Like Democracy, the Web Needs To Be Defended

climenole tips a great article by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in Scientific American. Quoting: "The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles. The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments — totalitarian and democratic alike — are monitoring people's online habits, endangering important human rights. If we, the Web's users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want."

Comments

Begs a question

[smagruder]

Are there really many human beings defending small 'd' democratic values, period?

software patents; mentioned, albeit briefly

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Software patents are one of the biggest threats. Writing a website is writing software, and having a website today is essential for many parts of our democracy. Campaigns on issues or for candidates need websites. Further, writing software is an important freedom in itself, like the freedom to write a book. Most people will never do either, but we all benefit from the small percentage of people who do.

Writing functional software often means reading and writing common data formats, so a patent on a format turns into a veto on others being able to write functional software in that domain.

(In reality, political candidates will never get threatened by patent owners - the patent owners don't want the politicians to feel first-hand how much of a problem it is.)

Berners-Lee makes a quick reference to it in TFA:

Openness also means you can build your own Web site or company without anyone's approval. When the Web began, I did not have to obtain permission or pay royalties to use the Internet's own open standards, such as the well-known transmission control protocol (TCP) and Internet protocol (IP). Similarly, the Web Consortium's royalty-free patent policy says that the companies, universities and individuals who contribute to the development of a standard must agree they will not charge royalties to anyone who may use the standard.

• Tim Berners Lee on software patents
• Webpage and e-commerce patents
• Freedom of expression

Re:Devil's Advocate: What about competition?

[Qzukk]

Worked great for Compuserve and AOL back in the day.

The way I figure it will play out, the major telcos will do it quickly followed by everyone else when Google, iTunes and Amazon cave and pay the protection money. It'll suck for 10 years or so, amazon.com and others will eventually close up shop, people will get bored with AT&TOL and go back to cable tv for their hundreds of channels of nothing important. Companies will stop buying "keywords", and when AT&TOL is begging for people to please give them a try because they put the internets in your computer, someone else will finally step up to the plate and either force cities to break their franchise agreements or manage to con the banks out of enough financing to buy up significant chunks of good wireless spectrum and start selling "the real internet". A .com boom will take off again as people discover that they can go to all sorts of websites, not just the ISP-sanctioned keywords, and we'll be back in the late 90's again before you know it... just in time for the y2038 crisis.