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Craig Mundie Wants "Internet Driver's Licenses"
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer, called for the creation of an 'Internet Driver's License' at the World Economic Forum in Davos, saying, 'If you want to drive a car you have to have a license to say that you are capable of driving a car, the car has to pass a test to say it is fit to drive and you have to have insurance.' Of course, there are quite a few problems with this. For starters, internet use cannot yet cause death or dismemberment like car accidents can; and this would get rid of most of the good of internet anonymity while retaining all of the bad parts, especially in terms of expanding the market for stolen identities. Even though telephone networks have long been used by scammers and spammers/telemarketers, we've never needed a 'Telephone Driver's License.'"
... if it's limited to people who *want to use windows* :-)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
...and shouts to the four winds "I'm an Idiot!"
"Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer...
Oh, the irony. In the history of this beloved yet hated company, there has never been so much explained in so few words...
This idea is so asinine that I can't really tell if this guy was drunk, high, or just plain stupid when he came up with it. In fact, it is so asinine that if it were to ever come to light, his would be the first one I would revoke.
As with all ideas, the only true arbiter of this proposal's utility is - and should be - the free market. If people are want to pay for an internet license, why shouldn't they be free to? I expect a lot of the same Linux liberals here on /. that bank on big government protectionism (in the form of the copyright laws that make anti-competitive devices like the GPL possible) will be the first to decry this potential market, they would love to regulate the internet to the point where sharing your CPU, memory, and all your intellectual property with everyone else on the network is compulsory.
A lot of the concerns in this case are overblown FUD. There is no motive for licensing companies to exploit their positions as gatekeepers of the public trust. It would be entirely against their interests to allow the types of activities in the summary to go on and if some should stray, the freedom of consumer choice as exercised in a free market would quickly put them out of business
Anyone who disagrees with this just doesn't understand that free markets have never really been tried. Any cases where unregulated free markets appeared to fail were really due to the inefficiency of big government, which can of course never be responsible for anyone's economic gains, but universally presides over private industry's failures. How cruel that this Craig Mundie will have his entrepreneurial spirit mocked and torn down by leeches with no innovative drives of their own, on the very internet which he is trying to protect.
For shame.