decisions about how they wanted their services to work, so there would be a lot less choice and competition among instant messaging users.

Wait a second....you're against standards because they mean less choice for the user? Are you on crack? The idea of having a standard is all about choice: it means that you aren't forced into using one tool just because it's the only one that supports feature X. Say we've got a standard, like "For every instant message, the format is a 32-byte 'From' field, a datestamp, and the rest is message until you reach a null terminator". Now as a user, this doesn't mean a whole lot, except that you know that any client that follows this standard will work with the rest of the instant messaging user community, at which point you start picking the client based on whether or not they think you should see ads on your contact list, or how well they manage those contacts, or if they're prone to crashing every ten minutes, or if the servers they talk to are prone to being unreachable every ten minutes, etc. All the other bells and whistles get embedded between the datestamp and the terminator. Want HTML formatting, include it. Think XML is the one true instant message format? use it. But just like email clients, you would do yourself a service by being less noisy, but HTML mail continues to annoy email users worldwide, and most of the people sending it are too clueless to get it, so it continues....

And that just doesn't serve any purpose, or at least much less of a purpose than creating a standard in upload and download speeds over cable and DSL lines that aren't federally regulated.

Whoa. Where the hell did that come from, and for that matter, what the hell does it have to do with anything? Where is it written that if we try to create an instant messaging standard, we'll never get a standard in cable/dsl rates? In fact, why should we have a standard in transfer rates on those media above what already exists? (What, you think they got this shit working out of sheer dumb luck? Everybody reinvents the wheel for every cable provider or dsl-providing-telco? There's plenty of standarization on that stuff.)

The problem in this market is a lack of competition. How are we supposed to show our disgust with artificial bandwidth caps if we don't have any other choice in the market?

-transiit

Re:Bandwidth is the key

[JaredOfEuropa]

Companies are indeed inhibiting innovation y limiting upstream bandwidth, but I think this is just an unintentional result of certain technical decisions they made when setting up their network. When bandwidth is limited, downstream has always (remember 1200/75 modems?) been favoured over upstream, and rightly so, as the majority of people pull in more than they send out.

What I see as far more detrimental to consumers becoming producers, is all the limitations ISP's place on their services. Again, all in the name of bandwidth preservation, but in this case they are far less subtle. Things like not giving fixed IP addresses, port blocking, not allowing people to run services, not allowing people to hook up multiple computers. All these are examples of ISPs meddling with how you use the bandwidth they sell, and prevent you from becoming a publisher as well as a comsumer.

I'm glad my ISP is one that provides me with bandwith, and nothing else. Barring a few provisions about not using my account for spam or resell the bandwidth, and a (generous) monthly data allowance, I am free to do whatever the hell I want with my connection.