Slashdot Mirror
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."
You want freedom, we want to sell it to you.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.)
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).
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....
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