FCC Commissioner Warns of Destructive FCC Policies

bugsy writes "Discrimination, Closed Networks and the Future of Cyberspace... Just over a month ago, Karl Auerbach asked, Is the Internet Dying?. Today, Commissioner Michael J. Copps, of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in a speech at the New America Foundation, is asking the very same question, 'Is The Internet As We Know It Dying?' and warning about FCC policies that damaged media now threatening the Internet. Coincidence?! Here is CircleID's report on these Remarks by Michael J. Copps, Federal Communications Commissioner: The Beginning of The End of the Internet? Discrimination, Closed Networks, and the Future of Cyberspace."

Comments

dying? how about changing

[iethree]

i think the internet is becoming a more commercial media, and with that come benefits as well as disadvantages. I don't like the turns the internet has been taking recently, too many lawsuits and crackers, this isn't what the internet was designed for.

Re:dying? how about changing

[shostiru]

I'd say the disadvantages far outweight the advantages, but that's my personal opinion.

I think the net reflects, to a great degree, the expectations of its users. I can remember back when there was no spam, Usenet was truly useful, and worms and viruses were exceedingly rare. The barrier to entry for the net was *very* high. Because of this, users tended to be participants more than observers.

As useful as the web is, it ushered in wave after wave of people whose prior experience with visual media was television. They bypassed the usual education of net.culture that one previously received by participating, as well as the ethical and practical lessons given by one's school or organization (and enforced by one's local surly sysadmin).

Now that people *expect* the net to be "television that you can click on", I think they are more likely to accept without complaint the commercialization and concentration of power that occurs with traditional broadcast media. Those of us who try to take a stand against this trend now seem outdated at best, radical kooks at worst.

Re:dying? how about changing

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure its becomming more commercial. It always was from the day ARPAnet evolved beyond the institutions and universities that gave birth to it.

With everything as in Nature there are parasites and predators, vultures, malingering hangers on that form a food chain. The question is whether it can continue to support that food chain in its present form.

I am saddened to see that one of the first three responses is "So what?!?". Those kiddes amongst us that have not watched the net grow and mature and seen all the battles and developments along the way selfishly take it for granted. Much like the current generation is in danger of losing our freedoms because they never had to fight for them.

The wiser and more experienced have seen it all before. Remember when DNS was being carved up by the domain speculators? The appearance of the first pay content sites (back in the days when EVERYTHING on the net was pretty much free)? The great popularisation of the 90s , www and the dotcom crash?

Its part of my history. To me the net serves a multitude of very important functions, peer communication, file transfer, entertainment, news. I could never go back to television news, I threw out my TV almost 10 years ago now - even then it was clear that vested media interests were taking TV along the road to biased and shallow content.

Sure there are more crackers about. Us old skool unix hackers were a different breed, we had ethics, pride, restraint and responsibility. Today script kiddies are everywhere, everyones a wannabe, and there is far more malice and nasty stuff about. But this is because the Internet is a viciously competitive and nasty place now, the new generation fight fire with fire. Every corporation is out to exploit them , install spyware on their boxes, haul them through court for sharing some files. Its no wonder then that todays hackers have an altoghether more cynical 'hit them before they hit you' attitude. The golden age of mutual respect is clearly gone and commercialisation is sqarely to blame.

Then there are the lawyers. Comapnies devoid of the ability to actually create any content now rely soley on litigation and carving up the IP pie to make a buck and this is having a profound negative impact on technological progress. One way or another they must be stopped.

What does the future hold?

Perhaps everything to date is just the 'first cycle'. The net may decline before we cycle back into another golden age. This could be in the form of a split - an entirely new subnetwork emerging from the existing infrastructure to reclaim the ground of a "Public/Peoples network" again. There are already embryonic contenders - Freenet etc, distributed peer to peer networks over encrypted channels forming vast VPNs will surely appear, an environment that will take us back to the old BBS level to build on again, and one in which commercial activity is STRICTLY BANNED.

What people miss is that the Internet is actually not a NETWORK (in the mathematical sense) so much as it is a TREE. ISPs and the old telecoms corps are positioned at nodes that already concentrate too much power. Once wireless is hacked to allow direct AB distributed networks and smaller relays appear hidden inside VPNs then the whole thing will start to change a lot. My money is that the future of the net is still very much about individuals, peer to peer, and distributed technologies.

Re:dying? how about changing

[orthogonal]

i think the internet is becoming a more commercial media, and with that come benefits as well as disadvantages.

It's not just the commerical media, it's the wide-spread access that's also ruining the internet.

I'll limit my rant to usenet; slashdot is too slow for the numerous post previews required to get a longer post right, or more brief.

Anybody remember usenet back in 1996? Or 1993? I remeber when you could hang out in the newsgroups for hours, reading thought, incisive, meaningful posts. alt.angst was a favorite of mine -- I still rememeber some of the laments and cries in the wilderness posted there a decade latter.

There was one post, from a guy who would lie awake in bed at 3am, and think about his good job as a programmer, his lovely and loyal wife, his comfortable home, and feel a great aching emptiness inside him as he recalls for the nth time that he had never made a scientific discovery, had never designed a unique algorithm, had never made a lasting contribution to the progress of mankind's knowledge. And it was written far more hauntingly than my lacluster rendition.

What's in alt.angst now? Oh, there are still a few good posters, but of course it's all deluged in aol'er "me too"s, in penis enlargment and porn spam, and psychotic ramblings.

alt.folklore.urban still has a dedicated core of erudite posters, but the last time I made in a regular part of my day, it was deluged -- for weeks, with megs of posts -- by the "Snuh Buh" crapflooders (DejaGoogle for it it you really need to completely waste your time).

The comp. hierarchy still works, but outside of the moderated gtroups, the signal-to-noise ratio declines thanks to

• the "do my homework" crowd ("I want to develop an algorithm for, uh, moving these three towers in Hanoi. Can anyone help me by giving my a compilable solution that I can put my name on?"),
• top-posters who have Microsoft newsreaders and so don't know better,
• top-posters who are told repeatedly not to top-post, but don't get it,
• and my favorite, posters to comp.lang.c or comp.lang.c++ who show a zealous dedication to not understanding the concept of a language Standard ("But it's not undefined behavior in Visual C++. Abd whose (sic) this Steve Clamage guy to tell me I'm off-topic. This newsgroups (sic) for C++ and I want to do graphics in C++, so graphic are on-topic. I demand you help me with graphic! (sic))

About three years ago I finally blew my stack at one such off-topic poster, went extremely personal and insulting -- went too far -- and relaized I just couldn't stick around in comp.lang.c++ anymore. which is a shame, given the truly great C++ coders who hang out there to offer stunningly detailed advice for free. But still, too much noise.

If I sound elitist ("usenet for articulate posters only!", maybe I am. But when usenet was mostly limited to .edus, it wasn't a golden age, but it was a hell of a lot better.

What are the threats?

[Carnildo]

The article makes repeated, general forecasts of "doom and gloom", but does not mention any specific pending decisions that might threaten the Internet. What are these threats?

it's already dead

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet as I knew it when I first started using it is already dead. Back when Mosaic first came out, there was no spam, no pop-up ads, no ads on websites in general. All the content on the web was free made by hobbyists rather than large corporations. On usenet, there were no AOL newbies, spammers, or fear of e-mail harvesters.

Re:it's already dead

[meta-monkey]

But that content is still there. I don't think the hobbiests went anywhere. They're still on the net, and so are their web sites. Just now there are commercial web sites, too.

Now, if the article is right, and network providers start filtering things out, cramming ads down your throat, then we're screwed.

In the meantime, you can still find all the free content, but now you also have access to commercial resources, too. Personally, I like it. Like many others, I have a list of web sites I check every morning, like reading the paper. Some are commercial news sites. Others are completely non-commercial "news" sites that devote their attention to hobbies and whatnot that I enjoy. I love being able to shop online, manage my finances online, and order take out over the internet. There's nothing wrong with commercialization on the internet, so long as it doesn't stop us from accessing the non-commercial info.

Inch by Inch

[Anonymous Coward]

I once thought the internet was a uncontrollable stream of information, that since no government had total control of it, then no one would be silenced from sharing their views; their thoughts, their knowledge. But there seems to be this growing consensus that something must be done by the people who run our governments, I use to laugh and say don't they know the internet isn't a US only thing, that they can't control what other governments do, but it seems that if the U.S. picks it up, the others will seemingly follow.

Yes, I am plagued by spammers, telemarketers, and the occasional viral alert. But it doesn't seem to bother me as much as it bothers other people. I am more frustrated that they are trying to ruin the freedom of the internet I came to enjoy. Am I the only one that has noticed how every day the cage on our existence closes in around us, they cloak it with words like Patriot, Security, or say remember 9/11. Yeah I remember it, but I also remember the freedom I had before it, and I will most definitely remember how every day after, it was taken bit by bit. Okay, that is my rant.

it may not be dying but...

[yintercept]

It may not be dying, but there seems to be a good number of powerful entrenched interests working to kill it.

Threats I see are things like the parasite and adware companies that are trying to install software on machines to either control or influence purchases.

Ad blocking and porn blocking software also poses a threat. The deal here is that the ad blockers have the choice of which ads to block. Already you are seeing situations where an advertiser reaches "terms" with an ad blocking company to let their ads through.

The number of paid listings on search engines in relation to free listings is growing.

When things like parasiteware and adblockers move from the desktop (where the user has some control) to routers where businesses control access, things get very scary.

Big media doesn't like all of these blogs stealing their thunder. Academic circles are incensed at all the commercial sites popping up everywhere and want to create little circles of their own.

Personally, I think most of the interests balance each other, but technologies like parasites and net partitioning need to be monitored closely and are likely to require regulation.

Then most of us go and take our knowledge...

[Yaa 101]

elsewhere, then what?
I can think of some parties that are not really amused if their pool of knowledge is taken away from them...
With the internet knowledge and ideas are for the grabs for institutions like the militaries NGO's etc...
Also the software companies loose track of their customers again...
Now we don't want that to happen, do we?

Is USA management that stupid and short sighted today?

Re:Death of the Internet Predicted

[firewood]

The internet (as used back then) is dead, and it will die again. Almost no one uses gopher any longer. NNTP is now a tiny percentage of internet traffic. The current protocols support the dumping of near infinite amounts of raw sewage onto the bandwidth paid for by others. I expect the people who pay to move onto greener pastures (new more-secure protocols), leaving unauthenticated SMTP ports and such open only on a few research and archeologists networks.

Sure the internet as we know it won't die, but the percentage of users and networks that allow the current protocols will go to zero (rounded to the nearest percent).

The internet will persevere, and in the end...

[yosemite]

The internet will persevere, and in the end I believe that it will be better off *because* of the actions of inept regulation and the corporate need to dominate, to crush diversity. The demise of the internet has become mantra of the weinies that gets repeated every couple of years. It SHOULD be a mantra: "Lets try to kill the internet", because in the end it will only make the net stronger.

When I first heard people say things like: the internet, as it was in the good old days, will be gone, the fixtures(?) of what make the internet what it is, are crumbling. I didn't like it. I didn't like the idea of corporate interests taking over and homogenizing and whitewashing cyberspace.

Take a step back and think about how the internet has changed in the last 5-10 years. Where are those homogenizing influences that everyone was sure were going to sweep over the *entire* net and turn it into the bastard child of AOL? They *are* there and can be found, but the hacker subculture is still alive and strong! I would argue that as long as this is the case it is impossible to kill the net. The hackers ( in the prejoritive and neutral sense) are what started the net and what made it great, the hackers(crackers) that wield destructive energy combined with hackers(intelectual idealists) both created the natural law in cyberspace and shape it.

Again and again, people try to control; the net reacts. Look at what is happening with intellectual property! A cornerstone in the legal system for hundreds of years, intelectual property rights, backed by some of the largest interest groups in the country, billions of dollars and hoards of raving lawyers are being crushed. Even now at this moment, jack valenti's pinhead is being crushed with an imutable fact; information WILL, MUST, flow. Like a river encountering an obstacle in its path, it will find a way and grind the object into dust.

If anyone has not read Bruce Sterling's "Information Wants to Be Worthless" you should give it a shot. The internet is completely out of control. Well maybe not completely but seriously, what does Jack Valenti think about when he goes to sleep at night? Maybe "You know, in a couple years the RIAA and MPAA will have this whole internet thing wrapped up" or "As soon as Microsoft gets that DRM bullshit going we'll be golden!" or maybe "as soon as we sieze control of every Internet backbone and filter all traffic...tell people what they can and cant do...(mumble)". Just think, if all the backbones in the country had their "spigots" turned off, there would still be enough information in manhatten, flowing over thousands of wi-fi node, to keep people downloading brittney porn and browsing endless mp3's. Shit, there's probably 500 years worth of porn sitting on hd's all across NYC.

I am starting to rant here but show me someone who thinks that they can control the internet and I will say that there is a thousand people will to step forward and circumvent that control.

Anonymous Hero