Justin Frankel On AOL, Subverting The Status Quo

linuxbaby writes "Rolling Stone has an excellent feature on Justin Frankel, the creator of Winamp, Gnutella, Shoutcast, Waste, and other projects. The article calls him 'the world's most dangerous geek', and after years of being muzzled by AOL for igniting the pirate nation, Frankel is breaking his silence." The article ends by asking: "In many ways, Frankel's future encapsulates the debate over the future of the Internet itself. Does it become just a distribution system for corporate product or more of a way to subvert that corporate control?"

Comments

Re:It's the subversion thing

[MBCook]

True, brands do mean something (that's why we have ONLINE brands like Google and Amazon), but on the internet they don't HAVE to mean anything. We have options now that we don't get in the traditional "Brick and Mortar" world. Yes people will still believe the brand names they see like CNN, but people can easily find other views. They can find views of ordinary citizens, the government agency that CNN was reporting on, etc; things that are nearly impossible to get most of the time on many issues. Before the internet views of small groups with "untraditional" thinking was often regulated to keeping up on things in small monthly magazines or newspapers. Now thanks to the internet you don't have to wait a month to hear what "Citizens Against A Government Controlled By Aardvarks" has to say on the State of the Union address, you can find out as soon as they want to tell you.

So the difference on whether brands mean anything is choice. Now we have a REAL choice, as opposed to (for example) only getting your news from CBS, ABC, or NBC. They are all pretty close. But on the 'net you get the Drudge Report, and tons of other things. (Not to get on a topic about ABC vs. CBS vs. Drudge, just an example).