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The Web's Creator Thinks We Need a New One That Governments Can't Control (thenextweb.com)
The web has created millions of jobs, impacted nearly every industry, connected people, and arguably made the world a better place. But the person who started it all isn't exactly pleased with the way things have turned out to be. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, believes that the way it works in the present day "completely undermines the spirit of helping people create." The Next Web reports: "Edward Snowden showed we've inadvertently built the world's largest surveillance network with the web," said Brewster Kahle, who heads up Internet Archive. And he's not wrong: governments across the globe keep an eye on what their citizens are accessing online and some censor content on the Web in an effort to control what they think. To that end, Berners-Lee, Kahle and other pioneers of the modern Web are brainstorming ideas for a new kind of information network that can't be controlled by governments or powered by megacorporations like Amazon and Google.The New York Times originally reported on this and has more details. (But it is also paywalled.)
We need to remember that governments aren't the only ones who censor others. We see private entities do it all of the time, too. Heck, even Slashdot's moderation system is a great example of this. A small number of people can easily manipulate what content others will see. Remember, censorship doesn't need to involve the complete removal of information. Even just obscuring it, by say downmodding a perfectly fine comment to -1 so it isn't shown to most users by default, is a form of censorship.
Packet switching - aka ARPANET- was US funded. The IP/TCP/HTTP/HTML stack was developed at CERN, EU.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
It's based on the faulty idea that the government must be evil so you can't give them control over it.
The government is made of people - some good and some bad. As such, ALL governments do some good as well as some bad.
There is no way to have an internet with significantly less government control without a shit load more doxing, Blackmail, identity theft, sale of dangerous drugs, pedophilie videos, viruses, hacking and tons of other crimes.
Hell, the government can barely contain the crime on the internet now.
Which means any significantly 'freer' internet would end up being banned.
The BEST they could hope for is to create a specific libertarian UN empowered organization in charge of the free-web, giving it massive enforcement powers but only related to the free-web.
That libertarian organization could possibly maintain enough control over the internet to reign in mankind's darker side, and at the same time preventing regular governments from over-regulating and controlling it.
But make no mistake, it can only be done by ADDING a new layer of government to the internet, not by creating a new internet.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
As another poster already pointed out, radio is controlled by the FCC. More importantly, the FCC maintains a fleet of vans dedicated to finding pirate radio stations, and the USAF and USN have assets dedicated to jamming radios. Try again.
I find the notion of the web being an economic plus laughable. Sure it's created a lot of otherwise useless tech jobs, but the amount of jobs it's destroyed is almost immeasurable, including tech jobs through outsourcing. Retail jobs, banking jobs, etc. Absolute economic destruction that's rarely talked about except in reports of how many people have simply given up looking for work.
Not to mention how it's impossible to keep a good vacation spot or festival from being overrun with people to the point of no longer being good thanks to social media. And how you'd best hope your favorite restaurant or bar never gets a good review from someone with a following or you'll never get in again.
Real estate is the worst: the web has made possible the kind of long distance investing from deep pocket organizations that's priced people out of all kinds of places.
Corporate control of the web is a much bigger problem than governments are. They ruined it and they continue to do so. Governments need to be kept out of it too, no doubt, but keeping corporations out of peoples' business is paramount. The government can raid my house and shoot me, sure, but the odds of that are low. The odds of corporations spying on me, trying to optimize pricing so I pay more, trying to track everywhere I go and who I'm with, building up dossiers to make it hard to get insurance, etc. is at 100 percent. People need to focus on the immediate threat.
A couple of people, not many, we decided that, well, wouldn't it be really swell if we planted a few gardens. We're gardeners after all. Why not come together and show each other what we know about gardening? We could connect our gardens to each other, have our plants grow together, maybe we'll find some awesome symbiosis happening! And we did. And others came and looked at our garden. It was just a little garden, mind you, there was nobody to hold your hands when you tried to only walk around in them, there were few trails and most of the time you had to carve your own, carrying a machete with you was advisable. Most people turned away when they noticed that it's going to be a bit of work to just look at our flowers. Let alone plant their own garden. Because back then, if you wanted to be part of that gardening experience, you better learned a thing or two about gardening, and fast!
Yes, there was the occasional bully who jumped into our flowerbeds and trampled over them, but we knew how to deal with them. And deal with them we did, swiftly and with lasting effect. We were, after all, gardeners. And we were good at that.
More people came along and we were overjoyed. They're really interested in our stuff! You see, nobody really cared about our plants and everyone we showed any of them called us names because, well, it was not "cool" to plant flowers. But suddenly this was the next big thing, everyone wanted flowers! And we were only too eager to share all the knowledge. Hey, the more the merrier! Knowledge multiplies if you share it!
Well, to be honest... we shared more than just knowledge. There were a few flowerbeds that had those camo nets above them, but hey, ya know, who cares what you do in your spare time, amirite? Just pass it and don't bogard the spliff.
Then people came who said they wanted to build some roads through our gardens so people could walk more easily. We agreed, it was a good idea. After all, most people by now weren't really hard core gardeners anymore. Many just wanted to wander about and smell the flowers. And those that joined were... well, let's say they were happy if we gave them a few saplings because they had no clue at all how to grow plants but wanted some good looking flowerbeds too. We didn't mind. After all, hey, it's not like I don't have that flower anymore just because I give you a sapling of it, right? And we get roads across our garden.
A seed shop opened at the corner. We thought it's cool. Hey, that makes it easier to get seeds initially. Someone's gonna buy, and then we pass 'em around and ... so we thought. But suddenly passing seeds and saplings around wasn't "allowed" anymore. The cornerstone of what we built was considered "bad" now. By whom the fuck and who died and made you king, we asked. We dealt with it the way we knew how to deal with it. The same way we dealt with the bullies, or with others that broke the rules. Only to learn that the rules have changed. We no longer make them.
Long story short, our garden is now walled in. Most of the plots have been sold, or rather, "reappropriated". We're sitting in some corners, tucked away from the busy streets where vendors peddle boring, uninspired hybrid plants (that are of course patented and don't you DARE to as much as SHOW it to anyone, let alone hand him a sapling!) where the masses stumble about, not even knowing what gardening is, for it has been turned into a huge amusement park. Allegedly there is still a tree standing somewhere in what used to be our garden, I haven't seen one in a long time, though.
So we moved on. And we learned.
We built another garden.
And this time, we will not make the mistake to invite the masses in. Leave them their amusement park, and leave them in the blissful ignorance that they don't even know what they're missing.
They most likely even wouldn't want to know.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.