Slashdot Mirror
How to Save the Internet
An anonymous reader writes "An article up at the Harvard Business Review's website by Jonathan Zittrain, one of the founders of the Berkman Center, discusses how the desire to clamp down on Internet openness can be avoided. From the piece: 'Those who provide content and services over the Internet have lined up in favor of "network neutrality," by which ISPs would not be permitted to disfavor certain legitimate content that passes through their servers. Similarly, those who offer open APIs on the Internet ought to be application neutral, so all those who want to build on top of their interfaces can rely on certain basic functionality. Generative systems offer extraordinary benefits. As they go mainstream, the people using them can share some sense of the experimentalist spirit that drives them.'"
The internet doesn't need to be messed with. Its actually the only free (as in speech) place to exchange information (depending on where you live).
If someone tries to regulate it people will find an alternative unregulated version and an industry will spring up to provide that, and those who regualted it in the first place will deregulate it to compete again.
The internet is actually the latest step in human evolution.
[For those who don't believe in evolution just ignore this. I'm not attacking your views just stating mine. ]
Think about it its the passing along of information from one generation to the next is how humans evolve. Now information exchange hit an un prescedented high with the internet, and the more we move to open communcation standards the more accelerated innovation and technical advancement will be possible thus more human evolution. If it is regulated or controlled then it will slow down that evolutionary process. So I am all for any way possible to preserve the internet as we know it, and if possible find as many mediums to work with it and expand its potential for information exchange. The more information we have the better. Now getting government officials to use that information for the good and well being of the people they represent and not just there own perosnal well being. that's the hardest part.
When we switch to IPv6 (well, not those who downgraded to Vista) why not set aside some of the IPv6 space for a nice clean filtered internet thats safe for kids & adults. Let companies like Verisign, Microsoft, ICANN & the others regulate, sanitize & clean that part up as much as they want, give it a special domain (maybe .boring or something) and leave the rest to the rest of us who dont want others deciding what we should be allowed to access.
Lets face it: the internet is a mockery of what it was meant to be. It is full of literally crap and is subject to the whims of politically oriented morons. If the internet was redesigned, there would be a chance to restart: a chance to redesign the net to suit what is best, without idiotic interference. The issue of net neutrality would come up, but with a redesign that works around it, there would be no problem. Think: a new chance to fix all the ridiculous errors and issues and clean up the internet through a redesign.
The article is interesting, long but interesting. The author is arguing among other things that PCs should stay mainstream because they are a motor of innovation since they are easily adapted to new applications. The author sees closed appliances such as tivos as a danger to innovation.
I too believe that PC are extremely important in our society. But I am not sure that the generalization of locked down internet-appliance would be a bad thing.
The main reason we are assaulted by spam and that botnets are rampant is that the average user is ignorant. A computer is a great tool and it's a very powerful one but as the other said "with power comes responsibility". But for a large portion of the users, the computer is a tool, that they use for a rather limited set of applications, and they have no deep understanding of how it works and what they have to do to use it properly : we can see that in the inability of so many to secure their computers.
To use the sacrosanct car analogy, computers are like cars that you can drive without license. Since you don't need a license, people don't bother learning how to operate it properly : they are not interested and I can understand that. The problem is that now computers are interconnected and interact with others computers the same as cars interact with other cars on the road. You could very well operate your car without learning anything other than how to turn it on and accelerate but in that case, it is required that every drivers learn how to use turning light and other things before they can go on the road so that they don't impact the welfare as the other users.
On the other hand, I'm sure that , those problems will be reduced in the future as children that have been brought up around computers and the internet will be more computer literate than their parents but the general level of computer illiteracy I see around me makes me think that it will take a long long time before the average joe can be trusted with a computer.
What could be done to reduce this problem :
-Nothing. Things are going to worsen but there is probably nothing we can do.
-Let OS vendors turn to trusted computing but that would destroy the power and usefulness of General Purpose computer for everybody.
-Hope people will turn to easy-to use appliance like device.
I think we are indeed seeing that on a level : we can already find appliance-like locked down computers in many houses : tivos, xbox, playstation, they all are lockdown computers. Not everybody need a PC and I think it would be good if people had the choice not to get a real PC if they don't have the skills to use it.
If they want it unregulated, they need to use only private land. Since they use public easements, the public has a right to regulate it through the Government. The Government should serve the people. In this case, it is of everyone's interest to allow companies to use the public easements -- companies stay in business and the public gets a valuable service from it. At no time should any concession be given to companies that require public property to operate. If a company disappears because they cannot serve the public appropriately, other companies will quickly fill the void.
I understand your analogy, but isn't it a bit specious? Did you ever fear being gunned down like a dog while running your shell account? ;^)
Yes, we all fear. Isn't it obvious:
"Don't forget your anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-phishing!"
"Do you know of a good spam filter?
"You need a good firewall, I recommend XYZ!"
"Internet Explorer isn't secure, get Firefox"
"You absolutely need to be always patched with the latest fixes?"
"I have all my ports closed but 80 and 443, even on those I'm having special rules setup."
"Drive-By Downloads: definition"
"Spammers attack back anti-spam site with DoS attack"
Does it sound like the Internet is a safe and happy place?
But here, I'll extend the analogy even further and explain the reasons: every single industry/society in the history so far is moving in cycles:
1. First cycle is early adopters, accidentally stumbling upon something new, people who use and develop something for the hell of it, without the general public realizing what it may be useful for (Columbus accidentally stumbling upon USA and thinking it's India)
2. Free phase: great for innovation, since the entry level is ridiculously low, anyone gets a chance, but there's no stability, no control, and that limits the use of previously mentioned innovation (wild west phase).
3. Police State phase: everything is legislated, entry level is high, but there's stability, so that you can rely upon the inventions of phase "2". There's still some innovation going on, but people rely on stability a lot more.
So there we go. Things that happen in the wild west phase don't keep repeating forever. There won't be a new Google every few years, for example, just like there won't be new Microsoft any time soon. Search engine has been invented and working well enough already, we'll mostly see legislation and increase in stability in this area. Innovation will happen elsewhere.
In the great Slashdot spirit of car analogies, I'll also ask you to imagine road without legislation. Sure, if this was the case, we'd have most problems with technology: much more intelligent, sturdier cars, cars that can take huge impact and the passengers will survive.
But they'll also cost a lot more in money and time to maintain and be sure the next time you crash you won't be dead, since it'll be perfectly legal to drive drunk zig-zag accross the road.
Some form of neutrality and fair competition enforcement is necessary indeed, given the big ISP oligopoly that currently exists. But it wasn't big business that made the Internet popular, rather, they encroached and grew alongside it. Proprietary services like Compuserve and others died or, like AOL, were forced to open to the "free" Internet in order to survive. If big ISPs try to go back to walled gardens, they will wither and die like their predecessors, so in that sense we don't really need legislation to curb their greed: let them try to charge more & in new ways, and fail it.
^[:q!
I do the same thing, in terms of archiving and locally mirroring anything and everything I think I will find useful.
That means I have the entire NetBSD distfiles (source tarballs) for a fairly recent Pkgsrc version ("make mirror-distfiles" is your friend,) and data and info for all the equipment, etc. that I have or want. Also it's important to grab old stuff while you can, like collections of OS/2 applications, and even Simtelnet's MS-DOS archives.
Not because I assume it will all one-day go away. Because I KNOW lots of it will go away, because a lot of it already has.
Did you ever fear being gunned down like a dog while running your shell account?
There is some doubt you would have had this fear in the "wild west" anyway. http://www.mises.org/story/1449 There would probably be places in the now "civilised" US that you would be more likely to be killed than in the wild west.
"in many places like Dodge City, tales of violence were actually accentuated to appeal to the tourist trade in the latter years of the Frontier."
"the excitement in the Old West in general has been much overstated. All the big cattle towns of Kansas combined saw a total of 45 murders during the period of 1870-1885. Dodge City alone saw 15 people die violently from 1876-1885--an average of 1.5 per year. Deadwood, South Dakota and Tombstone, Arizona (home of the O.K. Corral), during their worst years of violence saw four and five murders respectively. Vigilante violence appears to not have been much worse."
http://marriedmansexlife.com/