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Jonathan Zittrain On the Future of the Internet
uctpjac writes "Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford and renowned cyberlaw scholar, gave a lecture explaining that the Internet has to be taken out of the hands of the anarchists, the libertarians, and the State, and handed back to self-policing communities of experts. If we don't do this, he believes the Internet will suffer 'self-closure' — the open system will seal itself off when the inability to put its own house in order leads to a take-over by government and business. The article summarizes Zittrain's points and notes, "Forces of organized interests that do not play by the rules, like malware peddlers, identity thieves and spammers are allowing another army of interests — corporate protectionists, often — to demand centralized, authoritarian solutions. This is the future of the Net unless we stop it.'"
The Internet is being monitored left and right. The USA is doing it big time as part of Bush's "patriot act". The Chinese are doing it big time for censorship and suppression of anything anti-Chinese communist. And the Russians are doing it too.
In fact, just about every government is at least monitoring it. Some are actively censoring it. Some use the information the glean to arrest, detain, and question citizens.
Governments even set up shill TOR sites so they can monitor traffic in and out of anonymizing services like TOR.
In short, your personal messages are not personal. And they are being read by an agency somewhere. And archived. They probably aren't being read by a human unless you managed to pique someone's interest, but they are at least being scanned by programs that look for key words and patterns and that are addressed to other persons of interest that might identify you as some kind of person of interest.
It is real and it's happening now.
> That article sure uses a a lot of words to say 'the web should be communist'.
Yup. The problem is most people, even people who profess to be socialists/communists, don't understand that aspect of it.
And of course anybody with two brain cells that function should be able to spot the obvious defect in such a scheme. Who decides who gets elevated above everyone else and installed as an 'expert?'
Self selected? Right. Just look at the fiasco going on in the US right now as we hurtle along at insane speed towards a socialist takeover of a medical system that is the envy of the world currently. Look who 'self selected' as experts. Not a doctor, insurance actuary or other actual expert in the bunch. All socialist politicians pushing variations of plans that have already been tried and failed in other places.... failed to improve medical care but succeeded at increasing the power of the politicians. Ah. Now the student should understand the flaw.
Free from outside influence? Only if nobody cares what is being decided. ISO did solid work when setting standards where nobody had much of an ax to grind as to exactly what was in a standard, but everybody stood to benefit from having A standard. But observe what happened when billions of dollars was on the line with MS-OOXML. Suddenly those dispasionate experts were for sale to the highest bidder, stacking the meetings with paid for warm bodies, etc.
So again, who is going to pick the experts and how does one keep them from undue influence? Answer, you can't. Any scheme which could pick the experts would itself have to exhibit the sort of dispasionate expertise and freedom from outside influence that would make it directly suitable as a system of governance.
This recurring dream stems from a basic dream. The truth is that a wise and just king is the best form of government possible. But they only occur rarely and nobody has ever produced a working system to get such men on thrones at even the rate they occur at random nature. And the converse is also true. A bad king/tyrant (which occures more frequently than good ones) is the more common variety, which is why few will make the argument for monarchy. But the unspoken yearning for an all wise philosopher king is what drives most left thinking these days. Witness the uproar over the Obamessiah.
Democrat delenda est
Libertarians are anarchists that don't like to call themselves anarchists. They favor dismantling the government, but imagine that doing so would somehow lead to an idyllic society. They think that the "invisible hand of the market" will regulate all aspects of society.
The problem is that in the real world societies that lack strong government institutions and services are less utopia, and more lord of the flies. Industry and commerce cannot exist without law and order. Libertarianism tends to come from people who have read a little Adam Smith, and not enough Thomas Hobbes.
Iraq and Afghanistan are good example's of countries suffering from the power vacuum created by the destruction of strong government institutions. In Iraq, it was the institutions of the central government that made commerce possible by preventing the widespread violence that we see today. When they were demolished, what followed was inevitable.