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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"
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.
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
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).
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
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.
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.
Granted, the historical strength of the internet has always been bringing people together over distance based on common interests or motives (Slashdot, girlskissing.co.uk and eBay are all excellent examples). Just because it's been that way, however, doesn't mean that it's the only practical use.
What I find interesting is that the author suggests keeping the rest of the world out, as opposed to keeping the rest of the world from getting in (which is what China and a few others have been up to) on a scale that's unprescidented. Technically, I'm sure it's possible to accomplish this, but I'm still uncertain as to the practicality or the wisdom of doing so.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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!
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.
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!
Not to be pro-American or anti-American, but from what I've seen in the news, America hasn't been the major force in overstepping national boundaries or even enforcing national laws on the Internet at-large. France forced Yahoo! to remove questionable content, right? I thought Italy or the Vatican was doing something to that effect ... oh, that was taking down the site of someone who lived in Italy but was hosted in the US, never mind. Australia seems to be hell bent on restrictions, as well (not that they're in Europe ... just offering that up as well).
And who was it that forced eBay to remove certain items? France again? I might be getting mixed up a bit, but by and large, it seems that other countries are enforcing their laws, which in some instances are more restrictive, onto American soil.
You're probably going to get modded down selectspec, but you gave me a laugh, intended or not. Thanks.
.
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
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.
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
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!
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
Fact: in 1900, if you wanted to see the President, an appointment was nice, but not necessary.
Yesterday, I heard on NPR that the Secret Service is closing more streets around the White House for "security reasons." I had one thought: "Yep, here we go, building our own Forbidden City."
Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying, "but we were born free." There has been much debate of late on his site about the current situation in the U.S., most of it revolving around the "Republic vs. Empire" issue. The U.S. may have been born a Republic, but the 20th century taught us that our security can't depend on two oceans. Unfortunately, if the oceans couldn't protect us, the next option was to expand our influence overseas so the fight would remain away from home.
11 September showed us we can't keep the fight from here without extreme measures. Personally, I don't think the "extreme measures" are worth the cost of personal liberty, but hey, I'm just a poor seminary student and computer geek.
I will say this, though; the EU may create their own Internet, but before long, the same forces wreaking havoc here - bureaucracy and corporatism - will wreak havoc there. Like it or not, we're all connected now, and the havoc is becoming increasingly difficult to isolate.
JA
http://www.johnalex.org/
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.
"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
Automobiles, internet and space travel have little or nothing to do with the value of free expression, freedom of religion or of the press. These are fairly fundemental concepts which, so far, survive the passing decades. Why? Because they're the tools with which we as American citizens secure our right to freedom and self-determination.
The fact that many Americans are willing to allow these rights to be infringed only shows that we've begun taking them for granted. The fact that *you* and others like you believe that the world is somehow so different that people, say, don't deserve open trials (because if they weren't guilty, they wouldn't have been arrested, right?) is the bit we need to work on.
To paraphrase: Beware he who would deny you your basic rights to information and expression, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
...would be inpenetrable, thanks to a heavily fortified firewall that spans the length of eastern France, dubbed the "Maginot Firewall".
--- What
" The USA of 1776 is not the USA of 2002 in any form whatsoever."
And that is a very good things. In the 18th century, the US was actively participating in the genocide of native americans. And, of course, there was legalized slavery. I'd say, the US has come a long way toward putting into practice the virtues laid out in the constitution.
Check out my podcast: DreamStation.cc Video Game Show
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.
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.
Hold on there. Don't inject any sense here.
The opposite of progress is congress
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.
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
no. It was designed to allow U.S. universities and U.S. government agencies to communicate between themselves and each other.
however,It was designed to scale. Al Gore was on (head of?) the commitee that signed off on making it public.
That was a great day. The moment the first person decided to make money from it was a horrible day.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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.
Of course, those same laws also protect code licensed under the GPL from abuse. I'm with Linus here: if you write the code, you should decide on its license.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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
we do, it's called the Internet (nee ARPAnet)
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
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
Only a small percentage remember the days when there wasn't a single corporate interest on the web
I do.
It was pure, unfettered information.
With huge, gaping blanks because the entities that had the information weren't online -- whether those entities were corporations with their own information or Joe Blow user who wasn't online because there wasn't anything of interest to him there.
Yes, lets go back to pre-corporate Internet. After all, the Old Days Were Better.
What a load of extremist conservative claptrap.
Want to learn how to program? Pay gobs of money
Funny. I learned Perl almost entirely online. I learned much of C++ the same way. Want someone to hold your hand? Then yeah, you'll need to pay money for that person's time. Get off your ass and it's free. Sweat equity, just like it's always been.
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.
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
"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.
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?
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
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.
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.
What I find interesting is that the author suggests keeping the rest of the world out, as opposed to keeping the rest of the world from getting in
:)
Um. Isn't that the same thing?
Man the financial world is a dark and dismal place, I think I should invest in some land in a nice quiet place and pay some one to farm it for me organically. Every other measure of value has become flaky, but FOOD will always have a market :) Anyone for an organic coop in say New Zealand or Roratango :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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.
Fact: in 1900, if you wanted to see the President, an appointment was nice, but not necessary.
I'd be interested in knowing if this is true--it sounds blatantly false to me. It's not like presidents didn't get busy until this century...
Yesterday, I heard on NPR that the Secret Service is closing more streets around the White House for "security reasons." I had one thought: "Yep, here we go, building our own Forbidden City."
Fact: In the times of more openness, there were no worries about truck bombs that could do such massive damage (mcveigh), suicide bombers, airplane attacks, etc. These are are relatively new things for America. Gone are the days of the lone assassin escaping into the night...
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?
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.
Uh huh. 19th century wasn't much better. And the first half of the 20th century was messed up too. If we want to talk about the land of the free, we only really get to talk about the last 50 years or less.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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)
I am a student of history (I study on my own time, college has to wait, atm). I studied the Roman Republic and Empire, and the conversion from one entity to another. I had always thought that the conversion of the US Republic to the US Empire would be via the economy. He who has the gold makes the rules, right?
But you get me thinking here. Perhaps our evolution has been retarded by the progression of technology. Or hastened. Not sure which way. I mean, if we didn't have technology, we'd still be isolated, right? Else, if we didn't have technology, wouldn't we be less likely to have face to face meetings with the world leaders as we do?
I agree that the US is moving to a police state. We fear that cop car behind us, and I know I worry that I have done something horrible every time I pass one and the car pulls out in my direction. That is no way to live. They are here to protect us, not rule us, aren't they? Yet laws have made us all criminals.
So first we secure our peoples and subjugate them. Then we expand our military and our borders. What an idea! Then the DMCA could rule others as it does us. And what other road would help that movement? The interent.
I don't want to go backwards, but sometimes I wonder if this technology that we use doesn't hinder us as a species more than it helps.
Damn...
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
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.
"Pardon me, I know that most Americans are a bunch of arsemunches...."
If somebody can believe a stereotype can be applied to 250 million people, I can't imagine that person'd get much use out of a global internet.
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
What color is the sky on your planet? It's a funny world you live in where people aren't allowed to declare their religion publicly, and the US has a state religion of atheism, and that atheism is even a religion in the first place. Meanwhile the rest of us will be here on earth.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The U.S.A. of 1776 was a heaping lot of terrorists.
They were BRITISH CITIZENS and they took up arms and killed HER MAJESTY'S soliders.
What a fucking lot of hypocrites you all are now. Fighting a "war on terrorism" when your entire country was FOUNDED on acts of terrorism.
As such, you have indeed had a lot of influence on the Net, but only succeeded in freeing it from the direct control of governments, turning it right over to the direct control of commercial interests.
In some situations a person using the Internet may literally have their words and ideas cosigned over to the ownership of a commercial interest that lays claim to rights over the IP- there have been various scares over Microsoft, or Yahoo doing this- in others, control of protocols like HTTP are in practice wholly in the control of a company like Microsoft who leverage other properties to gain that control. That is authority, some of you guys just don't see that because they're not a government. You see it as a matter of choice, but in a practical sense it is not.
Currently, we're seeing Microsoft make determined moves towards seizing authority over the entire internet by way of .NET, DRM, Passport, the various technologies that would let them create a situation in which the 'choice' is to be subject to them, or not use the Net at all.
I know many of you Libertarians would object strongly if Microsoft used government to lock down this situation- for instance, banning non-DRM computer systems from accessing the Net.
Are you going to figure out that in this case Microsoft is as much an authority as any government, even in the absence of such legislation, and their 'barrel of a gun' is their ability to set the terms of participation? By that I mean- given that there is no government mandate for Microsoft, given that Microsoft controls 50% of all computers under their rules, and the remaining 50% of the Internet is hobbyists running old school TCP/IP and prevented by Microsoft's rules from interacting with the Microsoft net- do you view such a situation as a free market, or as a form of effective authority equivalent to government? What if it's 90% and 10%? 99% and 1%? 99.99% and .01%? At what point do you concede that although Microsoft are not legally allowed to directly point guns at people (they need BSA and federal marshals for that), they nevertheless wield force?
... 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...
Try quoting a document that has some legal bearing on the USA. The Declaration doesn't, the Constitution does.
I don't know what you mean by "stop someone from publicly declaring their religion" - the government doesn't do that, nor did it "strike the word god". Perhaps you could explain what you mean?
Or maybe you're just one of these reactionary lunatics who doesn't care much for accuracy or evidence.
XML causes global warming.
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.
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!
Wasn't the Worldwide Web invented in Switzerland? Most americans think the www IS the internet anyways... LOL
"Fact: in 1900, if you wanted to see the President, an appointment was nice, but not necessary."
Fact: In 1901 the president was assassinated by an anarchist.
Any relation? You be the judge.
Cordless telephones, wireless devices, etc. In Europe basically all devices have become wireless, including my weather station, cordless telephone, cell phone, headphones for my speakers, etc.
Your rebuttal may be, but we can get those here too. Well yes, but most of those things have to be the most butt ugly devices I have ever seen. EG wireless home telephones in Europe are small, use standard batteries, are encrypted by default and can have multiple phones per base station from different manufacturers. What was my solution? I buy all my household devices that are wireless in Europe. BTW they are not legal in North America because the bands that they use have been not been legislated.
DVD players in North America are mostly region one only. Outside of Region 1 most DVD players do not even check, they just play any ol DVD.
Cars from Europe cannot easily be imported into the US and Canada unless they are made for that market. However, North American cars can be imported into Europe. Why can they not be imported into the US? Because they are not North American made. I know because I had to import a car. Why did it work? Because the car was a Jeep which was made in the US. The borders use the argument safety, but that is bull since there are only a couple of small changes that need to be made. How do people import grey market cars? They scam and lie!
Sure these things are not entirely related to the net, but the free flow of information and conditions are starting change as stated in the original article.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
It's almost like the correct way to go is to emulate the intents of early American government- everything becomes balanced against everything else, and the thing is to maintain the balance. If something succeeds hugely, you hook it up to gears and wheels, tax it heavily, whatever, not so much to punish it as to use its success to float everybody's boat and to maintain the balance. If something is struggling, not like 'cheating and being crap' but just, like Linux, being a very small player, you tilt things in its favor, not so much to reward it for being a loser as to maintain the balance, set it up to remain a player rather than be run over by larger players as a matter of course.
So maybe you don't have absolute freedom to live in Hollywood- if that's such a ritzy place maybe it should cost the earth to live there- but at the same time, maybe you should have absolute freedom to live in Noplace, Kansas even if you don't have money or anything. You don't get a posh standard of living, but you're allowed a few bucks that you get to put back into the economy by buying things like food, and maybe you'll end up producing something worthwhile during your life. If not, well, on a government scale your whole life was cheaper than most defense contracts for the military, so it's not like you were expensive to feed: you're a gamble that society will benefit in some way from letting you live in spite of your seeming uselessness. You're NOT offered a mansion in Hollywood, mind you- that would be silly.
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.
"Fact: in 1900, if you wanted to see the President, an appointment was nice, but not necessary."
:)
Actually, my last post reminded me: Bush has to worry about Tecumseh's Curse. Since 1840 the only president that's escaped that one is Reagan, and only barely at that. Can you blame him for being worried?
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.
No, extraordinary claims simply require extraordinary proof. Personally, I'm a humanist. See, I can see and touch them. Most people without tinfoil hats and straightjackets agree that they exist. No faith required. Oh, and by the way, a lot of the founding fathers weren't "christians" in any fundamentalist sense, they were humanists or deists. They were trying to solve problems themselves, not theorizing about what God could do. Atheism is not a religion. It is simply the lack of belief in a "supreme being", whether that be the Christian god, Buddha, or those wacky little green men hiding their UFO behind a comet.
nuff sed
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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.
Hence the concept of slavery has evolved. Businesses that were told, NO MORE SLAVES founded sweatshops to leagally have slaves.
Coal mines had general stores.
To Compare the concept of the powerful enslaving the powerless is still just. Physical comparasion which I did point out is not the concept being discussed, is a different concept, I agree.
- Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
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.
You are not prevented from declaring your religion publically (as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell prove every day of the week.) You are even allowed to declare it on public property. By all means, say the Oath of Allegience with the words added during the 50s, in a classroom. However, do not, using the facilities and badges of the state, attempt to coerce others into doing so. Do not use your position as a government employee to put a child in a position where they feel obliged to either lie or make an entirely unnecessary ideological stand; do not place that child in a position where they are made to believe that the state blesses a particular set of beliefs.
It's not unreasonable, and it certainly the non-promotion of Christianity is not the same thing as the promotion of atheism.
And if the Oath is ever changed to "One Nation, Standing alone because it cannot rely on a god to protect it, as gods do not exist, indivisible", with children across the country encouraged to repeat it, by state employed teachers, you can start complaining that the state religion is atheistic. But not before.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Really? The US invented the Internet? Without any help from anyone else?
Ha ha ha.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Now that was funny.
Wanting a communications system between a dozen countries that's not subject to the whims of one foreign administration with a penchant for throwing its weight around is "isolationist"? "Smart" is the term I'd use.
And Iraq probably has better things to do than sending missiles at us. After all, we're not the ones actively planning a campaign to destroy their country because our senior politician needs to finish his daddy's work.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
what part of the statement is untrue...Many of the Europian governments are noticeably more socialistic....Not a complaint just an obervation.
If that has any impact on the EU's overall economic weight I don't know but I am confused by your reference and direction ? perhaps you'd like to splain some more ?
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
true but a massive customer base swings a great deal of weight in itself. It may well fall apart, the EU is bigger and more complex I think than the US ever thought to be...More history of diversity I think but we can only wait and see.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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
Interesting: the model you originally proposed sounded to me like an excellent one, but what you propose above strikes me as much more prone to abuse. I'm all in favor of taxing people and corporations a level heavy enough to attain important civic goals (a level from which the US is rapidly slipping), but actively "tilting the playing field" is pretty heavy-handed. The important question that the anti-government nuts in this country raise is: if we're going to tilt, who decides the terms of tilting, and why do we believe that they're fit to tilt? Of course in the US we have elevated this valid doubt to dogma and as such traded in our sense of civics for political nihilism.
I couldn't agree more that the stability of a rich country like the US depends on keeping the losers from upsetting the applecart, but the problem is, if you make start making heavy-handed laws to this end, the winners will upset the applecart and rewrite the law to take the spoils, which is much worse. So you have the continuing balancing act of keep the winners happy enough to stay on their yachts while still providing enough bread for the losers to keep them happy.
The original poster responded by noting that a lot of current political economic climate in the US is a result of rampaging deregulation of industry by a generation of businessmen that has forgotten what industry run amok looks like from the outside. to remember what But the effect of Reagan's overderegulation may be yet be good - just as some Americans are starting to remember that you can't cut taxes forever and keep the services that keep contents from turning into malcontents.
Governance is like raising kids - a country, a market needs a light but firm touch. The light touch is hard enough when it's just two kids, let alone when there's millions of em, and they're restless, cranky, rich, and smart.
It's not even 'takes money to make money', it gets to the basics of what makes a person go- our captains of industry are, in many cases, very intense, driven people and they do NOT NEED additional tax breaks in order to keep them interested. These are not the kind of people to let obstacles or adversity stand in their way. Some of them are dogged Randish individualists, others are more socially aware while personally still being incredibly hard workers. These aren't yacht people, they are 100-hour-a-week people who haven't seen the yacht in years- too busy. How often does Bill Gates take vacations?
Don't worry about keeping the winners happy- tax 'em and put the load on them, they'll carry it better than any number of losers. They're fighters, almost by definition- of course they're gonna squawk, it's their nature. But it's like the adage, if you want to get something done, ask a busy person- if you want to finance a society, hit up the rich people, good and hard. They'll cope! And on the whole they didn't get to be that way by getting coddled and supported. If you have a situation where your rich classes need to be coddled and supported by government, you're in big trouble. If you're pulling a cart, do you use an ox, or a shitload of chickens?
It's not even 'takes money to make money', it gets to the basics of what makes a person go- our captains of industry are, in many cases, very intense, driven people and they do NOT NEED additional tax breaks in order to keep them interested.
You've got a very good point here, and this certainly something worth capitalizing on.
But it's like the adage, if you want to get something done, ask a busy person- if you want to finance a society, hit up the rich people, good and hard. They'll cope!
Here I'm a bit more cautious. If you hit too hard, or make feel nickeled and dimed or browbeaten, they'll reincorporate in Bermuda, and that's bad news all around. Capital flight is all over Latin America, and there's no reason why it couldn't happen in the States or Europe.
To me its about reinstilling that sense that people have to take care of their fellow man, cause the alternative is to live behind huge walls in a world where most people aren't taken care of - not much fun. That costs money it's going to be carried out by a government that will not always do things in the most sensible way because it's being nipped in the heels by barking chihuahuas.
So here's the $64 trillion question: how do you get people back on board?
I stand corrected. I'm agnostic, not an atheist, and I should have caught that. You're thinking about what you're responding to, and words get caught in your head even if they're not quite right.
If I'd have been working for the government at the time, I'd certainly have been terrified. And certainly there's a difference between killing soldiers and deliberately maiming civilian government employees.
Not that this is comparable to the unprovoked murder of 3000 civilians, but I don't think it's safe to say that the 18th century was terrorism free either...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
" The U.S.A. of 1776 was a heaping lot of terrorists.
They were BRITISH CITIZENS and they took up arms and killed HER MAJESTY'S soliders."
A few things:
1.) In the late 18th century, they were his majesty's soldiers. Haven't had that talk with your parents about birds and bees I see...
2.) If you care to notice there were repeated efforts to resolve our disputes with London diplomaticly. For various reasons, those broke down. Thing might have ended differently if we actually had representation in Parliament...
3.) Even after the fighting began (around 1774 IIRC) the Continental Congress was still interested in ending things amicably. It wasn't until 1776 that they finally gave into the extremists and sought independence.
4.) On 4 July 1776 they sat down and and wrote a big fuckin' grocery list of complaints against King George II and the policies of his government. Some of them were a bit extreme, but most of them were not.
5.) Congress and the higher-ups in the Continental Army never sanctioned attacks against civillians. Ever. Though I can't say for sure I wouldn't be surprised if such instances when caught were punished severely (ie. firing squad).
6.) The cause itself had many supporters in Great Britain. To them, George Washington was an English nobleman leading a fight against a German pretender to the throne.
Now if you want to talk about state-sponsored amoral acts, would you be interested in talking about some of the history of the British Raj? How about the Opium War?
Let them do it! I would LOVE to see a successful alternate DNS system!!!
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
As for "state-sponsored amoral acts", how about the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the 50s? (I think it was the 50s, anyway.) That was America creating a guerilla army to invade Cuba... which, as it happened, failed dismally. But what gave them the right to do that? Yes, Castro had overthrown the previous regime in Cuba, and seized all foreign-owned property... but if the US was going to do something about that, an actual invasion would have been rather more appropriate.
(Could any answer to this question please avoid the general concept of "die, you evil Commie bastards!" -- it has long been a strange habit of some Americans to classify anything they disagree with as "Communist", and so somehow "wrong". Here's news for you; Communism isn't all that bad - just poorly executed. And no, I'm not trying to say that all, or even most, Americans are like this.)
America's track record of training terrorists overseas to oppose regimes that're anti-American is nothing to be proud of. There only difference, in my mind, between a "guerilla" and a "terrorist" is which side the person talking is affiliated with.
- "I'll probably get modded down for this."
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
When did it become necessary for evidence to be absolute before you accept that it accurately reflects reality? If that was a real necessity, science would be impossible, since science /never/ discovers absolute evidence of anything, merely evidence within the bounds of experimental or observational error.
/you/ live by a leap of faith doesn't mean that everyone does.
Just because
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
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.
Libertarians (and anarchists :) 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.
Conservative congressmen write things like the DMCA and this P2P hacking garbage, which he also opposes.
I recall seeing a model of political position which used left/right as one axis and libertarian/authoritarian as a different axis. Which can make a whole lot more sense than the usual one dimensional thinking.
"There only difference, in my mind, between a "guerilla" and a "terrorist" is which side the person talking is affiliated with."
Insightful... yeah, whatever
Apparently I was just too subtle for you in my last post. Let me spell out the difference in as simple terms as I can:
Geurilla: uses stick-and-move tactics to attack military targets only when they have a distinct tactical advantage, quickly blending into the background when the attack is over.
Terrorist: deliberately attacks civillian populations in an effort to sway public policy. Uses tactics that would run them afoul of the Hague accords.
Even simpler terms:
Guerilla: Aims specifically at military targets
Terrorist: Aims specifically at civillian targets.
Now for some examples:
Flying planes into skyscrapers: Terrorism.
Blowing up a destroyer: Guerilla warfare
Flying a plane into the Pentagon: Would have been guerilla warfare if it weren't for all the civillians on the plane
Blowing up a bus full of Israeli soldiers: guerilla warfare
Blowing up a bus full of Israeli schoolchildren: terrorism
Figured it out yet? I know you'd rather go back to the volley system but just because you don't agree with the tactics used doesn't make it terrorism.
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
Secondly, you have the false notion that atheism is a belief, when it is not. All that is required is that one lack the belief in god that most of the rest of the world seems to have. If it weren't for the fact that the rest of the world was theistic, it wouldn't even be something worth mentioning. We don't have a word for "human being with only one head", because we haven't seen any other types of human being." And if there were no theists, we would not have a word for atheists. The term is only useful in that it describes someone who lacks a particular viewpoint most of the rest of the world shares.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
And, further, if the classic definitions are used, it is possible for someone to be BOTH an agnostic and an atheist. That is what I consider myself. I don't see any reason to act as if there's a god given that a lack of evidence is what one would expect to find if god doesn't exist (so asking for evidence first before atheism can be considered would render atheism an impossible position to hold even if it turns out to be true). But I recognize that I cannot really *know* for sure that god doesn't exist. It's just that "made up by mankind" is still the more likely explanation by Occam's Razor for peoples' claims to have witnessed a god of some sort.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.