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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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/
...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.
Our Constitution is structured to place power in the hands of the many, so when we do something like allow secret trials or censor viewpoints or extend copyrights into perpetuity like some frozen baseball player, I feel disappointed not only in the system that has let me down, but in the general population who are obviously not paying attention to the actions of their government or thinking critically about its actions.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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.
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.
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
Libertarians? That's almost as absurd as saying we have to take the Net back from the communists.
Hear! Hear!
The internet is the closest thing we will probably ever get to a anarcho-capitalist society. And it works!
Everyone enters into this society with identical opportunities, with outcomes determined by merit, ability or persuasive ability, without regard to race, color, creed, or anything else like that. This society sparked and continues to fuel the Free Software revolution. This society has no borders, allowing us discourse with those in Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, China and other authortarian states. This society allows entrepreneurial capitalism to coexist with collectivist projects.
This society has given us Slashdot and Kuro5hin, Freshmeat and Sourceforge, a free press that doesn't have to ask permission of Washington DC to broadcast. It has provided a home for GNU and BSD, EFF and SPI. Major universities have set up branches here.
Of course, utopia is never an option. We have our problems. We have spam, virii, and trolls that just won't go away. But this is a small price to pay for genuine liberty.
Who cares if there's a bunch of commercial fiefdoms here and there? They have no power over us. But I guess the author of this article doesn't like this freedom. He wants a king to rule over him. Fine. Let him have his tyrant. But keep your guns, cops and armies out of this cyberspace, because we're doing just fine without them.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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.
Funny thing is: it did turn into the WWW in Europe. The WWW was developed at CERN, which is in Switzerland.
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
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.