We've all been jumping up and down about the Deep Dark Corporate future for the Internet. Some people have declared that there will be a revolution, whilst others have confidently restated old homilies. Most popular of these is "The Internet perceives censorship as damage, and routes around it."
I don't think there's much a government or a corporation can do about you or me. Where they exert real leverage over the net is in unified, single-point services. AOL, for example, controls enormous swaths of the Internet. This makes it a high-profile target for laws hostile to Internet freedoms. The Australian experience is that yes, Governments will go after big targets.
Wireless broadband is the backdoor out. Not necessarily the "transmit to base" kind advocated for wireless access companies, more the "point-to-point" kind which l0pht (amongst others) have tinkered with.
If people are determined to keep the Internet free, than the key is to have free tubes. Cheap, personal point-to-point networks can form small areas where Free cells can survive and even prosper. As these grow, they can link up, eventually providing uncontrolled tubes for the Internet to route uncensored material into.
Of course, it can be argued that such devices can be regulated. Of course they can, but not in the same easily-policed fashion as a single-point provider. If twenty million people have personal point-to-point, it won't be very practical to regulate them. Examples have been given where the FCC gave up on certain kinds of CB radios.
We shall see. If nothing else, somebody cursed the 21st century. These truly are interesting times...
At the risk of being assaulted by the fashionably anti-Slashdot crowd, I'd like to suggest that perhaps OpenLaw would benefit by reading and - better yet - participating in Slashdot discussions.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think there's much a government or a corporation can do about you or me. Where they exert real leverage over the net is in unified, single-point services. AOL, for example, controls enormous swaths of the Internet. This makes it a high-profile target for laws hostile to Internet freedoms. The Australian experience is that yes, Governments will go after big targets.
Wireless broadband is the backdoor out. Not necessarily the "transmit to base" kind advocated for wireless access companies, more the "point-to-point" kind which l0pht (amongst others) have tinkered with.
If people are determined to keep the Internet free, than the key is to have free tubes. Cheap, personal point-to-point networks can form small areas where Free cells can survive and even prosper. As these grow, they can link up, eventually providing uncontrolled tubes for the Internet to route uncensored material into.
Of course, it can be argued that such devices can be regulated. Of course they can, but not in the same easily-policed fashion as a single-point provider. If twenty million people have personal point-to-point, it won't be very practical to regulate them. Examples have been given where the FCC gave up on certain kinds of CB radios.
We shall see. If nothing else, somebody cursed the 21st century. These truly are interesting times ...
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