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A Private European Internet?
jakemk2 writes "Bill Thompson writing in The Register advocates a private European Internet to stop the fact that it has "been so extensively abused by the United States and its politicians, lawyers and programmers that it has become a serious threat to the continued survival of the network as a global communications medium"
Read it here" His logical fallacy is , of course, thinking that the US has a monopoly on this kind of thing.
It's been only a bit more than 10 year that the Berlin wall went down, I think it's time we isolate Europe again.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
I remember people saying how the Internet would bring us all together. You know, no borders, that silly stuff.
.. subnets - the world's new holy lands, only this time you can add as many as you like if things get too homogonized for your liking. ;)
Ironically, its proving that due to its non-geographical nature, you dont actually have to _have_ a border to fight over - you can just invent one at your own whim! Think about it
And please take this with a grain of salt, I'm only half-kidding.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Good riddance. I'm sick of eurotrash anyways.
From the article:
Umm... while I might agree that there is a lot of commercial content on the web these days, what about the rest of it, like educational resources, online research, BLOGS, and, well, damn near an infinite amount of other resources?
Nothing like cutting off your arm 'cause your fingers hurt.
I often thought the US should be the one with the separate network.
Get your popcorn here for the big UK vs. US flame fest. Get yer hot buttered popcorn .....
Where do I sign up?
SCO (noun.)- A Slimy Corporate Ogre. Often seeks free money.
I just submitted the same story, but with the twist that Europe is rapidly getting sick of the US always sticking it's nose where it's not wanted. Among rapidly growing anti-US sentiment. The Guardian ran this article at an earlier date: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/26612.html
"hello" is Arabic for "Allah can lick off my unwiped ass, you filthy sand-nigger." I'd have raped her before I shot her if you'd said that to me!
-Madeline Albright
If you're American before going IN to the bathroom, and if you're American after going OUT of the bathroom...what are you IN the bathroom?
European!
It'd work until the euros realized that they couldnt get pr0n from the US anymore.. WWIII baby.. =)
Pardon me, I know that most Americans are a bunch of arsemunches, but isn't the Internet supposed be a /global/ medium designed to let people communicated despite where they are?
Oh well... Time to move to Andora.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Not being an American citizen I do see the problems presented. The USA has a wonderful (meant seriously) constitution. When the founding fathers created the US they knew what they wanted and how to achieve.
Sadly though in the last ten years that has not been the case. The USA of 1776 is not the USA of 2002 in any form whatsoever. Those values held precious back then have been given up slowly bit by bit in the name of "security", "good for the people", etc, etc.
Creating a second Internet is simply an option so that the people are not at whim of a politician in another country. Not a nice situation, but giving the current adminstration and its pro-Big company stance, totally understandable....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Private parts?
Just another attempt by the fucking Euro-pees to try to feel important VS the States. Dem frigging underachieving commies!!
Ah... a heartfelt desire to shut out the rest of the world and ignore it. Where have I seen that before ^^;;
[o]_O
What about France suing eBay to take items off their web site hosted on American soil, or any number of student laws, suits, etc going on with countries suing/charging US firms for wrong doing on the Internet? Sorry Mr. Thompson! While the US does its share of stupid stuff, we by no means have a monopoly on stupidity as a whole. Look at WW1: a war over an assinated guy that nobody even cared about, not even the people form his own country.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
This actually sounds tempting. I doubt it will happen but the Eurohackers will have a lovely sandbox to play in. It might be more useful than the cryptocorporate anarchy that is the Internet today. I wonder if they'll let USAians fed up with the current net join ?
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
It has a government which respects free speech yet tries to persuade postal workers to spy on people as they delivered their mail
Anyone have any idea what this person is talking about here?
There is a liberal bias in the Internet, I can understand why Europeans would be upset.
There is no liberal bias in the American Mass media.
When did Europe start using the internet? Didn't know cat5 came in lengths of 100's of miles.
what
with all the stupid US organizations like the RIAA and laws that seem to be taken out of george orwells 1984 (dmca) i would loove a EU only network.
At the moment the naming bodies are hughly biased towards american companys. ICANN should be an international organization, or at least should be replaced by one
- insert 2 cents for the first flame
"We deal in lead" - Roland of Gilead
Europeans, their crappy music, accents, and bad food.
All the VW driving fags are Europe's fault. BMW snobs, and Benz driving morons.
Fuck them.
That is all.
C'mon, didn't you READ that article? It seems like the Reg has given up on waiting for "flame of the week" candidates to fill up their mailbag, and now they're developing their own content for FOTW. A particular favorite (not) was the reference to the US Constituion as the product of a bunch of activist merchants and "rebellious slave owners." Accurate, but deliberately inflammatory nonsense.
The issue isn't the US, it's the current US administration and the current US Congress and their bending over backward to accommodate the big multinationals. The US Constitution most certainly isn't the issue, written as it is with a very healthy dose of British inspiration (don't like our First Amendment? Blame your former Latin Secretary Mr. Milton).
...its not US-centric enough!
(yeah, bad attempt at humor)
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Dateline 2012:
The North London Internet was again attacked by the South London Internet hackers in an attempt to regain control of their fileservers in the North's webspace. The fact that many of these hackers could simply walk a few blocks and physically take the servers back to their own private webspace seems not to have occured to them.
The United States, which is still a part of the Non-European Internet (the mainstream computer network used by the rest of the world) was jubilant, and representatives from across the nation were quoted as saying, "Ha-ha!".
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Look, we've got some bad laws on the books. Those who read /. are aware of the problems but aren't a powerful enough or mobilized enough group (Slashdotting of weak servers notwithstanding) to get things changed significantly politically. Other countries can help the situation not by playing isolationist but by simply refusing to recognize clearly ludicrous U.S. laws. A private network is not the way to go.
As we often tell people to let the marketplace decide things, we should let the governing marketplace decide things as well. If the U.S. laws are cramping your country's style, then tell the U.S. politicians and companies politely that they can take a long walk on a short pier, and you'll deal with them when they have reasonable laws. If the U.S. wants to stay engaged, then it'll clean up its act.
In short: we'll oppose the draconian crap from the inside, and y'all do it from the outside, and eventually things will change.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
..if it means less French/British/Italian/Spanish/Portugese/Polish/Ge rman/Russian SPAM in my mailbox, I'm all for it!
Honestly, can Europe be any more arrogant?? (On second thought, don't answer that!)
Uhhhh... what?
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
I'll just make my own Internet. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the Internet!
Remember: If you buy anything from spammers, you have a small penis.
2. How Italian Police shut down US Webservers
If you pulled this guy's face off I bet you'd find Pat Buchanan underneath.
...but they came to OUR country, hijacked OUR planes, flying them into OUR buildings, killing OUR people.
And we're butting into WHOSE business now? A bunch of backward Islamic fundamentalists who haven't made a significant contribution to the West since the zero.
And this upsets paleo-liberals with too much time on their hands to do anything except rip someone with an MBA from Harvard who has speech problems. Real f**king mature.
Besides, WTF is the UK if not the 14th colony or 51st state or whatever.
Bill Thompson is such an asshole that if you ordered a train load of assholes and only he showed up, you wouldn't complain.
Thanks for reminding me, Bill, why my ancestors left that ever diminishing and less relevant mound in the North Atlantic to come to America.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Ah yes.
And in the year 2002 the MWWW (Mostly World Wide Web) was created, after the previous attempt, the WWW (World Wide Web) was determined to be too worldwide. The only people prevented from joining the MWWW were inhabitants of the USA and a guy from Britain named Murphy who no one liked anyway.
Next, we come to the robot wars of 2027...
With my dying breath, I curse Zoidberg!
I think the internet should remain global. Absolutely and unequivocably.
:-) With the US becoming more and more isolationist over time, it's hardly surprising others are reacting in the same way. There are *more* people in the EU than the US. There are ~1/5 the population of the US in the UK! Why should't they demand more representation ?
But to do the subject some justice
The US legal system (which is where a *lot* of the problems are coming from) is very much a big-business-friendly institution; since most of the congressmen are funded by big business as well, it's hardly surprising that the internet is being mauled with the same fangs that savage the "common person" in the US. There is also much more of a "who do I sue" attitude within the US than just about anywhere else.
Still, it's clearly a nonsense to advocate separation, and it's not clear to me that other countries are overall any better. The term "swings and roundabouts" comes to mind.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
He has an incredibly legit point here.
.pdf files, dont step on the grass when you're surrounded by fields!)
Given the choice, I'd pack up my digital bags and be user #1 on this new Internet.
Only a small percentage remember the days when there wasn't a single corporate interest on the web. It was pure, unfettered information.
While sure, that information is still here, its publication and therefore purpose has been lost.
Want to learn how to program? Pay gobs of money, and even then your programs are restricted by American corporations. (dont use a file format you didn't create from scratch, dont make a text-to-speech for
America, whether we like it or not, we have abused the Internet as a medium.
Even if there's very little chance of doing it right, those are odds that the Europeans should take. They're being treated like crap right now, and that has to stop. At least if they're being treated like crap by their own people, they have a chance to address it.
And who knows, perhaps the best case scenario will come true.
This is clearly flamebait, but you have a point. I can think of perhaps three European IP addresses I'd want access to, as well as the entire UK (they're ok). But the rest of my experience with European net users is one of annoyance. Either it's spams coming from remote countries or wanadoo.fr (AOL for France) lamers shitting in my IRC channel or some such. I'd be ok with Europe dropping off ARPAnet and I'm not afraid to say it.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
For years, I've been one of those who tries to get first post, to make sure that my mindless crap is the first thing heard.
It is now that I choose to resign this position and hand it off to my learned students. Well done, everybody who now triumphs with pride, "first post!"
My reasons are neither political, personal, or otherwise. No, merely an incarnation of "all good things must come to an end". I will miss Slashdot, from the trolls to the karma whoring to the hot grits guy. You, sir, are a genius with your witty comments about pouring hot grits down your pants.
Thank you Slashdot for the memories and the joy that I've shared with all of you. It's truly been a priveledge.
Sincerely,
Anonymous Coward #3
The US laws is a hodge podge of laws that developed in part by trying to read the minds of the founding fathers.
Is this guy Al Gore? The internet was invented in the USA.
Fight Spammers!
Seriously, other than the fact that the USG is an overbearing bully who wants to control everything it can and can't see, why do other countries let the US dictate their laws?
Concept: The Internet is global.
This would get rid of those things like the US exerting it's will on the populations of other countries simply because something is illegal in the US.
Can it happen? Yes. Will it? That's up to the rest of the world. If they let the US continue, then it won't. If they stand up and stop the US from doing it, then other things happen (like the US arresting foreign nationals if they come to the US, or other countries arresting US nationals, or commerce with the US stops, etc).
The US needs to stop thinking it owns the Internet or other countries will follow the example set by European countries and look to start their own 'internets'. Do that and you end up with a bunch of disjointed networks that might or might not be able to talk to each other and the whole idea of a global network goes down the tubes.
A European internet.. now THAT would be funny. What would be on it?? All those silly brits are using US sites. Is there one good site in Europe? Man, I'd be really ticked if I were in Europe and some moron was trolling about setting up an Internet because he has penis envy.
You're probably going to get modded down selectspec, but you gave me a laugh, intended or not. Thanks.
.
So long as I can get access to it. (from the USA)
Morphing Software
Why doesn't he go ahead and set up his new internet, and make it voluntary for ISP's/consumers?
Europeans who want our content can subscribe to the regular internet, and those who don't can subscribe to the new one.
Oh, wait, maybe because it would be a huge FLOP.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
I preferred it when the president screwed the intern instead of screwing the country.
His logical fallacy is , of course, thinking that the US has a monopoly on this kind of thing.
First of all, this is is not a "logical fallacy," but, if anything, a faulty premise. That term has been subject to enough abuse already.
Second, while it is true that the US may not be the only country in which politicians follow agendas that may be in contrast with the will of the public, it is nonetheless the case that politicians in the US are extravagantly prone to imposing unwarranted restrictions on technologies of this kind. I would say, more so than the EU, or so the record suggest. I cannot disprove your indirect claim that the EU would treat an Internet of its own the way the US has been treating what's in place now, but I also can not see why you would make this assumption.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
We have all these trade agreements to help unify the global marketplace, opened up our borders to allow the freemovement of our people, and soon we'll have a common currency world wide. Its time to get with reality that there is no unique culture anymore, but an American-centric Global culture. Making a second internet is not gonna stop it.
As I read the piece, this guy has a problem with an internet that can't be 'tailored' (i.e. censored) to a given nation's tastes. Quite frankly, that's an internet that I don't want to see. And I don't think we will see it. There'd have to be some sort of interface between the various 'national' nets, and those interfaces would constitute chokepoints that would allow all sorts of mischief. Any attempt at doing what he wants would be doomed to failure.
Oh, and nice editing job. Maybe he should worry less about the internet and more about proofreading his own work.
Unless we can take back the Net from the libertarians
Libertarians? That's almost as absurd as saying we have to take the Net back from the communists.
An important factor in Europe's favour is that we retain a belief that governments are a good thing, that political control is both necessary and desirable
Data flows into and out of Europe would be properly regulated and controlled to ensure that neither spam nor viruses came in, and that no personal data went out without explicit consent.
So basically he wants to trust the government to look at all outbound and inbound packets, presumably looking for spam, viruses or personal data? And he thinks this power won't be abused? What European wants to sign up for this Orwellian scheme? Just because he dressed it up in an anti-American screed doesn't make it a good idea.
"You get what you pay for after all." --
From the article
An important factor in Europe's favour is that we retain a belief that governments are a good thing, that political control is both necessary and desirable, and that laws serve the people.
Hitler/Stalin/Mosalini/etc... (this list is long) would have agreed heartly and would have eagerly supported this notion.
Jefferson by the way would not. A few Jefferson quotes by contrast:
"Most bad government has grown out of too much government"
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive."
Oh well.
First of all, in a debate, if you start calling names, then you've effectively lost any chance of being listened to. Anyone can be told their an idiot. Use info to support a claim, then go from there.
.pdf files, dont step on the grass when you're surrounded by fields!)
He has an incredibly legit point here.
Given the choice, I'd pack up my digital bags and be user #1 on this new Internet.
Only a small percentage remember the days when there wasn't a single corporate interest on the web. It was pure, unfettered information.
While sure, that information is still here, its publication and therefore purpose has been lost.
Want to learn how to program? Pay gobs of money, and even then your programs are restricted by American corporations. (dont use a file format you didn't create from scratch, dont make a text-to-speech for
America, whether we like it or not, we have abused the Internet as a medium.
It could be 0wn3d by the Germans at will.
His logical fallacy is , of course, thinking that the US has a monopoly on this kind of thing. [emphesis added]
... all these things represent damage as far as the internet, a system designed to propogate and share information, is concerned.
Assuming America has a "monopoly" on abusive potical, technical, or jurisprudence wrt to the net isn't a logical fallacy, it is a factual fallacy. The logic is sound, the assumption made upon which the argument is based is what is inaccurate. That isn't the same thing as a logical fallacy, such as ad homonem attacks, circular reasoning, appeals to authority, and the like.
All that having been said, I found nothing in that article that seemed to imply America has a monopoly on this behavior, just that, under the current Copyright Cartels (is there any doubt in anyone's mind who is calling the shots in D.C. these days?), we, or rather America, are by far the worst offendors.
One of the original strengths in the design of the internet is its ability to route around damage. Copyright, censorship, physical outage, political repression
If the Europeans want to build some redundancy into the routing and infrastructure of the net by building a network that can sustain itself independently, should America drop off the net completely, more power to them. The more redundancy, and the more capacity there is for the Internet to route around the kind of damage government censors, politicians, and copyright holders create, the better.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The story is available on the US site.
I doubt Slashdot can Slashdot the Register, but it might help American readers, especially those who missed the creation of the USA Register. The USA Register is basically the same content as the Register, but it drops some of the UK specific news (as in, UK elections and other events that are unlikely to matter to people who don't live there). As far as I know, there is no US-specific content, but several of their writers turn out to live in the US - so who knows...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
The jihad of the future will be over domain name disuputes...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Now our European friends will have their own private clubhouse so they can bitch about the US as much as they want w/o any noisome dissent from those crude, unprincipled warmongers across the Atlantic.
As for saving the global network from US domination by creating a parallel, smaller, private network - isn't that like fighting the Baby Bell monopolies by running a bunch of tin cans and string?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
If he's worried about the spread of U.S. influence, shouldn't he want to block U.S. Internet from Europe, rather than blocking European Internet from U.S.?
I find his candor refreshing; anytime you talk about taking things back from the libertarians, start buying stock in fascism...
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
sounds great - can I join.... I'm in california?
I don't know about them... but most of my spam seems to come from Russia!
USA citizens abusing INTERNET
Too much easy to believe, USA spam , USA propaganda,
would be because USA thinks its the world hero??
because USA say they are good and every body else is bad???
because they use internet to spy and deploy virus??
because they mask spies as ONU inspectors or researchers and scientist??
because USA violations to internationals laws, THey sign??
because they are the worst polluters of the world??
Each country or jurisdiction certainly has the rights to govern traffic that travel through its own data networks. The problem (if it's really a problem) is that information has no borders. If I, in Canada, request a file from Germany, half of the packets may travel over one satellite connection, and the other half may bounce across a transatlantic cable. Who knows how many countries it crosses during the journey.
Here are some resolutions:
1) Include routing info with the packet, such as "Not legal in the US", and the routing algorithms have to deal with that. This is, of course, completely impractical.
2) Provide a direct network path between each pair of countries, and route packets from source to destination country directly. This is also impractical.
3) All countries connected to the internet need to agree that data in transit is in "neutral" territory. Only the hosting site and the requesting computer are subject to the laws of their respective jurisdictions.
#3 is more practical. Note that it does NOT preclude eavesdropping by countries in the middle, but it does preclude the use of content filters unless the source or destination of the information is in your own jurisdiction.
Of course, I can't see any government wilfully giving up the ability to filter the data travelling on networks in their country, so I can't see #3 working. The rest of the world will have to come up with a way to route information around certain oppressive governments, particularly if those counties are a bottleneck for information on the internet (as in the U.S. right now).
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Well, his ideas for a highly regulated network are fine and good; but I don't see any reason why they'd need to close access off from the United States, as by the time they're finished with all the restrictions, no one in the US would want to connect to it anyway.
I doubt many Europeans would want to either, for that matter.
"Your Honor, Abu Monkeydung has plainly violated our Internet Law 234.b1: 'The letter 'r' must not be used in email under any circumstances.'"
This guy sounds like a Mom's Basement Isolationist. It's rather obvious he enjoys the paternal feeling that no doubt originates from being ruled by inbred bleeders.
He should set up a little Token Ring network down there in the fruit cellar and play Internet King on his own time.
I would imagine this is the same kind of reasoning that put china behind a firewall, to prevent unwanted ideas from entering into their citizens heads (although I think his reasoning behind this is a bit more superficial).
Somehow I doubt they are going to build a new internet just to satisfy some elitest european troll.
"The Internet" is a connected network of networks using IP. If the "European Internet" uses IP, and if people put up gateways to "the Internet", then the "European Internet" is part of "the Internet".
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
...would be inpenetrable, thanks to a heavily fortified firewall that spans the length of eastern France, dubbed the "Maginot Firewall".
--- What
What does Al Gore think of this?
Yeah, we should make a second closed internet. but instead of "Private European Internet" we'll call it the "Sane Internet" and disallow any censorship of either a government or corporate nature. We'll totally do what another poster suggested the internet was for, destroy gegraphical borders. Just won't allow any government of corp to bully the content.
That sound like a good idea. I'm all for having ones own value system, but if your offended by content, don't view it!
Who would all of the script-kiddies on T-online.de and Wanadoo.fr scan if my network wasn't on the EU net?? :)
Once again, need to mod the story "-1, Troll".
The important thing to note here is that this guy is not writing a serious proposal to create another net, he's just stringing together a bunch of muck which releases all the dopamine in his brain to make him feel warm and fuzzy, knowing that bunches of american geeks will be wrung through the adrenalin/cortisol wringer as a result of reading it.
Don't give him the satisfaction.
How about we (the US) stop all inter-continental traffic of the Internet, and see what the damn Euros do?
Thats fine, go for it. But don't be asking any of your US based networking companies or US based consultants of US based telcom's to help you build it.
You want to know WHY we monopolize it? Its because we INVENTED it, we COMMERCIALIZED it, and we bear the brunt of the effort needed to MAINTAIN it. How quickly you forget to thank the hand that feeds you.
Yeah, the world sucks, the US monopolizes everything, blah blah blah. We've heard it 1000 times. Bottom line is that we wouldn't monopolize anything if anybody else was competant enough to do something that could come close in competing with it. But hell, your welcome!
The internet is not only what you see in your browser...
Do not like it the way it is?
Built up a new protocole to replace http, invent a new standard to replace html, build a client, a server and there you go.
What will he do? Install it's own cables?
The content does not define the medium. And the medium IS decentralized. You don't like the content? Provide your own.
Really, it is as simple as this.
OTOH, what I would really really like, is for broadband access to become cheap for everyone, something which would enable us to get rid of access providers.
I really hope that there will be major advances in wireless communication.
Would it not be nice if everybody could upload/download at the speed of a T1?
This could actually change something, the medium would get more decentralized, and that would be great...
I'd rather be sailing...
OK, the article is poorly thought out.
Err...these two ideas are different how?
Yes, the article reads like a rant - and basically is.
Yes, The Register really isn't the place for such drivel.
But it's not worth thousands of comments - that just makes it a troll, and a successful one at that.
Julian
I thought the blame rested with penis enlargement devices, Work From Home companies and the American Dream... If the culture wasn't so obsessed with consumerism, these people wouldn't exist to recreate the worst (and only?) aspects of it.
P.S. CowboyNeal is innocent
"Unless we can take back the Net from the libertarians, constitutional lawyers..."
I thought we, the libertarians and constitutionalists, were hard at work trying to keep the Internet open and free.
Bill Thompson goes on to promote the idea of a "closed, regulated" Internet, based on individual countries laws, morals and ethics. If that is the future, then there is no future for the Internet. It will simply become a collection of LANs that may or may not be accessible across borders. In addition, disseminating information will become impossible.
The Internet should not be owned by any one country, culture, or belief (especially, the US government, which changes its mind on morality and law with the wind).
The first is the idea that the Internet is somehow outside or above the real world and its national boundaries. If I phone someone in Nigeria and suggest a money-laundering fraud then it is obvious to all that I am breaking the law in two countries, not in 'phonespace'. Nobody has ever suggested that the content of the telephone network -all those voice calls -should be somehow privileged and treated as outside the normal world.
Why, then, do we act as if our interactions with screen, mouse and keyboard are different? If I send an email suggesting that I am in possession of $50m and will hand it over in return for your bank details, why can't it just be that I also am breaking the law in two countries, not in some mythical 'cyberspace' with its own legal system?
Losing the idea of 'cyberspace' simplifies things greatly.
The problem is that when two countries' sets of laws don't agree that something is a crime, or the question of which country has jurisdiction is unclear. When we speak of cyberspace in terms of law, I think it defines that murky area where things are not so clearly defined as they are in the physical world.
It's not everyday that you hear a European argue that Americans are too free.
...
Thank God that someone out there is making sure that the Internet doesn't lead to excessive free speech.
I think the author is right on when he calls for Europe to "take back the Net". Those knuckle dragging Americans only mucked things up after the Europeans let them join the Net. Oh wait
It's well past time.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
I can see it now...
The information super highway today ground to a halt as drivers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Surfers, normally accustomed to breezing overpasses suddenly ran into one giant European roundabout traffic circle. We got the chance to speak with one of these poor confused souls earlier today but all he would say is, "wheeeeeeeeeee"
news at 11
I don't think the point is that the US is the only country that can do this. That's simply to inflame and get his point across.
However, the rest of the world (in general) seems to be getting pissed off about the US's overbearing (in general) attitude.
This is simply another facet of the problem.
Ultimately, it comes down to the US being an irresponsible "global community member" and acting like it's actions dont affect anyone -- or when they do, who cares what _they_ think?
My favorite was when he said in the first paragraph that we need to take the internet back from the libertarians *and* Congressmen seeking to place all kinds of restrictions on the net.
Yeah, you always see libertarians and conservative congressmen together. I guess we (the US) really don't have a monopoly on stupidity.
Really, what it sounds like is a whole lot of jealousy. A lot of Europeans are still angry at being relegated to sub-superpower status for the last 60 years. Notice that much of the article dealt with other general things that he's pissed off about the U.S.
There are enough things to bash the US about - but this is silly.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
It hasn't been global for a long time. Sure you can pull up some euro teens page on DVD hacking if you want to but guess what, if some american group makes enough noise, that teen will be arrested regardless of the laws of his country because the US gov't just leans hard.
Nobody likes getting leaned on especially europeans who have thousands of years of history & tradition over the yanks.
- Toby
BRING IT ON!!! EUROPE IS READY
This will be so totally awesome. Screw RIAA trying to tax webcasts, busting movie streamers, it will be a place where none of that crap will exist. It will be a private network with major Corporate USA assnads locked out! This is the best idea ever.
They have done the exact same things you get on America for. Don't talk as if EU is all innocent in trying to push their laws on other countries.
Michael Loves Me!
iso.netbsd.org is in the States. that's good enough for me.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
How, exactly, is this guy relevant? When it comes down to it, the internet does nothing more than squirt a bit stream from one point to another. How, exactly, can this be taken over?
Well, the good ol US of A (of which I am a proud member - note I said of the country: the bozos running it are another matter) does in fact contain most of the network. So what? Are we going to turn it off? Tell DARPA to fsck off and drop that backbone it built? Not bloody likely. And since the jurisdiction of our laws (supposedly) don't reach beyond our borders, how exactly are we "taking over" the web?
This guy wants to isolate Europe. Fine. So does most of the world. But don't bame your jingoism on American policies, as whacked as those policies may be. Or do we need to define the words "soverign nation" for you? Yep, even small countries in the Atlantic are allowed to make their own laws and have their own lawyers and programmers. Go figure.
Good Lord. It's time for lunch. I think I just ranted myself to death with no discernable point.
Americans suffer from an excess of corporate influence on the web as well as anyone else - it's absurd and very counterproductive to present this as a Europe vs. USA thing.
/.ers will then take the libertarian angle and argue that the minimum amount of regulation is fine and that, for example, allocating a lot of top-level domains will allow each country, religion etc. to have their own version of www.truth.com or whatever.
This chap seems to have as much difficulty as many US lawmakers in appreciating the logical fact that you cannot have international cooperation (over DNS or whatever) without ceding some sovereignty - it's impossible to have a net that simultaneously respects a bunch of contradictory rules.
I'm sure many
Personally I would prefer some Least Common Denominator regulation of content, practices, privacy etc. as well as raw technical standards, but only on the basis of strict democracy and not via governments - we don't want the Chinese vetoing the Taiwan country domain.
There are a few transnational democratic bodies in the professions, the European Parliament and (sort of) the International Criminal Court. The ICANN successor and related bodies should be elected by users. Nothing could be simpler in practice - it's the principle that national governments might find hard to swallow.
If such bodies were established the real issue is then whether Washington is able to accept any external authority, democratic or not - unfortunately the immediate track record is not encouraging but you never know, on this issue things might work out differently.
I believe every nation should have their own private internet...
I block all RIPE and APNIC netblocks on all the mail servers I run. 3 /16's a slews of /24's. Don't miss 'em.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
It's almost a shame that the notion of country specific domains was optional and everyone went in to a .com frenzy. Were all UK sites .uk, all US sites .us etc., then the notion of conflicting laws, national firewalls and all the rest would be solved.
Each country's content could then abide by its own laws and only those laws. If a country didn't like the laws of another country, all they'd have to do is make it an offence for their own ISPs to serve information from those countries to their national users.
So, if Yahoo US wants to have Nazi auctions to the distaste of Yahoo France, France can either: accept it's not their jurisdiction; ask the US to legislate against it; or block those nasty English speakers. Dimitri wants to enable blind users to run text-to-speech on E-books in Russia? Well then Adobe can either: deal with it; petition the Russian government to change their laws; or petition the US government to block Russia.
Once that's in place, the issue of doing what's perfectly legal in your country, in your country, is solved.
I realise that goes against the international, free of boundaries notion of the net that we all love, but then is it really free at the moment anyway? Or do we just have lawyers trying to apply the laws of their country to everyone else and then those people who know their country won't do anything flauting it all anyway? If anything, the notion of blocking entire countries would probably create such an outcry in those nations that claim freedom of speech that it may well end up being less of a problem than the current mess.
However, he attaches solutions to problems that a) have nothing to do with the US alone, and b) are not attached to secured networks.
As far as I knew, personal data, to a degree is protected by law in financial situations, and in many other situations. But regardless, customer information in the form of call lists, subscription lists, etc are going to be shared between companies regardless of a secure communications system.
I can just as easily burn a CD, or, say, print a copy, of my customer database as send it over the magical internet.
Further, the examination of incoming and outgoing data he describes requires more than a secured comm system. It requires Big Brother viewing the data flow. Unless, JUST LIKE WE DO IT NOW, when someone complains, the offending party gets cut off. Which becomes EASIER in a secured system, but it's certainly not impossible now.
This has nothing to do with a secured alternate internet. This has to do with DRM, machine rights, copyright control tech, etc. Which have been examined and set not only by the companies, which exercise the power given to them by consumers, but also the IEEE, I believe. If the EU wants to levy economic sanctions on copyright-abusive content providers and equipment manufacturers, hell, I'll move to the UK. But a secured internet will have little to do with it.
This is just a cheap shot, little material behind it. If there's beef, bring it, otherwise STFU.
It's true, a secured, trusted network would allow content providers to lock down sites that aren't approved. I guess that's what he means by human rights, although his use of the term is a bit confusing.
However, I would assume that there's enough variation over the surface of the European community, that this will still be a problem, and what you'll end up with is governmental censorship agencies, filtering through visited "securenet" sites. An interesting idea. I wouldn't like it. I'll stick with the current version.
-Greg
-Greg
The point of the insistence on personal freedoms is not just the freedoms themselves, but that a people with the freedom to speak cannot be as easily subjugated by any tyrannical power structure. The most important thing about the net is the ability to share ideas regardless of how the powers that be feel about them.
The system this man wants is localized information oligarchys. And his reason for using it is that America is bad, mmkay.As long as attitudes like these comprise the majority of Euro viewpoints seen by Americans, the US will be hesitant to cooperate on important matters. Every time we seen a European talking about us, we're being likened to the 3rd reich reincarnated with plague on top. That may not be the majority opinion "over there", but it's the only one that gets any press "over here". You don't see too many US citizens burning other peoples leaders in effigy, but we see that every time our president leaves the country.
Just a little insight (by way of rant), on the motivaions behind US policy. Take it with the requisite amount of salt.Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Would people be happy with a subnet that disallowed java, flash, ad's, and embedded audio/video. That would fix most all the problems mentioned. Anyone know if it would even be feasable to do such a thing
or .fr or .it
I say if they want their own internet get the fsck off of ours. All frenchies use smoker.fr all english use badteeth.co.uk all italians use greazzy.it (btw I am italian, and I speak french, spanish and italian, oh english too!).
BoomerSooner
What about France suing eBay to take items off their web site hosted on American soil, or any number of student laws, suits, etc going on with countries suing/charging US firms for wrong doing on the Internet?
Yeah, Mr. Thompson is quite a hypocrit all through the article.
He rightly decries the ability of America to impose censorship on the net, then calls for the ability to enforce local laws restricting access to objectionable information on the net in the next sentence. He decries the DMCA, then wants to build in infrastructure that would facilitate DRM type technologies into the network protocol a paragraph later (IIRC).
He resembles a Romulan when he claims the net was invented in Europe (it was invented in the United States. HTML, and what we call 'the web' was invented as a collaboration between CERN and the University of Illinois, long after the internet, email, gopher, and USENET had been in use by thousands throughout the US and world) and they should somehow 'take it back.'
In short, throughout the article he raises legitimate criticisms of the excesses of American politicians and law, then advocates building a new network to allow European governments to do the same exact kinds of things, indeed, to facilitate it.
I'm as down on the anti-government regulation of big business, capitalism ueber alles myopia of the Libertarians as anyone, but that hardly negates their far more legitimate stance with respect to individual liberty, or the need to respect the basic tenants of the US constitution (which, by the way, would negate much of his criticism of the US if we actually adhered to that document).
In summary, he basically is saying "take the internet out of the hands of the imperialistic americans and those anarchistic people, and put them in the hands of our local regulators and governments where they belong!"
Feh. I hope the network gets built just so their is more redundancy in the infrastructure itself, but good luck talking a wired world into divorcing itself from one another so your local goons can institute more of their censorship and their regulations instead. Short of mandated change, I doubt they'll get too many takers, even in Europe, no matter how much nationalistic anti-American Euro-pride gets trotted out during the marketing campaign.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I don't think this gentleman is too far fetched. I think having localized internet might be beneficial for different cultures. I believe with the internet the way it is, though, we are able to do this...with the co.uk extensions and such. The ability to do this is already there though, so why not, instead of breaking off from the current internet, just create an environment for different countries with main hubs for web pages? This could be easily accomplished and would make this guy happy I do believe. Just my two cents.
It wont matter if the Euros have their own net. They'll need Bill's position to run MS software.
Pardon me, I know that most Americans are a bunch of arsemunches,
And after hearing this kind of near-racist crap, does anyone wonder why the whole freakin' world can't get along? Yeah, like you're hella better than us because your not American. Have you even been to America? Probably not. We're a lot more polite than you might think. How do I know? One of my best friends comes from the UK and has lived in the USA for 20 years. Goes back to London... gets treated like crap.
In other words, native UK son returns to the US and enjoys the fact that people are polite in America. Ifyou want to bitch about the charachter of others, do it over your smug teatime, limey, and be polite to the rest of the world like you should. I know I am. Maybe if you were learning about another culture instead of hurling invectives at them then you might actually get friends instead of people flaming you on the net.
Your mother should have taught you better, all that, and coming from a culture that prides itself on manners. What a loser. Show a little etiquette.
Interesting quote from that MSN article:
The term World War I did not come into general use until a second worldwide conflict broke out in 1939 (see World War II). Before that year, the war was known as the Great War or the World War.
I'm going to start refering to the Gulf War as Gulf War I. We know there's going to be another one eventually, right? Might as well get in on the ground floor...
recognized globaly, for thing without borders.
The internet should be given 'global' status, and be run by qualified engineers selected by the UN. These engineer should be internet spcialists. Not web masters, but actuall network engineers.
It needs it own set of broad use guidelines that are aproved by the UN. note I said use, not architecture.
Technical descesions should be made by the engineers,after a discussion where everybody interested gets to weigh in there opinion.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So if there is a private European Internet does that mean the rest of the world won't be exposed to European anti-American bigots like the author of this article? I'd have to give this idea two thumbs up. I don't think I'll be reading the Register anymore.
No one AFAIK has suggested (credidibly) that the same offence is not punishible if conducted over the internet. Where is the problem, exactly?
in the UK we're perfectly happy to prosecute someone for war crimes committed fifty years ago in another country, so why are there problems if the crime involved the Internet? Under English law a sex tourist can be prosecuted here even if he has sex with a child in Thailand: surely prosecuting someone for promoting racial hatred on a US-hosted website can't be that different?
I must have missed a news story or two -- but if a British citizen violates a crime using US servers, are British authorities powerless to prosecute? Really? If so -- and I doubt this is the case -- shouldn't such obviously idiotic juristictional issues be fixed legislatively?
The result is that cyberspace appears somehow to be divorced from the physical world - but this is just an artifact of our current technologies and not a fundamental principle.
It would only appear so to a complete moron, or perhaps a child. Who, exactly, is the target readership of this article? Reminds me a little of a segment of 20/20...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Am I correct in thinking that this Bill Thompson and this Bill Thompson are one in the same Bill Thompson?
Considering the frequency with which The Register and The BBC are linked to on slashdot, I'd value his opinion. If you don't like the message, don't shoot the messenger, try to criticise the article. Oh! that's right, you're a troll.
Oh, and by the way, I'm smarter than all of you 'citizens' and want you to know that my form of hegemony is better than that coming from America.
And then at the first sign of a German Hacker approaching the firewall, they will throw down their keyboards and surrender.
"been so extensively abused by the United States and its politicians, lawyers and programmers that it has become a serious threat to the continued survival of the network as a global communications medium"
As in the political wrangling done by US politicians and businesses, or because European governments aren't happy with the US acting as a safe haven from European anti-speech laws?
Be careful what you wish for...
I'm guessing a great many European readers here have been thinking the exact same thing, but didn't relish being modded down as a "Troll" if they vocalised their thoughts.
/. in the UK and cut all the cables under the pond. ;-)
I have no problem with the American people, just their government, it's policies, their apparent belief that greed, litigiousness and callousness are to be rewarded and that their views should be foisted upon the entire Earth.
Yes, America really is at the root of most of the problems on the 'net. The VAST majority of spam eminates from the US (or at least seems to be on behalf of US companies). Their DMCA is wreaking havoc with personal freedom and even threatens the future of OS software. Their "entertainment" companies want control over all electronic storage devices, etc etc etc.
I say host
Yeah, mod me down - at least I feel better now I've vented...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Thompson obviously wasn't even paying attention to his own article, since his complaints are mutually exclusive (e.g. he's upset that the US succeeds in using the DCMA to have stuff pulled from foreign sites and that some French judge fails in his attempt to use hate crime laws to have stuff pulled from foreign sites).
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
The reason the internet we use now became such a profitable place is because it was a clean slate, such that anyone could come in and using the best of their abilities create something new without fear. That's what made the internet the place it is today. Global communication existed long before it.
That's ended, now, because like any profitable place devoid of government, those in power such as corporations and the White House all wanted their own slice, but lacking the knowledge to get it through innovation, they decided to buy it with laws like the DMCA, so they got it. Now your zeroes and ones aren't just zeroes and ones anymore. They must be trusted, they must belong to somebody, and you'd better not trespass or distribute any zeroes and ones that aren't your own. Your creativity had better not look anything like anyone else's, because it's probably patented.
The moral? When the battlefield is purely ideas, everybody profits and the community is improved. When it's about money and ownership and laws, the place stagnates. I disagree with the Register's opinion that the Internet should be within national boundaries. We're talking about a very large chain of private property here, and as long as my equipment isn't hurting people in the real world (i.e. exploitation of children, I know someone will bring it up), it should be considered mine to do what I want with. I also disagree that a binary representation of something in the real world necessarily embodies the real-world item. In most cases, it is purely an approximation, much like a Reimann Sum vs. the Line itself.
If Europe decides to make another true frontier where the only limit is creativity, I'm moving to Europe. Hopefully, if this happens, the xxAA and M$ or whatever they have in Europe will get the idea and decide to use some clever encryption schemes or protection, or (gasp) change their fossilized business model. What happened to "The Customer Is Always Right" anyhow? I'm sure that the USA's founding fathers are turning over in their graves thanks to the rule by money we have here now. If, however, this Euro-Net becomes reality and it's just a virtual sidewalk where I can't do anything I couldn't do on a real one, big deal.
~Ben
is obviously on crack...
So it is the US Government that has been aligning the planets???
I always had that suspicion, but I could never prove it
Could you please supply me with your sources so we can go public with this new information?
thanx
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking - H.L. Mencken
SWEET LORD MODERATORS!
Would you think with your head for a second? First, look at electric monk's past posts. Troll troll troll.
Now, s/he is claiming to work at hooters and an open source and all the egotism about being the babe and having the CS degree. S/he works for open source? Then why write this comment [slashdot.org]?
Folks, you've been trolled. And it wasn't even a good troll. Now write a comment to this poll to null out your moderations and come back down to earth. Sheesh!
You know, like what's described here
668: Neighbour of the Beast
So what if they make EOL? Nobody will use it unless they hook it up to the internet also. If they want to make a european community they can fuck 'em. If they want to post anything that will make them money, it will be on the real internt. For articles like this, post it on the euroboard. I don't care, whay should you. Thats the fun part about laissez-faire life. You dont have to care about anything.
Factual fallacies or not, this article does an excellent job of showing [another method] of how the U.S. is slitting it's own throat in the global relations arena.
Forwarding this article onto your state representative with a quick note explaining that laws like the DMCA do little to protect the consumer and plenty to create animosity among technically sophisticated nations would hopefully be at least a little interesting to them.
And this is different from the "evil" Chinese creating their own Internet... how?
What is music when you despise all sound?
Unless they just blocked every non-UK website, so the the other countries could still goto the European websites, while they are all safe and tucked away from foreign opinions.
Well, in America, it wouldn't be law. I don't know about Europe, but here in America, a law like that would have a snowballs chance in hell of getting approved.
... I mean, "fees", yeah, that's right, "fees"), etc.
... oh wait, you can't. Almost all of those people were dead long before the government rethought its decision, and broke up the monopoly they themselves had created.
Ahem. Don't count on it, and above all do not be complacent!
What do you thing the DMCA was a step toward.
Or what the SSSCA, DRM, etc. are an attempt to do now.
The US government has historically taken every new communications medium out of the hands of the common man, whether it was the telephone (a mandated monopoly for AT&T that lasted 70 years and put dozens of competitors out of business, overnight), radio, television (the FCC taking the once-free airwaves and restricting them to use by only those who could afford the payoff
All in the fine tradition of the British Crown, who invented copyright for the sole purpose of controlling who would, and would not, be permitted to own and operate a printing press, lest something the Crown disapproved of be disseminated to the masses or, even worse, the masses be able to communicate en mass amongst themselves.
Make no mistake about it, the Copyright Cartels and their tame politicians are making every effort to do the same to the Internet right now, under the guise of copyright protection, digital rights management, and laws making the disconnection of a controviersial website the default mode, rather than an exception requiring signficiant judicial review and perhaps even a trial beforehand (as was the case pre-DMCA).
Do nothing, do not speak out, and they will likely succeed, with nary a concern for the economic impact that would have on the next several generations of people. Just ask any of the many entrepreneurs who at one time competed against AT&T, before AT&T managed to buy legislation granting them a monopoly
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
More bandwidth for me. . .
I'd have to say the economic future for the EU is getting better. They will wield a massive economic interest in a corporate world run on profit. With the socialist government point of view and a united front, look out world. This will NOT be good for NON EU'ers, and MAY not be good for some EU'ers, but the days of them being an economic non-entity are coming to a close. The definition of super-power has shifted, and the lines of power have blurred. Soon ecomonic entities will be the true super-powers, and nationalist entities will be consumer, or if you are lucky customer bases to be exploited/tapped.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The www as any karma whore will tell you, was developed at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee.
Look at the growth of the internet over time and note the spike when the www appears. DARPA invented the internet, but the www made it.
.. well, at least that's what George Orwell called it. This George calls it TIPS, but it's basically the same idea. A "patriotic" government-sponsored spy network. Goodbye civil liberties.
Perhaps off topic but when are we going to impeach this corporate crook?
We have already seen US law, in the form of Digital Millennium Copyright Act, used to persuade hosts in other countries to pull material or limit its availability. US-promoted 'anti-censor' software is routinely provided to enable citizens of other countries to break local laws; and US companies like Yahoo! disregard the judgements of foreign courts at will.
Ahem, but does anyone see the lack of logic in this? If he has a problem with the US attempting to impose restrictions (which won't work) on foreign countries, why would is it OK for foreign courts to mandate tha"höUS based company comply with foreign laws?
Internet, schminternet. The whole European continent and the British Isles are going to be replaced by a huge, alien jungle anyway.
Megacorp-neutral would mean some sort of governmental involvement. End of story. When they (i.e. some government-sponsored commission *shudders*)will re-design a new Internet from the ground up, you can be sure they will think of ways to do away with all the bad things the current internet has: kiddie porn (and any other material the government deems "unsuitable"), the ability to do whatever you want anonymously (and to keep your private info out of corporate hands), ability to share pirated material (and publish your own material without having to obtain some permission).
A new Euro-internet will be like like AOL or Compuserve in the bad old days.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
...his anti-US feelings. He seems to leave out any evidence that would show that the rest of the world does the same as the US sometimes. What about the Vatican shutting down webpages here? Eh? Oops, only Yahoo! and a legit auction matter.
Why is it that Europeans can be so incredibly full of themselves, their culture, their history, brimming with arrogance, and call Americans the only bad guys in the world? I mean, come on, everyone has their faults, on both sides of the pond, but ignoring one set and focusing on the other is irresponsible reporting.
From article:
"Europe is the birthplace of the Web, with a wealthy, technically literate population, a network infrastructure that rivals that of the US and a rich cultural and political tradition which can counter US constitutional imperialism."
So all of us Americans are ready to run over to Europe waving the Constitution around, eh? Sheesh. Maybe like the Simpsons, the 2nd amendment is there to let us keep the King of England from walking in and pushing us around. Whatever. Get a clue, pal. We're fine and happy to let Europe run however they want, at least most of us. Stop listening to a couple pundits and company spokespersons and see what the rest of us Americans do: not give a shit.
"An important factor in Europe's favour is that we retain a belief that governments are a good thing, that political control is both necessary and desirable, and that laws serve the people. These beliefs are now lacking in the United States, rendering it incapable of acting to create any sort of civic space online or allowing its government to intervene effectively to regulate the Net."
Not all Americans are anti-gov't. I doubt many are. We just take a vocal stance whenever the gov't does something we don't like. I for one, have little faith in the system for immediate results. I think we're going to suffer for years with irresponsible, ill-advised, and sometimes unconstitutional laws and court rulings on the internet and technology problems, but in the end, I believe it will even out, much as regulation of the telephone companies and cable providers. It just takes a while for them to get a clue, which is expected in a large bureaucracy unfortunately.
And I'll bet there are a lot of folks in Europe that complain about gov't policies they don't like as well. And I'll bet they've been doing it for hundreds of years before the US even existed. So don't even start on civilized, conformist Europe Thompson.
"The United States is incapable, for the reasons I've described, of understanding this or of escaping its constitutionally-determined destiny to attempt to establish hegemony over cyberspace. "
Yeah, the US is definitely one big hegemony, a monolithic country seeking to dominate all. Bleh. Try a multiplicity of different groups who all want something different, but only really get heard outside their communities by doing something highly illegal or pouring money into someone's coffers. The simple fact is that Thompson is painting Americans as one giant evil group, while Europeans are all united in goodwill and such. Please. This guy needs a good thwapping with a trout.
If he presented two viewpoints, showing a more accurate look at both american and european wrongs, and suggesting controlled networks being shared among all nations, I might care. As it is, he's painting anyone as a guntoting radical (in oregon, no less) if we want our internet the way it is. Take a hike, I say.
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
America != United States
Good lord
While we're at it,
England != Great Britain
and
England is not the capital of London.
United States != All that is good in the world and
Nationalism == Racism, as far as some of us (Humans) take it.
Here is the essence of much of the disatisfaction between Europe and the US.
Maybe all the libertarians, small government conservatives and their ilk should consider that the purpose of government is to serve the people; to provide widely accessible services (health? education? public services?).
And maybe an "internet" that respects the laws and wishes of governments other that the US government (the best government that money can buy).
It's called Internet 2, look it up :)
They bully us too much in all aspects, Not just internet. It would be nice to join EU in the internet if it happens.
And Reg US was also provided to try and move some traffic over to the US to allow American viewers an easier time with accessing the content. I suppose I could look through the archives to try and find out, but I've wasted enough of my work day as is :)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Just because you're polite doesn't mean you're sincere. I can't stand the way people ask you "how are you doing?" and don't expect a sincere answer back (or rather don't care).
You may THINK you're being polite, while I say you're being damn rude even for asking when we know you don't care wheter I was dying from cancer.
China
*Cough*
Who is John Galt?
Comic book guy: "I'm interested in upgrading my 28.8 Kilo Baud Internet connection to a 1.5 Mega bit fibre-optic T1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP router that's compatible with my token ring ethanet LAN configuration?"
Homer: "Can I have some money now?"
Even though the author did raise good points about the idiotic DMCA etc, it seems more like a case of sour grapes to me. After all, which country was it that impressed it's will on India, South Africa, Libya, etc, etc. And wasn't it us that came rushing to their aid in "their darkest hour". I have a real hard time accepting this guy's moral high ground in the larger perspective of UK imperialism. Go ahead, make your own internet. At least Cisco will profit selling you routers. In the words of Han Solo "Let's just say we'd like to avoid any imperial entanglements".
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Judging from the current stream of comments, I guess I'm the only one who liked the article. I have always maintained that the Internet is attempting to be both a technical revolution and a social one and you don't have to subscribe to both. I don't see why an international data network trumps national distinctions any more than an international phone network or air travel network or space station would. We may not like all the laws of other countries, but we have to respect their right to self-determination or else we become hypocrites.
In retrospect, the concept of a bunch of geeks who swear by the EFF's manifesto on how cyberspace really is a separate reality in which national borders do not exist and regular laws do not apply... it really does seem vaguely similar to the analogy of a bunch of freemen holed up in Oregon who refuse to recognize the authority of the US government. He lost me a bit at the end, though. Monitoring all that data to make sure no private information escapes seems kind of hard to enforce, especially if the data is encrypted.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
I'm with Linus here: if you write the code, you should decide on its license.
However, if you write the data, should you be allowed to dictate the license of any code that uses the data? The US government seems to think so.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It must be the case that these things (the author points to his tinfoil hat) are indeed selling well. I can only guess that the market must be a bit flooded by the lead variety, soemone's obviously having their brain addled.
/.'rs living in the US, the message is simple: Your Congress-critters, and other quasi-elected officials are making you look bad to such a degree that you're being disabused in bad prose from other countries. Well, let's get rid of the source of the problem asap.
At any rate, this great example of a false dilemma fallacy may have a point to make, assuming that, the worth of a network lies in its connectivity and that restrictions on that connectivity invariably decrease the worth of the network. The article presents (at most) the one lucid point: The US is increasingly guilty of restricting the connectivity of this network.
Admittedly, this point could have been garnered in something like the first three lines of the article, and if you did so, considering the rest to be sub-literate, self-contridictory drivel, more power to you.
For the majority of
I don't think this is what Al Gore had in mind when he invented the Internet.
Playing devil's advocate, let's crunch some numbers. Say 10,000 American slashdotters give $100 a month to the EFF. That's $12,000,000 a year but, I doubt you'd get that much donation. Even if those are accurate figure, can they compair to what certain companies donate to political campaigns?
UNIX/Linux Consulting
actually, he has a point. the net was designed to withstand nukes, not politicians and lawyers. it's shown an unexpected resilience so far, but it may really be necessary to - as freenet puts it - "rewire the internet".
aside from ICANN and censorship laws, domain, trademark and patent mess, the usual spam and script-kiddie problems, when you stop to think about it, some days its really surprising that the net is still standing at all.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What an idiot. Firstly, there's the false impliction that since a guy at CERN wrote the first specs for the WWW that this means the internet was made by Europeans. (First off, it was the university of illinois that was communicating with CERN that worked on actually making mosaic and httpd to implement the spec, and secondly there's the fact that "the internet" != "the WWW".)
.net and .com addresses are not in the US. The only way on the net to reliably censor for one country is to censor from all of them.
Secondly, there's the fact that he's ignoring the two-way street to international poisoning of laws here. Countries that censor end up censoring everywhere, inside and outside their jurisdiction, or not at all. And that holds true in both directions, leading to a situation where only the lowest common denominator of what is legal in every country ends up being legal worldwide. He cited the case with yahoo showing hits for nazi sites in France, but forgets that that's a case of France trying to censor the world, not just inside it's own boundries. When Yahoo was asked to block access to that information from French viewers, they raised the objection that it isn't even technically possible to do that and the only reliable way for Yahoo to comply would be to remove that information for everyone, not just the French. Just because a hit is coming from somewhere other than a *.fr address, that doesn't imply that the viewer cannot be French. Lots of
Yes, the DMCA is bad, but the solution is to have countries with the balls to stand up to the US and say, "you don't have jurisdiction here". When Norway caved in in the famous DeCSS incident, they just bend over and accepted it without question. THAT attitude is just as much responsible for the US's hegemony as anything the US has done itself.
But building a seperate independant EU network??? That's absurd on the face of it. There must be interconnection with the rest of the world and once that happens you have one unified internet again. I don't think this guy understands what the internet really is. There already is a collection of independant EU-based hosts with their own network connections to other hosts. And this network is also connected to the outside world. It's called "that portion of the internet that resides in the EU." I don't think this guy "gets" how unstructured the 'net really is.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Let's not forget that if Mr. Thompson wants to walk down the street, he's being watched by vidcams on every corner. Obviously he likes the feeling of being watched every moment of every day. He likes the feeling of security that it gives him. He wants everyone to feel as secure as he does. He wants everyone to be watched every minute of every day, even while they are surfing the net.
He plainly says that we need DRM and identified processors. And this guy claims to get paid to give advice about computing!
As for myself, I have no need of the *.gov* regulating and analyzing everything I do, whether it's on the net or at the donkey show in Tijuana. According to Mr. Thompson, if I disagree with him, then I am not fit to occupy civilization.
"A trusted network will not stop the Americans - or anyone else - opting out and remaining with their existing unregulated Internet. Just like the survivalists heading out to Oregon with their assault weapons and dried food, those who don't want to be part of the great online civilisation could establish their own enclaves, where they would be free to run the code of their choice."
Translation: "If you don't agree with me, then you are a gun-toting nut. Also, if you are American, then you are a gun-toting nut."
The whole concept that anyone would be able to opt-out is ridiculous. If Mr. Thompson had his way, the controls would be such that there would be no opting out possible.
I wonder if this guy's mother still dresses him in the morning?
Note to Mr. Thompson: Yes, I am a gun-toting nut. I am also a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. I can trace my lineage back to English nobility on my father's side, and to Scottish nobility on my mother's. It was my ancestors who decided to tell the "Imperialist Bastards" ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "The English" to piss off. It was my ancestors who took this land from the natives (I also carry the blood of one of the 500 nations) and formed it into a country and would not allow England to rule us. Let us never forget that while the French are...well French, at least they helped us kick your ass.
The very fact that people such as you regard "civilization" as a place where no one has, "the freedom to act irresponsibly [and/or] to undermine civil authorities" is a very strong indicator that you have no regard for personal freedom, intelligence, initiative or self determination. Here in the US, we do value these things. No, we're not perfect, but we're still a hell of a lot better off than you. At least we rarely have riots at our sporting events...perhaps it's due to all the guns we tote.
America invents the internet years ago.
America signs off on an open public internet long before other nations realize its potential.
Americans as a whole adopt the internet faster than most other large nations.
American businesses get into the internet game before others do due to the bigger infrastructure available.
Europe and other nations, seeing that they are behind (for no other reason than not being in the know on a really interesting concept, certainly not cultural), and in the name of blind hatred of all things American, declare some sort of strange "American Conspiracy" against the freedoms of netizens the world over.
IN RESPONSE TO THIS, I COUNTER-DECLARE THE FOLLOWING ANTI-AMERICAN CONSPIRACIES:
1. The Swedish have been hoarding all of the hot chicks and cool furniture. For SHAME!
2. The Germans have been abusing the ability to make extremely dependable and stylish cars. We'll GET YOU!
3. The Japanese have a lock on small, compact, well-designed devices. HAND OVER THOSE BLUEPRINTS!
4. Belgium: Give us the secrets of your superior beer or face imminent invasion. ATTACK!
5. France: Fork over the bread and the director of Amelie. NOW!
Please, in the spirit of the ridiculousness of this article, add more anti-American conspiracies.
Sounds great -- just don't shut us Canucks out because we happen to be on the wrong side of the big pond. :-) I'd join up for the new 'net in a heartbeat if it meant US lawyer-happy corporations were shut out of the network! Leave us and our connections alone.
Ah, for the days of the 'net that one could browse without having to install an ad-blocker, or worry about javascript/cookies...or getting sued under the DMCA for posting an article about how something really works.
"? If I send an email suggesting that I am in possession of $50m and will hand it over in return for your bank details, why can't it just be that I also am breaking the law in two countries, not in some mythical 'cyberspace' with its own legal system? "
Guess what, you would be breaking the law in both countries. The more I think about how fundamentally flawed this thinking is, the angrier I get. Just because the Internet makes it easier doesn't make it less illegal. Currently on the news I'm hearing about a big 'Net kiddie porn bust done in both the U.S. and Europe; according to what the author is writing, I guess CNN is wrong, because this couldn't happen.
Today's Internet is a poor respecter of national boundaries, as many repressive governments have found to their cost.
The idea of the modern internet is to erase boundaries and share ideas. Don't you like to learn and share?
Unfortunately this freedom has been so extensively abused by the United States and its politicians, lawyers and programmers that it has become a serious threat to the continued survival of the network as a global communications medium.
So put up some decent sites and unique 'net tools. Do something constructive and make us go ooh and ahh, look at the EuroNet. Sounds more like envy so far, not facts.
If the price of being online is to swallow US values, then many may think twice about using the Net at all, and if the only game online follows US rules, then many may decide not to play.
Um, I pay Ameritech by coin every month for my DSL. Don't you dare say I don't pay for my internet. The country BUILT the internet. What the heck have you done?
We have already seen US law, in the form of Digital Millennium Copyright Act, used to persuade hosts in other countries to pull material or limit its availability.
They stole stuff! Stealing is stealing. Shut up unless your country doesn't have any copyright laws.
US-promoted 'anti-censor' software is routinely provided to enable citizens of other countries to break local laws; and US companies like Yahoo! disregard the judgements of foreign courts at will.
If they're breaking the law, through them in jail. Otherwise get a life, and move on.
Congressman Howard Berman's ridiculous proposal to give copyright holders immunity from prosecution if they hack into P2P networks is the latest attempt by the US Congress to pass laws that will directly affect every Internet user, because no US court would allow prosecution of a company in another jurisdiction when immunity is granted by US law.
Okay, I agree with him on this one point. If I break into your house, poke a hole in your ceiling, and watch you from the attic I will be arrested. The same thing here.
Unless we can take back the Net from the libertarians, constitutional lawyers and rapacious corporations currently recreating the worst excesses of US political and commercial culture online, we will end up with an Internet which serves the imperial ambitions of only one country instead of the legitimate aspirations of the whole world.
Imperial ambitions? Anybody seen a king here in the US? I know we have a pope, Hi Kurt, but not a king or a queen.
This guy has, to use a term, penis envy. He hates the idea that we are faster, better, and having more fun implimenting our ideas on the internet. This... person, if you call this unthinking Euro Neo-nazi like creature that, wants things his way.
Well guess what, the 'net is big ocean. You can put up your little dikes to keep ideas out. Even if you set up your little lake of information for Europe someone will open a few gateway because you want the freedoms we have.
To me this guy sounds like Hitler just after he rebuilt Germany from their economic crash.... Wait a minute isn't Europe in the middle of a...
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
That's right, Al Gore. And Al Gore is an American!
-----
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
And then everybody's next project will be to connect the two networks.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
As someone who grew up in the former G.D.R.(German Democratic Republic), I think I am allowed to draw a parallel here: The Berlin Wall (here an excellent link for those of you who wants to polish up there German language capabilities) was originally erected in order to protect East Germany from the West (and to retain the people in the Soviet Occupation Zone). The GDR-offiziell term for this perverse building was "Antifascistic Protective Wall"... wink wink, nudge nudge, know whatahmean, say no more?(see).
The bottom line is: While I am quite tempted to see a European Net as a way to protect us Europeans from the sillyness and corruption of the current US government (no offence to you honest US citizens), I cannot see why the European government(s) should be somehow immune against stupidity and corruption... Ultimately, a European Net would be used to imprison us rather than to protect us from the outside world.
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
Just like the survivalists heading out to Oregon with their assault weapons and dried food
Wow. We Oregonians rate a spot in European geography lessons?
This gentleman is a troll...every point he brings up is self-contradicting. The people who say "More power to him! America sucks!" and those who say "That bastard! What an idiot!" are probably both being snickered at because they're taking it so seriously.
Frankly, it's hard for me to believe someone could unintentionally be that stupid, or that wrong, in an article. Consider that his "two beliefs we have to drop" are the same, most of his evidence is just plain false, and his language is all inflammatory. I see 300 comments, most of them furious, so I figure his troll succeeded.
That said, I think it's kind of stupid that the Register would put something like that up even as a satire or a joke; it's not April Fools and I like to read pertinant, useful news there (not to mention the BOFH :) ). It's as if they posted a goatsex link or a "BSD is dying" article.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
Nonsense.
Someone in Renaissance Italy might have said the same thing about the Italian city-states.
Where are the Italian city-states now? Extinct.
Where will the current crop of nation-states be in, say, a hundred years? Extinct.
The Internet represents the first widespread oportunity for individual people to instantly experience something entirely outside the parochial culture of their little nation, and participate in a context that truly has no borders.
Too bad the author misses this minor detail entirely, in his little Euro-centric monologue.
It's unfortunate that he locks himself so tightly into his myopic agenda, because the larger question of how we stop the rush toward world-wide, United States-based global corporate hegemony is the *real* issue of our times...
It's the prevention of *that* holocaust that we all need to be working toward.
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Umm...taking it back implies it was theirs to begin with. Although I do agree that the web should be an international thing, didn't the US start the whole thing? I think it'd be a shame to start up segregated internet-like things that aren't the internet, but lets get one thing straight: They can't "take back" what wasn't "theirs" to begin with.
.sig you are looking for.
Of course, the article does have a point...the US has passed laws, and is considering laws, that suck, and could be outright unconstitutional. (DMCA and its kin)
This is not the
This must be a bad link since the article doesn't even remotely say what the story says it says. But it's a good read anyway.
It completely fails to deal with offshore locations not under the juristiction of any country. Without that, the entire concept falls apart.
I really tire of the viewpoints of Europeans that think the United States is the only source of online legal stupidity. Unfortunately, I've grown used to it. It's sad, because when an idea is presented in this way, many people tend to think the idea is as pointless as the person presenting it.
He also doesn't deal well with issues of spam, DOS attacks, etc. If one country decides to ignore spammers, does it become a diplomatic issue? Can we expect India and Pakistan to declare cyber-war on each other?
Meanwhile, I look forward to the EU deciding to control their portion of the internet and reading the BBC tirades on how much they're screwing up.
No Zen is good zen
Looks like the article has been ./'ed so I can't have a look. But based only on the summary in this story, this is one of the most stupid ideas I have heard in a long time. And I'm speaking as an EUian.
>WTF? What natural resources does the U.S. steal from anyone?
If Im gonna pick one it may as well be a good'n. So how about the air we breath. The US has 4-5% of the world population and produces 25% of the CO2 in the world. The reason is not that the US has more industry its just that the industry it has is so much dirtier than the rest of the world. Blair has nothing to worry about at re-elction time in, what, three years time, there's no decent competition. On the issue of having countries leading their own revolutions, yeah that'll work.
http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=020807 I'm on a linkie strike. :-)
Murphy was an optimist.
Either that, or he's really dumb. He's got a huge contradiction in his thought process. Whether you're a libertarian, statist or whatever, huge glaring internal contradictions reveal a poorly thought out argument.
He decries the idea of the US imposing it's laws on the world, and then says it's okay for Europe to do the same. (Prosecuting people for war crimes commited 50 years ago in another country.
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
Mr Thompson can babble all he want. The Internet isn't goint to change just because he dosen't like it.
Remember: If you buy anything from spammers, you have a small penis.
Since you don't seem to get what he is talking about, I will surmise it for you:
He wants to reign in the "pure unfettered information" by enforcing hate-speech laws and other impose European restrictions on political and economic speech. He wants to protect tax prisons like Europe from tax-free online competition.
He is complaining about all those pesky freedoms that can't be touched because of those troublesome "bill of rights". He thinks that the peoples of the U.S. would "run to the hills" to escape a "civil society" where the government can control its people according to its own desires. (Think EU Falong Gong sites being taken down at the request of China). Of course, what would really happen is that no one would be joining him in his virtual worker's paradise, because who wants to be regulated?
He also seems very ignorant as to the critical role which Europe plays in both viruses and spam, but that's not surprising considering the obviously limited grasp he has of technology. Considering your statement about having to pay to learn how to program, I gather you don't either.
Your feeble culture cannot survive, even in a walled garden. Submit or be humiliated like France. France used to dominate film, wine, culture etc., but now all of the good stuff comes from the good ol' USA, and the frogs, they ain't shit. Oil and all things that matter are products of the American hegemony, so get used to it and quit yer whining. Oh yeah, learn some English, so when I visit your country, you get my order right when I go to McDonald's.
Most of the packet transfer research was done in the US at MIT. There was definitely some done in the UK, but nothing as substantial. The first primitive beginning of the internet was called ARPANET and the first two nodes were at UCLA and near Stanford University. Last time I checked those two schools were in the US. We also had the motivation to develope the internet. During the Cold War, the US was worried about transfering vital information across the country in the event of a nuclear war. They wanted something that would not be exposed to the risk of a bomb destroying one commuication line, stopping all information. The answer was to have a network of lines across the country implimenting packet switching theory. This was the basis for the formation of what became the internet.
... just like americans use .com instead of .us? okay. And did you have a point to go with that?
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
Well crap... thats what you get for leaving your account logged in.
Sorry about the parent post, it most explictly does *not* represent my views, and was not posted by me.
(Not that I don't like the Queen and all... but that post is nothing more than ridiculous inflammatory rhetoric and was somewhat shocking to find listed under my comments...).
I guess I forgot the first rule of security: never leave anything unattended unless its attached to a high voltage shocking device...
being european, i have pondered more than once how nice a net "without those hypocrit, bigot americans" would be. but then, I thought again, and realized that the internet is what it is (a hellhole full of spam and annoying pr0n sites and the likes, but still a great place to hang around) because people from all over the world participate.
also, writing things like "the americans" or "the europeans" is so enormously stupid that it's close to racism for me, and I am very fucking far from being politically correct. what unites a farmer from texas and a businessman from seattle? about the same as a sheperd from ireland and a tourist guide from hungary..not pretty much. if i read something in the net i don't agree with, and then demand that this person and all the people from his city/land/continent/planet be banned from the net, or at least isolated to another part of it, then I think I should sit down in a corner and rot to death.
i have a nice pin from the university of san diego that states "diversity brings us together".
nuff said.
Karma
Make up your damn mind. Don't sit there and extoll the virtues of a global information medium in one breath and state the need for artificial borders the next. Seriously, you all but cheer free speech one moment and then bring up the need for government censorship (which is exactly what you're asking for) the next.
"We have already seen US law, in the form of Digital Millennium Copyright Act, used to persuade hosts in other countries to pull material or limit its availability."
To my knowledge there has only been one European detained for possible violations of the DMCA, while countless perpetrators of various US laws wander free in Europe because those governments often refuse extradition. The fact that one particular European government decided to let the US do what it will is the fault of that European government, not the US. By your logic the Vichy government should be held blameless for enforcing Nazi policies.
"US-promoted 'anti-censor' software is routinely provided to enable citizens of other countries to break local laws; and US companies like Yahoo! disregard the judgements of foreign courts at will. "
Free speech bad! Four legs good!
I ask you this: If you were on an EU-only network, established and controlled by the EU government, would you have the option of bad-mouthing them on said network as you're doing now?
"we will end up with an Internet which serves the imperial ambitions of only one country instead of the legitimate aspirations of the whole world."
I seem to have forgotten... are you talking about the current global information network of your EU-only vision of one?
"While this would greatly please the US, it would not be in the interests of the majority of Internet users, who want a network that allows them to express their own values, respects their own laws and supports their own cultures and interests. "
You seem to have left out a few words. What you actually want is an internet that allows people sharing your own values to be able to express them without anybody disagreeing with them. What you actually want is an internet that imposes the cultures or your choosing on its users, sheilding them from anything you consider "wrong" without letting them have the benefit of making up their own mind. Let's not mince words here, what you're advocating is exactly what the PRC has been trying to do for years. You don't want the internet, you want an EU version of AOL.
"Yet today's United States is a country which respects freedom so much that if I, a European citizen, set foot there I can be interned without any notice or due process, tried by a military tribunal and executed in secret."
"It has a government which respects free speech yet tries to persuade postal workers to spy on people as they delivered their mail."
To my knowledge these efforts have not been successful. On the other hand, I recall complaints in France's last presidential election that France's post offices showed political bias in delivering (or not) campaign advertising.
Of course, it would be very difficult for the federal government to convince the USPS to do anything because not only would it be a violation of several federal laws (enforced by US Postal Inspectors, completely different chain of command from either the FBI or CIA) there is little benefit that the USPS can receive for doing this (it's not like Congress can cut their funds or anything... )
"ICANN, the body it established to manage DNS, had to be ordered by a court to let one of its own directors examine the company accounts for fear he may discover something untoward."
A US court, I might add...
"And elected representatives -like the aforementioned Howard Berman -are paid vast amounts by firms lobbying for laws which serve their corporate interests."
Welcome to democracy. And it can be argued that this problem is actually worse in Europe. We may have bad politicians over here, but they're either not as bad or as powerful as Chriac or Berlusconi.
"These are clearly not the people who should be setting the rules for the Net's evolution. Unfortunately today's Internet, with its permissive architecture and lack of effective boundaries or user authentication, makes it almost impossible to resist this technological imperialism."
You've done Karl Marx proud...
"Fortunately the technology itself - in the form of trusted computer architectures, secure networks and digital rights management - can be used to rescue the Net from US control."
Let me pick my jaw up off the floor. I thought your support of government censorship is bad enough, but now advocating DRM... I take back what I said a few days about about being scared of Europe. I'm now fucking terrified!
"I believe that the time has come to speak out in favour of a regulated network; an Internet where each country can set its own rules for how its citizens, companies, courts and government work with and manage those parts of the network that fall within its jurisdiction; an Internet that reflects the diversity of the world's legal, moral and cultural choices instead of simply propagating US hegemony; an Internet that is subject to political control instead of being an uncontrolled experiment in radical capitalism."
OK, replace amorphous threat of US hegemony with much more tacticle threat of EU police state... riiiight...
"Why, then, do we act as if our interactions with screen, mouse and keyboard are different? If I send an email suggesting that I am in possession of $50m and will hand it over in return for your bank details, why can't it just be that I also am breaking the law in two countries, not in some mythical 'cyberspace' with its own legal system?"
Nice straw man there. Fraud is fraud is fraud and is prosecuted as such. You don't see a separate "fraud over the internet" law on the books just as you don't see a separate "fraud over the telephone" law (though you imply otherwise). The only moderate difference between the two is that fraud via e-mail is slightly more difficult to track down (but not impossible, since in your example the defrauder would have to access the bank account in question).
"The other thing we need to lose is the ridiculous belief that when we are online we are somehow in 'another place' outside the real world. We need to reject the philosophical bullshit which argues that there is an equivalence between being simultaneously a 'citizen' of Maine and of the United States and our co-existence in the real world and the online world *, and accept instead the mundane reality that nobody has any real form of existence online - either now or in the foreseeable future."
You're confusing the foolish concept of being a "citizen of the internet" with the quite real concept of being a "member of an on-line community." Ideas are communicated and exchanged in a way that they would not be without the internet, conclusions are formed, and actions are taken based on those conclusions. Take a look at the Free Sklyarov protests that sprung up. Without places like Slashdot and The Register reporting it as front-page news, nobody would really even be aware of the situation.
Of course this view of things is toxic to your argument, since you'd rather artificially impose physical communities onto the internet whether the participants want to or not.
"We can also deal with the problems of jurisdiction for online activity in the same way as we deal with it elsewhere: in the UK we're perfectly happy to prosecute someone for war crimes committed fifty years ago in another country, so why are there problems if the crime involved the Internet?"
Say it with me:
extradition
The UK wouldn't be prosecuting Pinochet if he wasn't stupid enough to set foot there.
"Under English law a sex tourist can be prosecuted here even if he has sex with a child in Thailand: surely prosecuting someone for promoting racial hatred on a US-hosted website can't be that different?"
The difference is:
1.) Limey dumbfuck came home to UK jurisdiction
2.) No state would turn someone over to the federal government for some foreign speech crime, even if the federal government was dumb enough to bother asking (somebody just lost the next election)
Once again, the word of the day is "extradition." Kinda funny how you're looking to artificially enforce national boundaries when it comes to violations but want them to magically disappear when it comes to extradition...
Fuck it, I'm getting too appalled by the views and fallacies your espousing for me to contue to try to offer rational arguments. Go ahead and establish your own EU internet ("censor-net") over there, see if I give a damn. Just don't try to force it down my throat and don't be surprised when you've just argued yourself out of a medium on which to argue.
God Damn the Amerikuns, AND the pusherman!
Its frustrating that they affect us in more ways than just the internet. Personally, i'd like the US to keep their greedy hands off the rest of the world. Chances of that are unlikely since the large corporations that make campaign donations usually get their own way.
The whole point of the Internet is to connect the world. If you live in a country where this is not appreciated, you shouldn't have the Internet there.
Unfortunately this freedom has been so extensively abused by the United States and its politicians, lawyers and programmers that it has become a serious threat to the continued survival of the network as a global communications medium.
So, to make a better global communications medium we must kick out everyone except Europe?
If the price of being online is to swallow US values, then many may think twice about using the Net at all, and if the only game online follows US rules, then many may decide not to play.
The Internet contains many, many different cultures. If you are finding US values, you may want to look at a different area. Better yet, you may want to create your own, non-US valued content.
We have already seen US law, in the form of Digital Millennium Copyright Act, used to persuade hosts in other countries to pull material or limit its availability. US-promoted 'anti-censor' software is routinely provided to enable citizens of other countries to break local laws; and US companies like Yahoo! disregard the judgements of foreign courts at will.
Anyone in another company that pulls something down using the DMCA is just stupid. Unless Yahoo! is hosting servers in France, the user is responsible to keep their activity legal in their own homeland.
Unless we can take back the Net from the libertarians, constitutional lawyers and rapacious corporations currently recreating the worst excesses of US political and commercial culture online, we will end up with an Internet which serves the imperial ambitions of only one country instead of the legitimate aspirations of the whole world.
You were just saying that Yahoo doesn't obey France's laws, well, why shouldn't you be able to get DoS'd because a US law says the RIAA can? You aren't making sense.
I believe that the time has come to speak out in favour of a regulated network; an Internet where each country can set its own rules for how its citizens, companies, courts and government work with and manage those parts of the network that fall within its jurisdiction; an Internet that reflects the diversity of the world's legal, moral and cultural choices instead of simply propagating US hegemony; an Internet that is subject to political control instead of being an uncontrolled experiment in radical capitalism.
Any country that wants to can do it now, without imposing any silly ideas to other countries.
Europe is the birthplace of the Web, with a wealthy, technically literate population, a network infrastructure that rivals that of the US and a rich cultural and political tradition which can counter US constitutional imperialism.
The web is not the Internet, make up your mind.
As for the rest, he goes on to spout about "Mapped networks". I hack you, from one network to another. Whose jurisdiction is it then? My country believes hacking is not illegal, yours does. That is also the problems with Britain's laws that you mentioned: jurisdiction.
What you find to be problems with the US, has more to do with the inadequacies of yourself. Go build another Concord, it will make you feel better.
This is just an aggressive idiot slinging around buzzwords. He's got some hangup about the US and he's taking it out on his only form of escapism - the Internet. If not for the Americans and Russians he'd be speaking German right now. Fuck him. Americans don't like the DMCA any more than he does. It's not like Europe's lawmakers are more tech-savvy some how. The only intelligent technological politics I've seen any evidence of yet are in South America of all places. Other than the internal combustion engine and the rocket (both German inventions), Europe hasn't had a creative thought in 150 years.
"I hear the internet is really good this time of year."
Now back to your regularly scheduled rant already in progress...
The US doesn't tell any other country what they can have on their servers, and anyone that disagrees is an imbecile.
So why did Jon Johansen get arrested?
From the EFF page on the subject:
MORTAR COMBAT!
For years, when there was little control over the Internet, US websites did anything they wanted. For example, many of the pr0n sites actually violate the laws of many other countries. Is there any mechanism to ensure that these sites are not visible in those countries? When some of them did try to block such sites we were quick to dismiss them as "censors" and people without freedom.
However, when there is a foreign website that violates US laws, our government and companies do the utmost to shut those sites down. How would we judge a person in USA who visits a child pr0n site hosted elsewhere? Didn't we ensure that film88.com was shutdown for violating US copyrights even though it was hosted in Iran?
Most of the governing bodies of the Internet are based in USA. ICANN is US based. NS, which was the monopoly in domain registration, is based in USA. And so on.
It is true that the Internet is a global phenomenon. But, any rules that do exist on it are dictated by USA. As an American it can be easy at times to assume that US law is the world law. Unfortunately, that is far from true.
All your favorite sites in one place!
"While this would greatly please the US, it would not be in the interests of the majority of Internet users, who want a network that allows them to express their own values, respects their own laws and supports their own cultures and interests."
Read: " I'm pissed because governments won't be able to push moral-majority opinions on to every citizen in their respective countries."
What does the Berlin Wall have to do with isolating Europe?
tmegapscm
... and Iraq-gemony, Afghan-gemony, Canada-gemony, etc. Cut the net into little boxes and stop this rampaging, unfettered global communication.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Wasn't the Worldwide Web invented in Switzerland? Most americans think the www IS the internet anyways... LOL
He wants to have a truly internationally governed network, and not run by a bunch of US organizations. If things worked, who would complain? Apparently things do not work.
Did anybody else read the article far enough to see that he is pushing for DRM as an answer to his imaginary problem?
Oh, the irony... Do we really need Palladium to protect us from the americans?
I respectfully request that Bill Thompson remove his head from his ass. He would then get a better view of the world and the internet.
I know it has become envogue to bash the US, its policies and its people (and now blame the state of the internet on the US) but please keep your mouth shut if you can't say anything more intelligent than an American teenager (which should be easier these days since SAT/ACT scores have been dropping faster than the stock markets).
You can't live in this world as an isolationist not in your country or cyberspace (yes Bill I know you were trying to do away with the cyberspace concept, but your argument was assinine and pointless since you used the term in your final conclusions anyway).
Yes the US and entities residing in it have long drove the culture of the online world (we are one of the biggest markets in the world) but Euro trash companies behave the same way online as most US companies do. You also failed to mention the huge asian and russian influence on the net (not to mention the India influence). Bombastic simpletons such as Bill might find it difficult to reason that the borderless internet is the best thing to happen to humans in a long time. The benefits of borderless electronic communication outways any downside so far. One of the great things about the internet is dumbasses like Bill can post highschool newspaper articles to cyberspace and it will be read by netizens all over the world.
Blame Canada
You 2 arguing about who invented/made the internet, both with valid points, proves beyond a doubt the inernational nature of computing research and development.
I will let three paragraphs speak for themselves: (not that it was easy to do, we DID in fact slashdot the Register).
. . . US-promoted 'anti-censor' software is routinely provided to enable citizens of other countries to break local laws . . .
. . .
Fortunately the technology itself - in the form of trusted computer architectures, secure networks and digital rights management - can be used to rescue the Net from US control.
These developments, reviled and criticised by those inside and outside the continental United States who hold on to an outdated and unrealistic view of what the Net was or could become, are the key to its future growth and usefulness. Whatever the libertarians say, they must be defended, promoted - and properly controlled.
There are European-coordinated pieces of Internet, for obvious operational reasons. For some reason, the people running them seem to appreciate open access.
Anybody, anywhere, who wishes, can set up local nets with local rules. China and Singapore are good examples of countries that have done exactly that. For some reason, some citizens of those countries insist on being unruly and using the proxies that so annoy Mr. Thompson. Mr. Thompson is welcome to buy all the network control applications he wishes and set up his own network - but good luck getting anybody in a free country to use it!
Hahaha... stop, you're killing me. What about Vietnam, Gulf War, Afghanistan, upcoming Israel? Is there anything Americans don't feel they should meddle with? Your government acts as if it owns the world (including its own citizens), be it in a military, cultural, environmental or whatever way.
Sadly enough, and really, try to understand this instead of start flaming and modding me down, most parts of the world don't accept this American tendency to 'rule the world', to make decisions beyond its own borders. There's a very critical attitude towards your government here, in Europe, aswell as in almost every other part of the world, and what I would really wish for, is to see once a _thoughtful_ reaction to the criticism, a reflection of one's actions, and not the usual nationalistic 'we rule' (shut up or we send our army / economical restrictions / ...) kind of talk. America is really considered the bully on the world's playground.
Honestly, I don't agree with the writer. I hope ('hope', not 'believe in') for an internet that brings the world together in harmony and mutual respect; I have the deepest of respect for every one of you individually, no matter where you're from.
But please, reflect about your actions instead of grouping together in a flock of fascistic sheep, like some of the posts here do. The American nationalism reminds too many people here in Europe of the nazi über-empire; it scares me. Try to be objective, and listen to e.g. your president. He doesn't sound much less racistic, chauvinistic, nationalistic than a Bin Laden to many people; America is a big nation, and it's not that hard to understand that many people are very weary whenever there's an incident that involves the American law, military intervention, environmental issues or whatever outside of American's borders.
I'm afraid this situation could escalate in the long run. America is really seen as a bully by most of the world, even in Europe. Most reactions on 9/11 where of horror and compassion of the inhumanity and suffering of the innocent, but many people also had a slight 'they had it coming' in the back of their head; nobody was really amazed that there was an incident. The American government clearly should revise their policies with the rest of the world in the future (maybe they should hire Micro$ofts PR-department? :) ), otherwise things might get much worse.
Which would be sad.
Peace.
The problem has little to do with the Internet and everything to do with the importance of the US market.
.coms from imposing huge dutys on your products; despite any number of deals you sign with .gov or any number of international trade rulings you might secure.
Even if you went so far as to split the european internetwork from the north american one, the US would still lock you up for DMCA infractions or posting a picture of Mickey on your web site.
A major problem is the imposition of US laws on other countries. Couple this with the fact that in a lot of instances the US government abdicates their responsibilities to corporations and one gets all manner of mayhem.
Apparently, in the US, international trade is a subject for the courts and US businesses, not the government. We all no how strange the US courts are, and you can imagine how US businesses view international trade. I'll sum up their complex position for you: "My stuff going out is good, Their stuff coming in is bad". So, if you happen to be in the unenviable position of, say, Canada or Mexico, you are stuck. You can't ignore the US economy without a generation of poverty, and yet you can't stop the US
I just wrote to Bill, author of the Register piece about Europeanising the Internet, asking him why he thinks we're not now having this discussion about Minitel? Why aren't we asking "How did we let France shape the world's communication network?" or "How can we reclaim our sovereignty from French cultural hegemony?"?
Because they didn't of course [though oddly, that's exactly what they wanted to do], and the reason they didn't is they built something typically European, typically closed, regulated, and government controlled - the way Bill would like it.
And that's why the Internet didn't turn into the world wide web in Europe, because no-one wanted to join things like Minitel.
Won't Al Gore(sarcastic) and all the government workers who actually developed the net be surpised
'anti-censor' software is routinely provided to enable citizens of other countries to break local laws
So WE are terribly opressvie, trying to let people have free speach
and US companies like Yahoo! disregard the judgements of foreign courts at will.
I wonder if it hurts to be that clueless, hmm maybe the reason yahoo didn't listen to Frace is because Yahoo agreed to obey US laws not French laws
the majority of Internet users, who want a network that allows them to express their own values, respects their own laws and supports their own cultures and interests.
So when an US company wants to obey the laws they are evil, but when the US dosen't stop regulate things in other countries we are evil.
These are clearly not the people who should be setting the rules for the Net's evolution. Unfortunately today's Internet, with its permissive architecture and lack of effective boundaries or user authentication, makes it almost impossible to resist this technological imperialism.
Can't resist freedom, all that freedom imprisons us!
In the mapped network we will not have the absolute freedom of speech which cyberlibertarians claim they want
Except in countries where you can't say what you want, like nazi stuff in France (I don't care for nazi's but I defend the right of others to say whatever they want)
Many will see this as a loss of freedom, as some people aren't blind. but the freedom they value so much is also the freedom to act irresponsibly, to undermine civil authorities and to escape liability.Yep freedom means responcibility It is the freedom to release viruses, abuse personal data, send unlimited spamI'm looking in your direction China and undermine the copyright bargain. It is not a freedom we need.Freedom needs to be controlled or it's not...free
An important factor in Europe's favour is that we retain a belief that governments are a good thing, that political control is both necessary and desirable, and that laws serve the people. These beliefs are now lacking in the United States, rendering it incapable of acting to create any sort of civic space online or allowing its government to intervene effectively to regulate the Net.
War is Peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is Strength
(pg 7 of 1984 by George Orwell)Big Brother is watching you for your own good
A few good points drowned out by so so much babbel
if it seems mocking it's mine not his.
Sometimes I really wonder if we made the right choice in fighting against Hitler instead of fighting alongside with him. If only we had known at the time what a group of whinny useless fucks most of Europe would grow to become we would have figured out that the Third Riech was almost certainly an improvment for humanity as a whole.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
He mentions how awful it is to swallow "American Values". I guess the UK is tired of Free Speech, too. This guy should get censored, and then see how much he hates "American Values".
Am I the only one that sees the irony in the fact that an American website publicises his anti-American writing, but I bet if any American wanted a forum against the UK, they wouldn't give us the time of day. That's "American Values" for you. It's freedom. It's dwindling, but it's not like the UK is any more free with a disarmed citizenry and Tony Blair as PM.
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
If the US were cut off from the rest of the world's networks, where would we go for quality warez and pr0n?
My blog can kick your blog's ass
Bill Thompson is just upset that we won the war against Britain.
Europe won't split it's network from the Americans. It would hurt their economy too much (while barely affecting the U.S.)
While he did mention that the Web was invented in Europe (CERN) he forgot to mention that the core of the Internet (TCP/IP) and many other standard protocols in use today were created in the good ol' U.S. of A.
Go cry to yo mama.
Just as long as there aren't Romeing fees
Shouldn't that be "intranet"?
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
is actually his assumption that the US gives a rat's ass whether or not the rest of the world is on the internet.
Did he say "take back the Net from the libertarians"?
It can, at least the important parts, and it very well might.
Headline or not, his proposition to segragate different regions of the internet is not the problem, it's the regulation.
The internet is the one place where (near)Anarchy works, and possibly the only place it can. It's not perfect, as he points out - there's spam, viruses, and MSN all over the place. But it's strength lies in its breadth, diversity, and freedom.
What makes you so sure that that freedom will survive the TCPA?
Look at what China's doing now, and how successful they are. Completely? No. With TCPA they can come a lot closer though. Those of us in Democracies don't have to fear that exact thread, we have to fear its opposite twin in the form of corporate control. Those of us in the US don't have to worry about the government censoring what we say online... unless it involves DeCSS, say, or anything else which irks the people with the money.
Ignore his rants, ignore his illogical conclusions, etc. ... and there's still something very important sitting there.
Be realistic. If Europe decides to shut out the US from "their" internet, who is going to suffer? I sure as hell wont miss any European websites, they will be the ones cutting themselves off from Google, eBay, Yahoo, etc, etc.
So we ditch the emotocent Euros ... and then do what? Kiss Chicom azz cause they make cheap sneakers ? Oh, sorry our business-brownshirts do that all ready.
Hahaha... stop, you're killing me. What about Vietnam, Gulf War, Afghanistan, upcoming Israel? Is there anything Americans don't feel they should meddle with? Your government acts as if it owns the world (including its own citizens), be it in a military, cultural, environmental or whatever way.
Yup, the genocidal killing of the natives of the Americas is a lot like Vietnam, the Gulf War, and Afghanistan. Pardon my surprise if we happen to invade Israel next.
most parts of the world don't accept this American tendency to 'rule the world', to make decisions beyond its own borders. There's a very critical attitude towards your government here, in Europe, aswell as in
That's alright, Americans don't appreciate Europe's attempts to "rule the world" using the UN as a puppet.
The U.S. has no interest in "ruling the world." If we had wanted to rule Europe, it was there for the USSR and U.S. to split. We didn't. We invested enormous sums of money and lives into rebuilding the mess you made of your own continent, and then did the same to keep the Soviet Union from eating it. We did this because it's in both Europe and the U.S.'s interests for Europe to remain independent, but also to be able to economically support itself. Thanks for all of the gratitude.
But please, reflect about your actions instead of grouping together in a flock of fascistic sheep, like some of the posts here do. The American nationalism reminds too many people here in Europe of the nazi über-empire; it scares me.
Wonderful how Europe continues to try and embody this glorious nationalistic nonsense. Scare yourselves for a change.
We don't care about you other than that you don't jeopardize our abiltiy to trade and be oblivious to you. We are "nationalistic" in that we aren't giving up our sovereignty to Europe through the UN. We're also not going to allow countries to take our money and then send their brainwashed youth to come interefere with our way of life.
We "have it coming" because we've spent so much time securing Europe and the U.S. mutual interest in oil from the Middle East. We also "have it coming" because the remainder of the world has this inferiority complex that projects some image of the grand American who believes he is the child of God, above all others. People say stupid things about the grandiose nature of this country, and it means exactly squat. The people here are pretty isolationistic. They don't care about Europeans, but they might go visit it someday. They aren't going to expect you to act like a slave when they arrive. Stop treating us like we're oppressing you.
Just make local hops among IP6 subnets. Seems like it's built in.
.us just became available last year to anyone other than the government (hence state.town.us)
Also since we invented the damn thing we can do what ever the hell we want. Go be an isolationist european and just wait for the iraqis to get missles that can reach the uk.
More to the point of the parent, this guy is opposed to both "libertarians and conservative congressmen," but he's not saying they're allied.
:) tend to oppose just about any regulation of the internet, and particularly even "mild" limits on speech, this which the author of this article favors.
Libertarians (and anarchists
Conservative congressmen write things like the DMCA and this P2P hacking garbage, which he also opposes.
His basic point, which has some validity, seems to me to be that regionalizing the internet would, in a way, make it more democratic. Other countries are feeling the effect of opposing US political views towards the internet (those darn libertarians and conservative congressmen again), but with the structure as it is there's little they can do about it.
If you disagree with someone, that's fine, just make sure you understand what they're saying.
On one hand, he has a point. We have been treating it like it's our toy. Witness ICANN's atrocious behavior. On the other hand it is our toy. Doesn't excuse us, of course, but why should anyone be upset if they want an internet of their own? Let them finance it, control it, maintain it and deal with the headaches.
My
Limekiller
nuff sed
Table-ized A.I.
Well put.
When Americans stay away, we are told that we let children starve or dictators go wild, when we get involved we are 'imperialist' and 'feel as though we want to rule the world'.
Bottom line is: there is no winning and pleasing everyone.
People here blindly compard the DMCA to everything like slavery, etc!
unbelieveable how reactionary some ppl are.
I'm a European and I'm really at least a bit proud of that, what you probably could see from my other posts bashing the US( and prasing the Europe for no reason at all). But this is just MAD. What on earth is wrong with the author of this story?
I feel that there are a lot of things wrong with the US and even more so now with Dubya in charge, but I don't hate America and wouldn't like to be isolated from all the great sites in the US. I mean what would I do without my daily dose of Slashdot? The only site in Europe I visit regularly is Guardian's website. Some of the problems mention on the article are valid, but surely the right way of fixing them is not by isolating Europe. The author seems to be pissed about reading texts by stupid [here I go again] Americans clinging to their Constitution like it's the word of God from the net. Surely I feel like that many times, but this does NOT mean that it doesn't do good for me to read about other people's ideas. Isolating Europe and the US would probably just lead to a war or something like that, because if people don't communcate they seem to get mad at each other for some odd reason
Sorry about this post. Didn't mean to ramble so much. Peace.
IVAN Nethack is not the king anymore.
We have already seen US law, in the form of Digital Millennium Copyright Act, used to persuade hosts in other countries to pull material or limit its availability.
This stupid legal approach to intellectual property is not limited. Major entertainment companies from all over the world are pushing countries to enact similar laws. In fact, the US is not the only country with such stupid laws. Deep linking, for example, is illegal in the Netherlands. Who is gonna protect the European internet from them?
US companies like Yahoo! disregard the judgements of foreign courts at will.
Thank god! The foreign courts are trying to censor the free speech of US citizens.
Yet today's United States is a country which respects freedom so much that if I, a European citizen, set foot there I can be interned without any notice or due process, tried by a military tribunal and executed in secret.
Can he name one example where such a thing has happened? Sklyarov was interned with due process and eventually set free. True, Ashcroft is testing the bounds of the US constitution by holding suspected foreign terrorists, however:
- Except for the POW's, these actions have yet to be tested in a court of law. It is almost certain that the government will lose and these people will be set free.
- No one has yet faced a military tribunal.
- No one has been executed.
His arguments on this count are like proclaiming that baseball is an unfair sport in the middle of the first inning because only one team ever gets to bat.Its Chief Executive illegally sold shares when in possession of privileged information about an impending price crash.
In spite of many investigations on this issue, it has never been shown to be true. Furthermore, if it were true, what would it have to do with a private European Internet? Every country ends up electing bad apples into leadership roles. The beauty of a democracy is not the prevention of electing bad people to office, but the ability to recover from having done so.
ICANN, the body it established to manage DNS, had to be ordered by a court to let one of its own directors examine the company accounts for fear he may discover something untoward
Congress is not pleased with the way ICANN behaves. Congress is the biggest current threat to ICANN.
These are clearly not the people who should be setting the rules for the Net's evolution.
The beauty of the Internet is that no one is really setting the rules. Anyways, who would you trust to set the rules? The French government?
It is time to reclaim the net from the Americans.
Reclaim it from the Americans? Is he aware where the net came from?
Under English law a sex tourist can be prosecuted here even if he has sex with a child in Thailand: surely prosecuting someone for promoting racial hatred on a US-hosted website can't be that different?
The kinds of laws cited by Bill here are few and generally related to things like child porn and molestation. On the other hand, if the laws of all countries apply to the net equally, then it is nearly certain that I am breaking a law every time I do something online. Funny though, that he decries the enforcement of the DMCA on Europeans but then describes a world in which all laws--not just one poorly thought out law--transcend borders.
Once we clear our minds of these erroneous beliefs we can see that the US has no right to determine how the whole Internet is run.
Exactly how is the US dictating how the whole Internet is run? He shows nowhere an example of the US government dictating world Internet use.
Europe is the birthplace of the Web
Where did he craft this illusion?
A trusted network will not stop the Americans - or anyone else - opting out and remaining with their existing unregulated Internet. Just like the survivalists heading out to Oregon with their assault weapons and dried food, those who don't want to be part of the great online civilisation could establish their own enclaves, where they would be free to run the code of their choice
Doesn't he have it wrong? Isn't his network the little survivalist, whacko bunch living outside established civilization?
But inside Europe our values, our principles and our legal system can determine how our part of the Net is run.
What the fuck is European values and principles and legal system? It is painful enough to get Europeans to agree on a freaking currency!
In Europe our copyright laws allow lending of material, and so media players licensed for use within the dataspace would not restrict personal copying or lending, although they would respect other rights.
Using what? A magic DRM fairy that knows when the copying you are doing is an "illegal copying" and when it is a "legal copying"?
Over here, human rights legislation, interpreted by judges who are able to use their intelligence instead of just relying on textual analysis of the Bill of Rights, gives us a much better chance of tying online action to the real world and integrating cyberspace with real space in way that benefits both.
In other words, Bill is saying that the whims of a couple of old French guys is worth more than a long-established, written law.
american's don't deserve to be thought of in such a manner. AND CANADA DOES!?
If you are going to say something at least don't take it back when you realize that your name is attached to it.
Disclaimer: I did not write this either.
What we need to do is build a second Internet. Then make it against the usage agreements for poloticians or lawyers to use/monitor/legistlate.
Then just make sure we cut them off the second we find them and peg them for violating the usage agreement.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
The writer doesn't want are US values yet he wants a highly regulated internet that the US goverment has been trying to put into place, unsuccessfully, he seems to think that the goverment adheres to libertarian values (?!?!?) when it's us (hackers) that are in cyberspace (and alot of them are in his own country) that are trying to get the death grip of big business and the regulatory goverment hands off to allow true freedom. And he attributes that to US values (again, ?!?!?).
What's funny he's yelling at a Congressman, who would love to regulate the hell out of the internet btw, and he's yelling about the DMCA but he seems to be in favor with both those actions.
Weird, this guys probably a little schizo, and probably drinks too much coffee. Or possibly he's in cahoots with the UK way of thinking. Considering, the want to do exactly what he wants them to do which is regulate and censor. Because regulation and censorship seem to always go hand in hand.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
Ameropollution, Ameroglobalwarming, Amerocorps, (especially Amero$oft and AmeroDonalds), Ameroguns, Amerogluttony... All in all they're sick of Amerocrap.
Obviously you have no idea as to why the American Revolution was fought. It was fought over money. Wealthy colonial landowners were sick of being taxed by powers that they had grown to consider foreign. So they fought to gain self-governance.
This is not terrorism.
Terrorism is concerned with striking fear in to the heart of ordinary people. American Revolutionaries didn't give a rat's ass about ordinary British soldiers. They also didn't hide their demands, but presented them as the Declaration of Independance. They established official foreign contact with other nations to establish their legitimacy. These things were done out in the open with the very clear intention to establish their own government separate from the British crown. They didn't want to frighten the British in to submission, they simply wanted the British to leave them alone.
While the term terrorist had been overused, the American Revolutionaries didn't fit any accurate definition of the word.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Yeah, that's right, Brown - hand control of the Internet to your politicians. Then everything will be perfectly fine.
Moron.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Darn those Americans, always acting as if they invented the darn Internet...oh wait.
Jack
Funny. As an American I use the Internet to obtain information/news/content about/from Europe and The Rest of the World (strictly English speaking of course considering I wasted ~7 years taking Latin "ego stipidus" ;) As I see it from this perspective there is a lot of good things out there to read from Everywhere. When it comes down to it, its about the content of the sites on the Internet. If you do not like what you see, you may have to start creating your own content, not isolating yourself in defiance. If the concern instead is over who allows what content is connected to the Net, an Americanistic Open-Market Internet is probably the safer bet for ensuring the freedom of the Net's content, not setting up some Council of Elders who dedide what content is allowed.
We don't like it, so we are taking our ball and going home.
Seriously folks, There are massive issues with the jurasdiction purpose, but lets look at some of the judgements that Europeans are forcing on american people and companies:
- Yahoo/eBay crud.
Can you imagine the outcry if an american court forced a european court not to sell something completly in line with european law (never mind the horrible precident to forbid works of history).
- American's paying VAT taxes
Americans end up paying taxes on goods in Europe, even when we don't put taxes on their goods.
The author also labours under the fallacy of a single american culture. I, as an american, take that as a insult. I despise hollywood, am anti-death penalty, but anti-abortion.
In closing I have no worry about them taking their ball and going home. The Internet works beause it is a global best behavoir net. The side effect of a closed net is to shut themselves off too.
Was there any need for that? Is it even true? Last I checked, European economies were looking a whole lot sounder than the US, European military forces were doing their fair share around the world (unless you count threats to remove foreign leaders because you happen not to like them, but even so, there's still enough firepower in Europe to level the planet several times over) and European trade with other worldwide countries is at least as strong as anything the US does.
European governments do not throw their weight around the way the current US administration does. This is a good thing. But don't make the mistake of assuming that because European countries, singly, don't do certain things, Europe as a whole is any less capable of doing them if it wants to.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yet another hate-America-first'er shooting from the hip, apparently. Thing is, would anyone use a Euro-net? I doubt it...as much as the elitists might hate the fact, America is where it's at, and the masses have decided. This schmoe probably wants to segregate Europe from Hollywood and CNN, etc.
Um, yup.
And we don't put apostrophes in "Americans" either, you filthy canadian!
I have posted fair usage quotes from your interesting and thought-provoking article along with a link to The Register URL where the original article was posted in an appropriate forum.
The forum I chose is called psychoceramics. It's an international forum of the sort you would like to make disappear for the discussion and appreciation of crackpots.
You deserve the opportunity to take your place among the notable net.kooks of our time and I'm glad I could give it to you. Very few manage to make the transition from complete obscurity to immediately joining the ranks of men like Archimedes Plutonium with a single article, but you deserve this recognition and I will be happy to see you get it. It's unfortunate that Monty Python's Flying Circus isn't still being produced, as it would be the ideal venue to present your interesting ideas visually to a mass audience with all the seriousness that they deserve.
I look forward to seeing your encore performance, though I can not begin to imagine how you will be able to top this. Do try, though.
A.Lizard
p.s. any laughter you heard in response to your article from The Register itself was *at* you, not with you. I am certain that your article was published solely for its entertainment value.
Bravo!
Tech Public Policy stuff
... and nobody came.
bomb europe
He's absolutely wrong in everything he says. There's not much else to say about it. Let's all try to ignore it as it will never be even discussed seriously.
Either way what I see in some of the comments posted here is plain and simple american nationalism. If you're against a uk guy that is a nationalist and a true us-suck-ass-fan-boy please stop being such eu-suck-ass-fan-boys! After all you're just being what you're criticizing!!
oh the humanity...
-- Would it be acceptable to just put my name on my sig?
... emotocents, and when the wogs or Russkis come to eat them, just turn on the garbage disposal ...
I wish you guys would be consistant. Seems like half the times you people are complaining that we do not do enough, but then you turn around and say that we are doing too much. We are pretty much in a damned if we do, damned if we dont situation. A good example is the Israel situation. We get slammed for a while for not doing anything, but then you turn around and then say that our handling of the situation is biased (excuse us for not supporting terrorists like Arafat). If you thought we were so biased, why did practically beg for us to get involved?
Small wonder many Americans react by ignoring you.
Is there anyone left in Europe with a functioning brain cell?
Let them do it! I would LOVE to see a successful alternate DNS system!!!
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
your 9/11 event was hilarious good fun don't you think?
There are two reasons for America's influence on the internet:
1. We invented it.
2. There are more users in the US than any other country.
George III was a he.
And a tyrant.
By Bill Thompson
Posted: 09/08/2002 at 14:01 GMT
Guest Opinion I've had enough of US hegemony. It's time for change -and a closed European network.
Today's Internet is a poor respecter of national boundaries, as many repressive governments have found to their cost. Unfortunately this freedom has been so extensively abused by the United States and its politicians, lawyers and programmers that it has become a serious threat to the continued survival of the network as a global communications medium. If the price of being online is to swallow US values, then many may think twice about using the Net at all, and if the only game online follows US rules, then many may decide not to play.
Go ahead and think twice about using the internet, even think about it three times, if you like. I don't think I would even mind all that much if you don't "decide to play."
We have already seen US law, in the form of Digital Millennium Copyright Act, used to persuade hosts in other countries to pull material or limit its availability. US-promoted 'anti-censor' software is routinely provided to enable citizens of other countries to break local laws; and US companies like Yahoo! disregard the judgements of foreign courts at will.
Instead of complaining about the DCMA, why don't you complain about the EUCD, the European Union Copyright Directive, the equivalent EU legislation to the DMCA? Do you believe that it won't be used to persuade hosts in other countries to pull material or limit its availability? And as for the anti-censor software, heaven forbid if a few Chinese are actually able to read the BBC News, in violation of their local laws. You are right, that is a terrible thing.
Congressman Howard Berman's ridiculous proposal to give copyright holders immunity from prosecution if they hack into P2P networks is the latest attempt by the US Congress to pass laws that will directly affect every Internet user, because no US court would allow prosecution of a company in another jurisdiction when immunity is granted by US law.
This isn't law yet, and probably will never get passed, but even if it did, I am sure this power would only be used on machines within the U.S., since those activities would be illegal in those countries.
Unless we can take back the Net from the libertarians, constitutional lawyers and rapacious corporations currently recreating the worst excesses of US political and commercial culture online, we will end up with an Internet which serves the imperial ambitions of only one country instead of the legitimate aspirations of the whole world.
Rapacious corporations? Don't you think that is a slight over-statement of the situation? How would a whole corporation actually rape you anyway, some sort of giant cluster-fuck?
While this would greatly please the US, it would not be in the interests of the majority of Internet users, who want a network that allows them to express their own values, respects their own laws and supports their own cultures and interests.
US domination has been going on for so long that many see it as either inevitable or desirable. 'They may have their problems but at least they believe in democracy, free speech and the market economy', the argument goes. Yet today's United States is a country which respects freedom so much that if I, a European citizen, set foot there I can be interned without any notice or due process, tried by a military tribunal and executed in secret.
Yes, that is our standard operating procedure for handling all European tourists. First, you get to see the Statue of Liberty. Second, you get to go to Disney World. Third, you are interned without any notice or due process, tried by a military tribunal and executed in secret. It is a very popular bundle deal, available from any good travel agent.
It has a government which respects free speech yet tries to persuade postal workers to spy on people as they delivered their mail. Its Chief Executive illegally sold shares when in possession of privileged information about an impending price crash. ICANN, the body it established to manage DNS, had to be ordered by a court to let one of its own directors examine the company accounts for fear he may discover something untoward. And elected representatives -like the aforementioned Howard Berman -are paid vast amounts by firms lobbying for laws which serve their corporate interests.
Heads are rolling from all of the stock market mess, and I am sure many more will. What you accuse Bush of doing, if it is true, will most certianly bring him down. As for ICANN, they were ordered to release the records. If they weren't, then there would be a problem.
These are clearly not the people who should be setting the rules for the Net's evolution. Unfortunately today's Internet, with its permissive architecture and lack of effective boundaries or user authentication, makes it almost impossible to resist this technological imperialism.
Who trusts you, baby?
Fortunately the technology itself - in the form of trusted computer architectures, secure networks and digital rights management - can be used to rescue the Net from US control.
These developments, reviled and criticised by those inside and outside the continental United States who hold on to an outdated and unrealistic view of what the Net was or could become, are the key to its future growth and usefulness. Whatever the libertarians say, they must be defended, promoted - and properly controlled.
You were just complaining about the DMCA, but now you are in support of digital rights management? That is rather contradictory. Something you seem to fail to realize about libertarians is that, above all, the seek personal liberty, hence their name. A popular quote for libertarians that sums up nearly all of their beliefs is "better to die a free man than to live a slave." They will never be "properly controlled".
I believe that the time has come to speak out in favour of a regulated network; an Internet where each country can set its own rules for how its citizens, companies, courts and government work with and manage those parts of the network that fall within its jurisdiction; an Internet that reflects the diversity of the world's legal, moral and cultural choices instead of simply propagating US hegemony; an Internet that is subject to political control instead of being an uncontrolled experiment in radical capitalism. It is time to reclaim the net from the Americans.
For you to reclaim something, you need to have had a claim on it to begin with. The American claim to the Internet (it was developed by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Administration, originally for the U.S. Department of Defense) is tenous at best, but the European claim is non-existant.
This will not be easy. In order to do this we have to reject two beliefs that underpin our current understanding of the Net, and these beliefs, although wrong, are dear to many.
The first is the idea that the Internet is somehow outside or above the real world and its national boundaries. If I phone someone in Nigeria and suggest a money-laundering fraud then it is obvious to all that I am breaking the law in two countries, not in 'phonespace'. Nobody has ever suggested that the content of the telephone network -all those voice calls -should be somehow privileged and treated as outside the normal world.
Why, then, do we act as if our interactions with screen, mouse and keyboard are different? If I send an email suggesting that I am in possession of $50m and will hand it over in return for your bank details, why can't it just be that I also am breaking the law in two countries, not in some mythical 'cyberspace' with its own legal system?
If you were to do this, even via e-mail, you would be breaking the law in two countries, and if that e-mail message were found, you would be convicted, regardless of the message being e-mail. Where did you get the idea that you wouldn't?
Losing the idea of 'cyberspace' simplifies things greatly.
Quite correct, losing ideas, in general, simplifies things greatly.
The other thing we need to lose is the ridiculous belief that when we are online we are somehow in 'another place' outside the real world. We need to reject the philosophical bullshit which argues that there is an equivalence between being simultaneously a 'citizen' of Maine and of the United States and our co-existence in the real world and the online world *, and accept instead the mundane reality that nobody has any real form of existence online - either now or in the foreseeable future.
How is this idea any different from the first? Idea 1: the Internet is somehow outside or above the real world and its national boundaries. Idea 2: that when we are online we are somehow in 'another place' outside the real world. They sound like the same idea to me.
This makes our discussion a lot simpler because we no longer have to grapple with the idea of having two forms of existence - the one that involves breathing, pissing and fucking and the one that involves typing. We don't have to stretch our legal or constitutional thinking to cope with the apparent contradiction of being in 'two places' with different standards of behaviour at the same time.
We can also deal with the problems of jurisdiction for online activity in the same way as we deal with it elsewhere: in the UK we're perfectly happy to prosecute someone for war crimes committed fifty years ago in another country, so why are there problems if the crime involved the Internet? Under English law a sex tourist can be prosecuted here even if he has sex with a child in Thailand: surely prosecuting someone for promoting racial hatred on a US-hosted website can't be that different?
You were complaining about the possibility of being tried and convicted in the U.S., for committing a capital offense (one great enough to warrant the death penalty), yet you think Americans should be tried and convicted in England for presenting a dissenting viewpoint in a public venue?
This is not to claim that these issues are all simple, resolvable and determinate, just to point out that we already have legal systems - admittedly imperfect - in place that can deal with them mostly adequately, most of the time. In general the few exceptions are not allowed to be used as arguments for making bad law. We must not allow the Net to be the biggest exception, creating the worst law of all.
Brave Old World
This is hard for many old-time Net users to accept, because we like the idea that being online takes us into a new space, a new world. But it is simply not the case: we are not creating a brave new online world out of our electrons and pixels. It is all one world - the only difference is that we currently lack the ability to map our online activity onto our real-world lives with any degree of certainty. The result is that cyberspace appears somehow to be divorced from the physical world - but this is just an artifact of our current technologies and not a fundamental principle.
Actually, the program Xtraceroute can show where a computer is physically (in 3D), and show the route your data is taking to get there, rather easily.
Once we clear our minds of these erroneous beliefs we can see that the US has no right to determine how the whole Internet is run. Each country should decide for itself. All we need to do is to mark out the network, using trusted computers and secure networks to locate servers, hosts, networks and people within geographically-defined areas - or nation states as they are usually known - and let the countries get on with it. We can establish the rule of law, national sovereignty and local values in those parts of the network that fall within the jurisdiction of a particular country, and let normal diplomatic, cultural and commercial channels deal with the interaction between countries.
This would not stop the US treating its Constitution as the only true source of wisdom or framing their discussions in terms that draw only from the US political and economic tradition. But if they decide to run their part of the Net according to the principles laid down two hundred and fifty years ago by a bunch of renegade merchants and rebellious slave owners they would not be able to force the rest of us to follow suit.
My ancestor at the time was both a renegade merchant and a rebellious slave owner, not just one or the other. I guess he was something of an over-achiever.
If they want a First Amendment online, or to let some gun-toting nut argue that writing viruses is the online equivalent of carrying a concealed weapon and so counts as a constitutionally protected right then they can go ahead - the rest of us can do things differently. ('Viruses don't trash hard drives - people trash hard drives.')
Why don't you just use an operating system that doesn't get viruses? I personally recommend FreeBSD. Oh, and that reminds me, I need to clean my rifle.
A cyberspace in which each machine is 'within' a jurisdiction and where actions can be mapped onto physical space will be very different from today's Internet.
In the mapped network we will not have the absolute freedom of speech which cyberlibertarians claim they want, but neither will we get absolute oppression, absolute free market capitalism or even absolute communism. We will instead get compromise, and regional or national variation, just as in the real world.
Heaven forbid an internet with absolute free speech. It is a good thing you came up with a solution to that problem.
Many will see this as a loss of freedom, but the freedom they value so much is also the freedom to act irresponsibly, to undermine civil authorities and to escape liability. It is the freedom to release viruses, abuse personal data, send unlimited spam and undermine the copyright bargain. It is not a freedom we need.
It is easy to see why this approach will be resisted by US activists, of whatever political persuasion, who see the 'one world, one cyberspace' approach as a convenient way to establish an online constitutional hegemony. It will also be resisted by many of those who see any attempt to create trusted software running on secure processors as the network equivalent of the arrival of the black helicopters from the UN World Government Army.
However their position is untenable, because the vast majority of Internet users need and want a secure network where they can use email, look at Websites, shop, watch movies and chat to friends, and they are happy to accept that this is a regulated space just as most areas of life are.
To quote one of those renegade merchants and rebellious slave owners, Ben Franklin, "He who gives up a little liberty in order to gain security, deserves neither liberty nor security." Do you actually think that your ability to shop online is more important than my freedom of speech?
Even if we don't act we will still get a regulated network, because the commercial interests which dominate the US know that it is a prerequisite for a digital economy. However the shape of that network will be entirely determined by US interests, just like today. It is therefore vital that a different approach to the development of the Internet is proposed -and I believe that Europe is the place for it to start.
Bring it back
Europe is the birthplace of the Web, with a wealthy, technically literate population, a network infrastructure that rivals that of the US and a rich cultural and political tradition which can counter US constitutional imperialism.
The U.S. is not under constitutional imperialism, that would require an emperor supported by a constitution, similar to England's constitutional monarchy. However, we dislike monarchs greatly.
An important factor in Europe's favour is that we retain a belief that governments are a good thing, that political control is both necessary and desirable, and that laws serve the people. These beliefs are now lacking in the United States, rendering it incapable of acting to create any sort of civic space online or allowing its government to intervene effectively to regulate the Net.
Does this mean that the broad control of the Internet by the U.S. government that you were talking about earlier will never happen, since we would hang our Senators before even half of it was put in force?
The recently-agreed .eu ccTLD could be a rallying point for a serious attempt to extend the EU online, adopting new standards for trusted computing, regulating their use within EU countries and establishing a European dataspace which would grow over time to become a major node in the emerging trusted network that will replace today's Internet.
It will take political will and technological skill to do this, and it will not be achievable overnight. But if we are to escape a world where corporations build systems which are only capable of supporting US-style online government, or where trusted software is a trojan horse carrying the US constitution into our online life when we neither want nor need it, then we need to act now.
That's right folks, all software written in America secretly contains the entire text of The U.S. Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights. For example, in Microsoft Word you can access this dangerous material by pressing Control-Alt-U, Control-Alt-S, Control-Alt-A.
A trusted network will not stop the Americans - or anyone else - opting out and remaining with their existing unregulated Internet. Just like the survivalists heading out to Oregon with their assault weapons and dried food, those who don't want to be part of the great online civilisation could establish their own enclaves, where they would be free to run the code of their choice.
Do you mean like an isolated enclave from the "great internet civilization" for all of Europe with methods in place to avoid pesky freedoms like freedom of speech?
But inside Europe our values, our principles and our legal system can determine how our part of the Net is run. Personal data would be protected by law, and those who abused the information provided to them by individuals would be prosecuted. Data flows into and out of Europe would be properly regulated and controlled to ensure that neither spam nor viruses came in, and that no personal data went out without explicit consent.
This would, of course, work wonderfully, because there are no spammers or virus-writers in Europe.
In Europe our copyright laws allow lending of material, and so media players licensed for use within the dataspace would not restrict personal copying or lending, although they would respect other rights.
So that you can "lend" American media content to your friends?
In Europe community standards for freedom of speech differ substantially from those of the United States, where any sensible discussion is crippled by the constitution and the continued attempts to decide how many Founding Fathers can stand on the head of a pin.
Yes, standards for freedom of speech do differ substantially in Europe. They apparently seem to be rather lacking. As for Founding Fathers standing on the head of a pin, 27 will fit, exactly.
Over here, human rights legislation, interpreted by judges who are able to use their intelligence instead of just relying on textual analysis of the Bill of Rights, gives us a much better chance of tying online action to the real world and integrating cyberspace with real space in way that benefits both.
In the end, William Gibson was wrong: cyberspace is not another place, it's just part of this space. There is no 'there, there' : in fact, it isn't really there at all. The illusion is, in the end, only an illusion, however consensual it may be. Not only does 'meatspace rule', but 'meatspace rules rule' - the laws and regulations that govern the Net, whether they are legal, social, architectural or code-based, will all come from the real world, where judges, lawyers, programmers, politicians and - in some way -citizens get to decide how our online activities and our real world lives mesh and are linked.
The United States is incapable, for the reasons I've described, of understanding this or of escaping its constitutionally-determined destiny to attempt to establish hegemony over cyberspace.
It cannot be allowed to succeed, and so those of us within Europe need to begin to work now to extend our culture onto the Net in all its complex glory. We need to build our borders online and offer our citizens protection within those borders, and escape from America.
If the U.S. is incapable of achieving it, then why does Europe need to go out of it's way to make sure the U.S. doesn't succeed? Is anyone making Europeans go to American wevsites, or do they just provide better content?
* Much as I like Lessig's work, he just goes too far here. I blame law school. Being a Cambridge philosopher manqué I tend to have a more brutal constructivist approach to this sort of thing.
I am sure Cambridge is real glad that you are serving as an example of what they will let graduate.
© Bill Thompson.
Should that copyright be viable outside of Europe? Can I "lend" your work to others in the U.S.?
Best Slashdot comment ever
nt
He can call his net the "Utopian WWW". And once he begins to build it, we can watch it all go down in flames once they realize they really can't agree on what should and shouldn't be censored. The only thing they agreed on was opposing the US system. How many times must people attempt to create utopian systems before they realize that no two people can agree on it's structure?
I can just see it now: they build their own net, and within no time, they're all compaining about the Germans imposing their beliefs on the French. Or the numerous English imposing their laws on the Belgians. Then, the EU net will break down into national-nets. But, even those will be controversial as different elements within the nation vie for control.
whatta crap...
-JAPAN: ol yor beys ar bilong tu as! -AH!
Your sig needs a
to make any sense.
I can understand the author's sentiment. It is not hatred of the USA, as most blue eyed Americans think. It is the fact that the USA is acting in an increasingly totalitarian manner and unilateraly towards the rest of the world irrespective of what happens inside the USA. The USA gets bad press, not because of envy as so many think, but because it is so self absorbed at the cost of the rest of the world.
I personally don't want to be ruled by corrupt American politicians. My own corrupt politicians are more than enough thank you.
The thing you have to recognise here is
1. It was a slow news week
2. The reg needed to publish anything and so wrote their own flame of the week.
3. It was a slow news week.
Sadly Slashdot propogated the troll.
This article would have been a lot more persuasive minus the name calling. At first his ideas were readable but about 1/2 way through it got so that all he was doing was "flaming" the US about the last 250 years of our existance. He ruined his entire article.
Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. Yes is the answer.
Umm while reading the Euro bashing quotes and the American bashing quotes is a lot of fun for someone who is neither, shouldn't we be focusing on the more important issues? Like dealing with those organisations on both sides of the atlantic who would much rather legislate away our rights.
And they wonder why the IT community is so divided.
sarcastic quotations 80s style
random capitalisation
punctuation on the U.S.
but hey don't fret, you actually managed to whore some karma on that troll.
They are jealous of our freedoms. Our democracy. We a are one nation UNDER GOD. They resent our freedom of speech, our inalienable rights. I propose we never allow another article from this Unamerican Website. Freedom has been attacked, and Freedom will defend itself. Fredom of Speech must triumph! DE-REGISTER THE REGISTER!
It is consistent. If an Internet for Europeans is made, The Register for Americans is created.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Was by far the most telling.