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Death of Internet Predicted: Film at 11
Remik writes "The Register has a piece analyzing several threads of Lawrence Lessig's blog, and concluding that the Internet as we know it is dying. For anyone who reads the majority of YRO posts, Lessig's blog is one of the most important sites on the net." Another submitter summed it up well: 'Lessig is predicting that the days of the Commons of the Internet are over, and that as a result of FCC deregulation, the concentration of digital rights in the hands of just a few large media companies will kill the internet for good. Even former FOX and Vivendi executive Barry Diller has criticised the move.' We joke, but there are large elements of truth to Lessig's dour predictions.
I think spam is more a danger to internet. I think folks will say hey I hear the Internet as full of spam I don't want to go online if it's just a big ad space. I don't know if that makes any sense or not but some people may say why the hell do I want to pay 20-45 bucks a month to get ads.
Or, at least I hope it will...
Wireless networks are what we need. Whatever problems exist are at least partially because we don't own the wires. But citizens can have more control of a section of the spectrum, and we can build little networks with that.
But who really said that the Internet has to be a bunch of commercial sites and spam-laden e-mail? If individual servers get too cumbersome to use, then they will be replaced with something else. When http and port 80 become nothing but a vast marketing wasteland, we can make something new. We've got our own publishing rights, so we don't have to eat what's shoveled to us.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Media companies must make sure no artists gain popularity without their approval and control.
Corporations need to ensure bad press and negative experiences with their products are buried.
The media must present the "correct" view of the world. Dissenters must be kept quiet.
"Your 15 minutes" must be in the form of a controlled "reality" show instead of a blog where you get people to boycott a company that screwed you over.
Even though movie grade cameras and editing equipment are priced within the reach of middle class citizens, they must not be permitted to make movies that threaten the Hollywood mainstream, or at the very least they must be prevented from distributing them.
There are more reasons, but I don't have time to type them now.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The average voter (or non-voter for that matter) doesn't really give half a hairy shit about the DMCA, fair use, divestiture of communications service, spectrum allocation, and so on. They probably never will. Outside of a few key issues (abortion, gun control), people just don't care about politics. Lots of people have their 'pet issue' (ie.
Taking that into account, when you realize all the money being fed into our representatives, it seems that the laws will be written the way that the corporations want them. Maybe the technology companies will stand up to the media industry, maybe they won't. Let's, for now, assume that they won't. What this means is that consumers will lose all rights, with respect to media.
Even if that does happen, I don't see it being enforced. What will happen is the media companies will push for prosecution of all the new "crimes". That's when people will start to care, because they don't want to be criminals (in general). Plenty of people who don't care about the RIAA/MPAA campaign against P2P found it pretty ridiculous to sue for billions of dollars.
The only way said media conglomerates will be able to heavily prosecute these "crimes" is by convicing the public that they are indeed crimes. So far, they're doing a very poor job of that. Most people feel that they have a right to "steal" content using P2P networks. All the lobbying in the world isn't going to change that feeling. Maybe some clever marketing will help them, but trying to convince someone that they're obtaining 'free stuff' is not an easy task.
Society, and almost any natural system, tends to settle into an equilibrium. There's a certain inertia that needs to be overcome in order to push out into some other stable region. The media industry is pushing really hard, but I just don't think they have the muscle to really pull this off. They can shake things up, but in the end, it'll probably settle back down again. Let's just hope they trow their collective back out in the process...
<Disclamer>
- I do, in fact, support the "criminalization" of certain things (ie. drug addicts are criminals).
- I do have my own "pet" issues (ie. affirmative action is discrimination against whites).
</Disclaimer>Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
I second the motion - if anything, the recent attention given to blogs has legitimized a thoroughly uncommercial and decentralized news gathering force. Think of the Baghdad blogger, for example, who by himself provided a viewpoint on the war in Iraq that no monolithic news source could.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Okay, the earliest sightings of smileys were found. How long will it take us to agree on when the earliest reference to Imminent Death of the Net Predicted was? I found one dating to April 11, 1991. Does anyone know of an earlier one?
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
From the article:
An architect friend tells me that email has become the biggest productivity drain in his organization: not just the quantity of attachments, but the mindless round-robin communications, requesting comments that get ignored. Email has become a corporate displacement activity
Psh... this is hardly an Internet issue. It's more of a corporate-mail mentality. Spam is *the* internet-email problem.
Basic web surfing means navigating through web sites whose inspiration for their baroque overdesign seems to have been Donald Trump's wedding cake, all the while requiring the user to close down dozens of unrequested pop-up advertisements.
I believe this is only the case when you want to visit the page of the Smith Family from Anytown, USA, so you can see pics of their kids playing with the family dog.
Self-Respecting sites that want to keep their audience/customers will have a sensible interface or lose to the competition.
Users are not stupid.
This is where I agree. See comment above.
No sig
As long as there are opponents to DRM and commercialization, the internet will never die.
.com's. Why the hell do companies have a right to a .org? A .net if they aren't a Network Service Provider. This is what is wrong with the internet.
I'm not opposed to DRM. I think it's a perfectly reasonable tool that can be used to promote good things. For example, signing an applications source and allowing free distribution. It's what media companies want to do with DRM that's horrible. DRM can be PGP signatures or md5sums on source, to prevent trojans and "evil code" on the kernel level. DRM can also kill your rights. Until DRM is extensively used to excercise fair use, I will avoid ever supporting it. I see it as a tool.
Commercialization is fine on the internet. Just stick to your
I hope that with IPv6, it is possible to setup an alternate internet. Managing our own DNS systems, that hold strict rules for what exactly can be under each domain and get an automated script to find possible offenses.
The internet isn't dying, innovation on the internet is. People stopped doing innovative things with the internet since TCP/IP gaming and Flash became "cool"
There are a few projects that make it different, like FreeNet and P2P applications, but those are going to become endangered. If the geeks unite, we can contribute to lobbyists (EFF, et al) and "campaign contributions" and hopefully keep these projects alive and promote proper innovation and the next step in networking.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
All this works fine. Where's the problem?
The Internet isn't about shopping.
I think you miss the point. People are getting sued for putting up websites that say bad things about other companies. They're getting sued for writing search engine software. They're getting sued for, as he pointed out, registering domains for their own personal family names.
;) ).
Email is nearly worthless for most people - I'm at about 1:50::real email:spam. We're to the point that people are running software to filter mail for them, software which can tag non-spam as spam - a worse problem than getting the spam itself. But, people are desperate enough to restore email's worth that they'll put up with that sort of thing.
You don't get any spam - I hope you realize that you're a part of a very small minority (you may also want to contact your MX admin, the mail server could just be down
20 to 1? I don't know what you are talking about. Perhaps you post your address everywhere you go. My spam/mail ration is exactly the opposite and I achieve that by registering to unimportant internet services with fake accounts or alternative accounts. The rest is handled by mozilla mailnews bayesian spam filtering. Popups are handled by mozilla just as well. Sure one popup occasionally gets through but it's no biggie.
/. model? Perhaps because the need is not there yet. I find and obtain plenty of sources, most importantly I can find primary sources (judges' opinions, congressional debates, and what not), stuff that was unthinkable 10 years ago. And guess what I a use a browser to read them. Alternative means are welcome but I don't see any reason for pessimism here.
Is it harder to get independent news sources? Judging from slashdot's sources, it seems rather the opposite. Most of the stuff I read here would have been impossible to report/know/learn without the internet. I realize you are not talking about tech news, so why isn't there a successful general interest news site using the
Those with the historical perspective of a mayfly combined with "progressive" political indoctrination (nobody hates progress more than progressives) see every local downtick or potential for problems as signs that the world is falling apart.
We have more choices in music and easier access to it than ever before in history. We have more books to read. People in the wilds of Montana now have a greater selection available than residents of Manhattan had twenty years ago.
When I started using email, it was literally a tool of the military industrial complex. Now even children regularly use it and there's so much "power to the people" that it's as if everyone in the movie theater were given his own megaphone.
And I just love the endless blather about dissenters being kept quiet in this age of personal megaphones. Sure, if the world isn't paying rapt attention to me, then it must be the fault of some vast right-wing conspiracy silencing dissent. Yeah, what else could it be?
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
And, the register included a bit about spam in emails in that story. I still don't get it. Why are people so upset about spam? Maybe I"m sheltered, but I don't have any problems with spam; I get maybe one a week, but I quickly add that domain to my block list on the server. Are they talking about AOL people?
AOL is kind of like a crutch for people. It allows them to use the internet without actually really knowing what they're doing. If AOL never existed, I wonder if we would still have the problem of spam that we have now?
Of course there's also hotmail...I don't know what to say about that, I've never wanted to use Hotmail after it crashed my friend's browsers repeatedly because of the amount of spam in their inbox...
The popularity of the internet is built on four major components. Two of the four are most definately at risk:
* The Web
* Email & Messaging - Under attack by spammers, and even under worse attack by anti-spammers. The trend is towards central control of email to eliminate spam. The antispam camp should take note of the failure of the Instant Messenging networks to stop spam on their centrally controlled services.
* Peer to Peer Services - Tools that allow the exchange of information between two nodes like NFS, Gnutella, Windows File Sharing, Telnet, etc... These tools are under attack at the fringe, but how different is getting a file off Gnutella than an anonymous FTP or a windows share? Not very.
* Usenet - The surprising survivor. I can't believe that Usenet is still kicking and popular after all these years.
The key to the Internet's success has and will be:
* Easy and inexpensive access to information and easy and inexpensive publication of information. (web, usenet, file sharing, etc...)
* Easy,inexpensive and fast communication. (email, usenet, IRC, IM, etc...
The good news is that the market is too powerful to be co-opted. People don't want the internet to turn the clock back to the days of Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe.
-- $G
To make it even worse, the legislation he was involved in was the legislation that led to the commercialization of the internet and hence the popups we all loath. Not something I would be bragging about.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Telecomunication companies, of course, want to extend their pay per minute rape.
Software companies have proved themselves unable to compete with free software which depends on a free internet.
Who else? You mentioned government?
Oh well, there you have it. If we give into these forces we will be slaves. Remember that you own the land the wires run on and should demand your right to lay more if the incumbents fail you. The incumbents will fail us, of course, as they seek to impose limits of obsolete technology to and make us pay for their existance.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Good analogy but to extend it: you probably wouldn't choose to live under a flight path without good reason in the first place.
If your first experience of the web was a deluge of deafening popups/unders/overs/whatever, as is common with some sites these days, then you mightn't bother with it after that. Which is especially true of the people that are offended by the porn.
Those that have been around for a while have learned to adapt and deal with these "jets" and other annoyances but there's a certain amount of skill to getting a good SNR from the internet nowadays.
Imagine that Earthlink, AOL and MSN are the only ISPs available to you. They block port 25 to force you to use their SMTP servers. (so much for that domain name you bought... random.coolzip@policestreet.com is useless now) They transproxy ports 80 and 443, so they can record all your web surfing and "share" the information with their "marketing partners". (Funny, though... goatse.cx won't load anymore, and neither will nra.org) Port 22 is blocked to "prevent hackers breaking into vulnerable machines with a SSH exploit". 23 blocked because telnet is insecure. Your TOS requires you to keep 137-139 open (and to run a machine to which those ports are meaningful) to monitor the quality of service. Oh, and everything above 1024 is blocked because there are no legitimate services running on those ports.
Beginning to get the (rather bleak) picture? It may sound corny, but maintaining the World of Ends we've come to know and love does not advance the cause of controlling the general populace. The Prime Directive Of Business is to Make Money. Individuals matter only insofar as they can be persuaded to spend. Big Business wants the net to be Television II: a model they understand and can exploit as an advertising medium to promote the consumerist culture. Geeks want everything to be free, and unlike Big Business, are willing to contribute to the effort without necessarily turning a monetary profit. ("Don't want money... Want admiration") Reality, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle... but not exactly centered.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.