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Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
netcetra writes "From a post by on CircleID by Phillip J. Windley: 'Doc Searls has written a brilliant piece framing the battle for the Net at Linux Journal. ... if you take the time to read just one essay on the Net and the politics surround it this year, read this one.' Quote from Doc himself: 'This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future. Even optimists agree that the Net's future as a free and open environment for business and culture is facing many threats. We can't begin to cover them all or cover all the ways we can fight them. I believe, however, that there is one sure way to fight all of these threats at once, and without doing it the bad guys will win. That's what this essay is about.' Also see additional background on the piece on Doc Searls blog."
In other media such as television and radio, it takes a great deal of resouces to be able to broadcast your information outward. Anyone can connect to the internet, and unless ISPs suddenly find the motivation and the money to start taking fine tuned control over what every user does, anyone can host their own information and data.
as if millions of bytes of ram screamed in agony, and were suddenly silenced. /.ed before any comments isn't a good sign.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Nothing to see here. Move along.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
...still one of my favorite sins.
That and pride are the two things causing the current dark ages of the internet.
And make no mistake, we are in what future scholars will call the dark ages. We have this wonderful tool for communication which would enable vast networks of not just information, but concepts and ideas to be shared globally. And we are letting ( yes, letting ) big companies/governments take control and destroy this wonderful tool. All to satisfy some board of share holders, or some CEO's pride.
Whether they see us as the depth of the dark ages, or the beginning is the question I worry about.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The other option to clean up the internet is teaching people the correct use of THEIR, THERE and THEY'RE.
Not to mention TWO, TOO and TO.
Don't forget about YOU'RE, YOUR and YORE.
Oops, almost forgot ITS and IT'S.
signatures are for fools with hands
I know all kinds of smart people try really hard to predict things like this, and they give all sorts of explanations that "support" their position. But here is why the Internet won't go away: it is useful, and people like it.
If you look throughout history, in all cultures, if people find something to be useful, no amount of government or corporate intervention or regulation will dissuade those people from doing what they want. Despite most citizens not giving a shit about voting in government elections, very few people will stand by and allow a government or corporation to take away something they want. It just does not happen. This happens all over the world, in all cultures, and when this stand-off becomes a big enough event, it makes the news as a "revolution".
So no, the internet isn't going to be flushed down the tubes by ISPs or whatever, because consumers will not allow it.
What are you, an idiot?
First of all, it's impossible to force everyone to do anything. Second, it's impossible to massively delete every single site on the Internet. Third, even if you got every "web-host" to assist you, you still wouldn't get half the sites because they're hosted directly on the owner's machine. Fourth, web sites are not the Internet. There's IRC, Usenet, email, ftp, and about a million other protocols -- there's even still gopher!
Finally, and most importantly, your entire idea is wrong. It's exactly the opposite of what the Internet is supposed to be, which is unmonitored and Free.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Check out Tim Lee's lengthy response. He argues (and I suspect most Slashdotters will agree) that, "The Internet is a massive, chaotic, fiercely competitive ecosystem. No one carrier owns more than a tiny fraction of its capacity. No one company controls more than a tiny fraction of its content. In short, no one company is ever going to control the Internet." The complete rebuttal is available at http://www.techliberation.com/archives/027010.php
widespread.
2.2M represents less than 1% of the population, and the reality is it is a small percentage of repeat offenders.
You want widespread?
Copyright violation is being estimated by the media industries to be occuring on the rate of millions of offenses per day. Millions of users are logged onto P2P networks primarily for copyright infringement purposes (I said primarily, not exclusively).
Minor excess speeding tickets hit a large percentage of the population (upwards of 40% depending on jurisdiction and technologies being applied). That will definitely go up in the UK if/when they roll out those beautiful new speed cams.
Drug crimes hit a large percentage of the population. Sure, lots of people are in jail for violent crimes. But 1 person in 30 in the USA are in jail are because of drug crimes, the majority of those for simple possession. Estimates range, but the low estimates for teenage illicit drug use (one-time or more) is at around 25%.
Those are widespread numbers. Violent crimes (I'm sorry 12,000 murders is not a lot in a population of 280 million) are not. You just hear about the violence a lot whenever you listen to Fox News or whenever the police or government are trying to take your rights away. Even with the drug violence, long term violent crime rates continue to decline.
Only commenting on the article post... it's the "bad guys" that made the internet what it is, including raising the bar in bandwidth requirements and security. Balance without "bad guys" in any environment is impossible. If it weren't for RIAA smashing napster, we probably wouldn't have torrents (at least not yet). Balance.
But that doesn't seem to be happening on the Internet I use. Companies have a bigger presence than every and there is mroe and more commercial Internet, but I find that in no way interferes with any of the rest of it since you just access what you want. I haven't had anyone try to stop me from hosting free sites on the topics I want, I haven't had webservice get scarce, on the contrary, the barrier for entry seems to be lower than ever.
So what's the dark age you are talking about? What is destroying the net? The only thing I've seen receantly is all that stupidity about DNS which was just politicians playing games, nothing was ever going to come of that.
There's a book about this.
:) Go read it yourself.
It's called City Come a Walkin. It was published in 1980. William Gibson had some nice things to say about it.
The problem, in the book, is the problem we're seeing here. Some rich club mob wants to take over the Internet. They want to control the communications system, and they want to be the gatekeepers of what all will go over the wires. And they're using it to leech off of, and eventually control, society.
Cities have a way of becoming self-aware. In the book, we meet San Fransisco: City. And we meet Sacramento, briefly. (She looks like a prostitute, apparently.) Chicago's also got a soul- in a living man. New York. Phoenix. The major cities- They start to take on a life of their own.
And they fight as hard as they can against the network controllers. But... "When the city comes a walkin' we'll all be obsolete."
I don't want to spoil it.
Somehow, Searls extracted some hideous meaning from these comments. He wants to ask Whiteacre a bunch of deep questions about the Net and freedom. I don't think Whiteacre could answer any of them; nor should he.
Someone please read this for me and tell me what it means.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
When I meet a single person over the age of 20 that has gone a decade without commiting copyright violation, I'll let you know.
I agree exactly with the thesis of the article. The Internet is being divided and debased by people who care only about avoiding knowledge of their own deficiencies, such as some of the leaders in China.
The control freaks often get control. In the past, their power over the Internet has been limited by their extreme technical ignorance. Now, more and more, they are hiring technically knowledgeable people to corrupt and diminish the freedom.
If the healthy people don't assert their authority, the corrupters will debase the Internet as they debase everything else they touch.
The ceaseless activity of those whose only life is money and who want to make one more dollar has already caused limits to VOIP, for example. The communications companies want to protect their easy profits. They use VOIP, but they don't want us to do it without their permission or without their profit.
When so many people break the law, maybe there is something wrong with the law. Maybe there is something wrong with how the problem of intellectual property rights is being approached.
I've seen NO creative thinking about IP rights. There's a lot of talk, but very little serious progress.
Maybe history is a guide. For example, did you notice how libraries made all publishers go bankrupt? Not.
Did you notice that television and video tape recorders utterly destroyed the movie industry? Not.
I don't download music. However, if I did, it is obvious to me that I would get interested and would buy more CDs.
I had several very bad experiences with the music industry and their marketing methods. The industry is extremely adversarial toward its artists and its customers. Over time, that caused me to listen to music less and less. What I'm seeing however, is that music industry leaders want to fix their problems without fixing the problems they create for me.
The world is dominated by people who believe that interacting with other people requires fighting. In fact, the only real solutions to social problems come from thinking.
well...when you consider that most victims of murder knew their killers, (%92 percent among women ) and once the victim has been murdered, they can't be murdered again, and no one wants to hang out/befriend a murder.... ...it seems to me that the supply of victims would diminish to a point that a particular killer would have no one left to kill,
Conversely, copyright infringement doesn't limit the supply. In fact the opposite is true, the more infringement the greater the supply. Sure i might not want to commit the same infringement twice, but others still can. Try that with murder. You can only pass the same bloody corpse around so much before it ceases to be interesting.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
...but it is obvious that even the large readership of the slashdot community is either ill informed, indifferent, or uncertain about this issue. Even the article posted at 230am has more activity! This should frighten you!
Make no mistake...the governance of the Internet and the fight for its control is the most important issue currently at stake. Period. Wars will subside, politicians will be replaced, the world will keep turning. However, if the core principles driving the Internet are not preserved, we as diverse citizens of all nations will forever have lost something magnificent.
I have been on the Internet for a long, long time. I remember BBSes at pathetic baudrates, when emails didn't travel between ISPs, when there weren't any advertisements online whatsoever. Those of you that remember these changes and are able to see the Internet --- not as it is nor for what it has become, but for what it must be --- please educate the masses. It must exist as a free, uninhibited enity and REMAIN independent of the infrastructure through which it is accessed. Should the day come when borders and binding structure is imposed upon the Internet, we will all have truly lost the most important medium for communcation, commerce, and culture ever created.
Of course we can delete the internet. Kris Kristofferson could do it. There's that device to delete the internet inside the president's desk.
Wrong. Block port 80. boom - most of the sites on the internet are gone.
And that is exactly the sort of thing TFA is talking about. Pay us, or your site goes bye-bye.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Just my two cents but I found this article poorly written and hard to follow. So many quotes and right-on allusions: is the writer worried we'll think he hasn't got much to say? And a pervasive sense that drama and crisis are being manufactured from materials that aren't really up to it. Other writers around, notably Robert X. Cringely, cover this territory with more style (and without an obsessive interest in hyperlinks).
Maybe this guy should leave computers alone and go far away and do something completely different for a year. Great way of clearing the head. Perhaps he'd get some new perspectives on life and find he'd gotten a better writing style too.
Bob Young, who recently stepped down at Red Hat, made a very important point the other day. The present generation of lawmakers may be clueless about IT, but they are reaching retirement age now. The next generation is a lot more knowledgeable about IT having grown up with it for most of their adult lives. Over the next 5-10 years, expect lawmakers to show a more sophisticated approach to IT legislation and a lot less indulgence towards big corporations and cartels trying to pull a fast one. If this is true - a big if but not unlikely - then Searl's dire predictions are not going to happen.
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tournoun pas maï
I mean, he loses credibility in the first sentence.. "This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it.". Of course there is a limit!
We all know that the number of computer bits that man could ever possibly compute is 1.35x(10^20), so his essay could *never* be more than that long, or else it would neve rbe completed.
Foolish!
I know that this a long post, but everyone should read this essay.
ZNet Commentary
Not Everyone Felt That Way September 12, 2005
By Tim Wise
When I was a kid, I remember my maternal grandmother defending Richard Nixon for the crimes of Watergate, because, as she put it: "He didn't do anything any worse than what every other President did." Knowing, even at six, that this was hardly a morally compelling justification for one's actions, even if true, I recall how it infuriated me to hear it over and over again, whenever politics were discussed in my grandparent's home.
Little did I realize that such obfuscation was hardly unique to certain members of my family. Indeed, throughout the years, it seemed like whenever Watergate came up in conversation (as it would for a long time after 1974, and Iran/Contra after that), someone would pull out this same canard, repeating with the precision of an atomic clock, that "so-and-so didn't do anything that every other President/Senator/Congressman, or whatever, didn't also do." And invariably, those who would say these things were always staunch supporters of whatever asshole was being criticized: whether it was Nixon, Reagan, or Bill Clinton.
It's almost as if stupid arguments spread by osmosis, or some such thing. So we end up with people who have never met each other, nonetheless miraculously spewing the same apologetics, as if they had gotten some kind of memo instructing them on what to say whenever one of their personal heroes stepped in it.
So too, the oft-heard argument that one shouldn't be too harsh on this nation's founders, or other early USAmerican Presidents, when it comes to slaveholding, or involvement in Indian genocide, because, after all, they were "products of their time," and shouldn't be judged by the moral standards of the modern world.
I heard this one again recently, after an article of mine hit the Internet, in which I discussed, among other things, the depredations of Andrew Jackson: one of this nation's premier Indian killers.
The person who wrote to attack me as a "PC liberal" who "hates America," insisted that Jackson, and others like Thomas Jefferson shouldn't be evaluated on the basis of today's moral "underpinnings." And as with every other instance in which something like this has been said to me, in this case too, the comment was made absent any awareness on the part of its author, as to the position's utter absurdity.
The most infuriating thing about the "men of their times" defense, is that by insisting Jackson, Jefferson and the rest were in line with the standards accepted by all in their day, apologists ignore, in a blatantly racist fashion, that to the blacks being enslaved, or the Indians being killed, slavery and genocide were hardly acceptable.
In other words, the "everybody back then felt that way" argument assumes that the feelings of non-whites don't count. Some folks always knew mass murder and land theft were wrong: namely, the victims of either. That lots of white folks didn't, hardly acquits them in this instance. It's not as if the human brain was incapable of recognizing the illegitimacy of killing and enslavement.
Secondly, beliefs that killing and stealing are wrong hardly emerged in the 20th or 21st centuries. Indeed, the very people who suggest we should cut the founders slack because of the standards of their day, are overwhelmingly the kind of Bible-thumping conservatives who insist morality is timeless, and who clamor for the posting of the Ten Commandments in the public square for this very reason. Yet they appear to have forgotten that among those Commandments (which were not, after all, handed down to Billy Graham in the 1950s, but rather to someone else a wee bit earlier) are prohibitions against murder and theft.
In other words, the founders don't merely offend by today's moral standards; they offended by the moral standards set in place at least by the time of Moses.
But there's something else troubling about this kind of argument:
The Internet is wonderful and useful, because it is free. It's freedom is a fragile thing. Forces of ignorance and outright evil are attempting to gain control so they can profit, at public expense of course. If they succeed, freedom will be a collateral casualty. The war is fought at the most elementary level, human language. Those who convincingly define the issues can frame the debate in a manner that assures victory. The other side has won victories by defining the Internet experience in terms of content = property = scarce resource. We have content providers, content carriers, and consumers. And this is the wrong way to view the Internet. The Internet is a commons, where everyone can have their place and publish anything they want. We have to change the debate now! Stop letting these forces define the issues by getting there first and defining them the way WE want, or we'll lose the Internet! Write your congressperson! Join the EFF today!!!
That's how the article sounded to me. Very black and white. I think some of this is justified, but I object to several things here. First off, the tone of the thing: the article makes up a category with two pigoenholes, stuffs everyone into one or the other, declares one to be right and the other to be wrong, and exhorts the "right" side to go to war to defend us. It's as if the forces on the "wrong" side know very well they are in the wrong, but have made a conscious decision to be evil because evil is profitable. Except they don't know they're wrong, or evil. They are convinced they are right. The response is good intentions lead to hell, and they ought to know better, and therefore they are still evil. But we don't know all that. What seems dangerous to me is this "if you're not with the Internet, then you're against it" attitude that could push a lot of neutrals to the "wrong" side. Worse is singling out some and tarring them as evil-- could anger multifaceted entities with genuinely sympathetic views if this is done in error.
Second is the presumption that the freedoms and Internet are fragile. The implication is that it wouldn't be so fragile if we weren't so dumb, and I don't buy that. There are simply too many people with too much at stake to allow the Internet to fail, or to be given over to a narrow consortium of interests, or turned into a morass of censorship and patronizing guidance of consumers to products. Many people are too smart to be hoodwinked into going along with such dastardly schemes, and too smart to swallow those lines about it being "for own own good". This illustrates a basic problem with liberals and democrats. They evidently don't see that most people can see these dangers too, and go way out trying to "educate", not realizing that they are actually insulting our intelligence. Most everyone who has experienced DRM quickly perceives what a bad deal it is, and if they don't, need only hear what would be possible if not for DRM and what used to be possible to conclude on their own that they've been had. Ironic that well meant but snobby and elitist efforts to save us from being turned into cattle and suckers talks down to us as if we already are. And ironic that their efforts to strengthen the freedoms and Internet through "better" govt regulation may actually be the greatest danger facing the Internet.
So what should we be doing? Fighting evil, or educating, or inventing and debating? Or just relax because it'll all turn out all right in the end? Do no harm....
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
What happens when a few rouges from one culture enter another culture against their will... War.
I personally believe the internet is worth fighting for, perhaps not physically, but logically.
MirrorDot mirror of the Slashdotted LinuxJournal page.
** my feelings gathered in the two years I was a paralegal in a DA's office, and in the nine/ten years my wife (who is a DA) spent in prosecuting cases ::
The great majority (90%+) of violence is assault.
The great majority (90%+) of assaults are against one's spouse.
The great majority (90%+) of battered wifes does NOT separate, press charges, or otherwise go away from their assailants.
Violence IS a repeat crime. Murder is when a violent person makes a mistake and goes overboard.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048