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Open Letter By Eric S. Raymond To Chris Dodd
An anonymous reader writes "ESR, one of the finest engineers behind the open source movement and much of the software we use everyday, writes an open letter to U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd. ESR points out the concerns of 'the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century' about politicians attempts to lock down our Internet or our tools. A portion of the letter reads: 'I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
To understand that, you have to grasp that “the Internet” isn’t just a network of wires and switches, it’s also a sort of reactive social organism composed of the people who keep those wires humming and those switches clicking. John Gilmore is one of them. I’m another. And there are some things we will not stand having done to our network.'"
That guy hypes himself way too much.
This is my sig.
The fact is that there is a serious choke point for the vast majority of users (in the U.S. at least). A handful of big name companies control almost all the broadband ISP's and trunk lines in the U.S. You can't very easily "route around it" if the few providers in your area are censored. In my area, you can choose from 1 cable ISP, 1 DSL ISP, and 3 major cell providers. All five of these are major companies who would bow to the government in an instant if asked. If they were all effectively censored, there would be nowhere to turn save a satellite provider.
There are always ways around censorship for the hardcore techies, of course. But it really wouldn't be that hard to censor the internet for 99% of the population if the government really wanted to.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
And how do you suppose you're going to do so? You don't own the backbone, you don't own any of the fiber connecting you to your ISP, you don't own any of the switches and routers, you don't own any of the software (since most of what runs the internet is BSD and is easily forked). So exactly how are you going to "take it back" when all the infrastructure is owned by others?
I'm getting sick of hearing the propaganda terms "lockdown" and "crackdown" used in place of the correct term, oppression. Are we too afraid to say it? Not politically correct enough? Can't admit our own reality to ourselves? Fuck that.
Let's call a spade a spade here. The terms "crackdown" and "lockdown" imply that the victim was doing something wrong or immoral in the first place. THAT is exactly why government and the media use these terms. They are "self-justified". They are deliberately false depictions of reality. It's pure propaganda, but the amazing part is that some victims will actually repeat the terms themselves.
The correct term, oppression, implies that the victim is innocent, not guilty -- and that the oppressors are guilty, not merely "getting around to that crackdown". For christ's sake, use the correct term.
"...there are some things we will not stand having done to our network." (emphasis mine)
That is exactly how I feel. As a Network Engineer myself I share their frustration with old, grumpy, white men who sit on capital hill raining down laws that would effect my job and customers without understanding the technology itself, nor the gravity their actions would have on the Internet community at large. I've watched the hours long C-SPAN videos of the hearings with the SINGLE Google representative they invited as an "expert" only to see her get cut-off and publicly flogged and discredited, while old men who had to read basic networking terms such as "internet", "Internet" (they are not interchangeable), "IP Address" and "DNS" off a prepared piece of paper, listed the "merits" of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA. Especially from a security standpoint, the amount of negative repercussions to censoring the internet along the same lines as China could be catastrophic, and that is before even considering its' effect on free speech.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
ESR is no different in this case as he has his own agenda he is trying to push.
You are more right than you realize. ESR considers himself one of the Open Source greats despite that his largest contribution is that he maintained the termcap db and his is the first I've heard anything from him since Linus Torvalds refused his rewrite of the kernel config system. Not to mention his self proclaimed expertise in lovemaking.
His main function in life is to be what bloggers were before we called them bloggers and really isn't someone we need or want as a spokesman.
I was with you, Eric, right up until you called the media industry execs "stupid" and "dimwits". Your arguments were clear and well stated right up to that point. However, when you call your audience dimwits, they stop listening and discount anything you've said up to that point. This is a great shame, because your letter was incredibly persuasive and non-ranty up to that moment.
Apache guy, Open Source enthusiast, runner
There is a difference between the people who use it, the people who own it, the people who run it. And most of the people who run the core stuff are on the same page.
You may be a user, but that doesn't make you part of the culture that ESR is referring to . He's talking about the culture of the people who actually work on and in the Internet. The people who would of course care about how it is used, as opposed to the people who use it and have no idea of how it works, or how it could be damaged and what the damage may do to the Internet as a whole.