World wide web father Tim Berners-Lee told politicians on Thursday that it’s critical to shield his seminal innovation from control by a single company or country. A top priority for policymakers going forward must be “making sure the web itself is the blank sheet, the blank canvas, something that does not constrain the innovation that’s around the corner,” the knighted engineer told a US House of Representatives panel that writes internet and telecommunications laws.
I can see the lawmakers shaking their heads and wondering what in blazes TBL is on about… you can see it with the more classic responses like “Isn’t that like having a speed limit without enforcement” or “How are people supposed to get paid”
Questions software freedom advocates, anti-DRM types and the ‘web freedom’ folks either respond to with non-answer marketspeak (just look at the whole FSF website) or the blank ‘thousand yard stare’.
There is just this… Naivete to the whole subject – The DRM folks actually believe you can stop piracy through software (NEWS – software can be CHANGED) while the anti-DRM folks try to soft sell the concept that given a chance people will actually behave of their own free will (which is just plain manure – naivete at it’s worst)
Because there’s legal, and then there’s what people DO.
As sad as it is, the web NEEDS rules and regulations – otherwise we’d be knee deep in kiddy porn and snuff films (or at least, more so than we are now). Media NEEDS royalties otherwise there is no way for anyone along the distribution route to actually make a living doing it (for every rich performing artist, there are people making a decent living setting up distribution, trucking CD’s around the country, minimum wag pressing CD’s, stocking shelves, and people making minimum wage pressing CD’s and running injection molders to make the jewel cases) and software needs to cost money so the programmers can make a living doing it as their day job – instead of being the province of college kids having life paid for by mommy and daddy, career educators and lecturers, and hobbyists for whom programming is NOT their day job.
But that’s a reality the ‘free as in freedom’ folks often seem to ignore. Makes one question what reality THEY live in. This isn’t the 1960’s and this ain’t no commune.
While I agree with what you’re saying, I don’t think that’s the issue here. The issue here is that the internet is currently a loosely regulated free-for-all where everyone can potentially have a say. With Net Neutrality up for grabs the worry is that, say, some big corporation will use its influence to prevent people from reading the blog where someone blows the whistle on them… (outlandish distopian worst-case scenario, but there you go)
Right now there’s a free exchange of ideas; the little guy can step forward and tell his side of the story (not that I’ve seen much of that myself, though I did read The Interceptor blog from the New Orleans ISP during the Hurricane Katrina disaster). In a regulated and controlled future, how much freedom will go away? I recall reading that many ISPs have promised they’d still let you visit all sorts of websites even without Net Neutrality (in which case, why are they so interested in seeing it done away with?) but… Without that guarantee there’s the possibility of abuse, which means sooner or later someone’s going to try. Given the way we use the internet now for nearly everything, there are enormous financial incentives to do so.
Both now and in a hypothetical mega-regulated future people can get in trouble for doing illegal things online. The biggest issue (or at least, my problem with the possibility of Net Neutrality going away) is not preventing people from doing illegal things online; the issue is preventing people from doing things that are NOT illegal- simple, silly things.
Because there’s legal, and then there’s what people DO.
If people are generally doing something “illegal”, one can only conclude the law is illegal since it does not reflect the will of the people. We live in democracies, and therefore the only legal laws are those that people follow. If the law is broken by the majority the law is void.
And no. Software does NOT need to cost money. It’s nice when you can charge for it, but it doesn’t _have_ to cost anything. And no. The Web DOES NOT need rules and regulations. Rules and especially regulations are in opposition to freedom and democracy.
Here is a hint for you: Technology evolves. Technology replaces people. People gets unemployed and must be moved to other work areas. Tractors replaced people at farms, cars replaced horses, the car has mostly replaced cabs, the busses replaced trains (except in high density areas and for longer distance travelling). And so on.
The CD and the DVD is about to be deprecated because of technological innovations. There is no longer a distribution route, nobody is required to transport CDs, DVDs, pressing CD or anything. Most of these can be laid off, making for much cheaper distribution. Too bad some might say, but this is reality. Technology replaces humans. Cope with it.
and software needs to cost money so the programmers can make a living doing it as their day job – instead of being the province of college kids having life paid for by mommy and daddy, career educators and lecturers, and hobbyists for whom programming is NOT their day job.
Okay. You want to make it illegal to share code. You want to abolish free speech (free as in freedom, and not free as in gratis) and the right to free communication as guaranteed by UN’s world declaration of human rights (free as in free speech and not free as in gratis). Why should it be illegal for people to distribute code freely? What is wrong for “hobbyists” to code and distribute through the net? Is it because you cannot compete?
You seem to want to live in 1990’es. Well, hello!! This is democracy, this is freedom and we have moved on. Adapt or vanish!
“The Web DOES NOT need rules and regulations. Rules and especially regulations are in opposition to freedom and democracy”
Perhaps you don’t understand democracy very well. The only freedom critical to a democracy is the freedom of every citizen to have a say in what laws are made. A democratic society can quite legitimately choose to heavily restrict a range of freedoms.
In most democratic societies, the freedom to randomly stab people in the street is denied, for example.
Are you seriously suggesting that people should have the freedom to post child pornography or bomb making instructions on the web?
Of course the web needs rules and regulations, and a democratic society has every right to create rules and regulations to limit the freedom of people to do things that are dangerous or immoral.
Democracy and freedom are two distinct things. Absolute and unlimited freedom is not what democracy is about, you seem to be thinking of anarchy, which is quite a different kettle of fish.
Edited 2007-03-03 11:00
People in a Democracy do not have any “right” to restrict the freedoms of others. That they have the power of the state to *force* people to behave a certain way is one thing, but Democracy is, at its best, a tool that serves an end – hopefully freedom, in many cases, but mobocracy in others.
So no, a Democracy can not “quite legitimately” choose to heavily restrict anything. It can prevent things by *force of law*, but there’s nothing necessarily legitimate about that.
Societies have no “rights.” Individuals have rights. Societies can choose to recognize and protect those rights, or it can choose to abridge them. In a Democracy where the latter tends to be the case, there is nothing sacred or decent about that society.
The regulations you specifically mention – child pornography, for example – can be justified on the basis that the act of manufacturing this material violates the rights of the child (an individual), who cannot give consent. This is a position I am more than comfortable with.
Beyond which, there are – Thank God – far more alternatives to Democracy than anarchy. Constitutional monarchies and republics, for one, which can (at their best) protect the individual from the whims of the majority – or other parties, such as large corporations, which is principally what we are (I think) talking about here as per the Web.
These are the only kinds of societies I have any interest in living in, personally.
This may well be a semantic argument, but Democracy is just a neutral tool which can be a good one when it serves freedom, or a horrific one, when it serves the whims of an irrational and decadent majority. Imagine a democracy with a populace formed exclusively by fundamentalist religious nuts of your choosing. Would such a society then have the right to, say, stone people to death for wearing the wrong kind of clothes?
I certainly don’t think so. The power, yes – the right? No.
The difficulty of the Web has been in the way it has been funded. I will say that in the event that a networking company decides to allocate bandwidth unevenly according to its economic interests, at bare minimum, any and all taxpayer-provided funds that that company has happily accepted throughout the years should be paid back, with interest, to the taxpayers.
Likewise any and all special legal privileges (including but not limited to those privileges which allow the company to act as a natural monopoly) should be revoked. In addition, these sort of things should be taken into account when the company is considered for government contracts in the future.
One of the things which definitely needs revisiting are the special privileges many of our states have granted to corporations – “corporate personhood,” for one. I have no objection to the existence of large companies, but I think many of these companies have become too powerful not out of economic, scientific, or engineering prowess, but out of special and illegitimate privileges bestowed upon them by various states of the world.
I’d like to see how these companies would behave and whether they would persevere in a *real* free market.
What are rights? Rights are nothing more than privileges agreed upon by society, either explicitly through a majority vote or implicitly through compliance with the decrees of an authority. There are no ‘rights’ that nebulously fall from the sky – what you call rights are arbitrary rules and ideals decided by a society as a whole, regardless of the opinions of any given individual in that society.
In practise, there are no rights (regardless of any abstract ideals you may have), only the privileges your fellow human beings collectively decide that you have. The ‘right’ (privilege) of freedom must necessarily be constrained in order for a social structure of any sort to exist. A society inherently requires that individuals give up some of their freedoms in exchange for the benefits of living together as a cohesive social group.
In a democracy, it is the people (usually through proxies or representatives) who create the laws that they choose to impose upon themselves, to limit certain freedoms and allow others. Even in a dictatorship, a dictator cannot do anything without the implicit consent and compliance of the majority of the people, and regardless of the formalities of social governance, in all societies, the social contract necessitates limitations on individual freedoms for the greater good. Any collective of human beings where there are no mutually agreed limitations on individual freedoms is not a society at all, just a collection of self-centred misanthropic individualists.
In economies, a genuinely free market is a Very Bad Thing – some things require regulation for the greater good of a society.
For example, a nuclear power plant operating in a free market might decide that it will be better for them to dump their radioactive waste near a town with no containment of any sort. No sane society would allow this, which is why most people demand that their governments heavily regulate (ie limit the freedoms of) the nuclear power industry.
I The Web DOES NOT need rules and regulations. Rules and especially regulations are in opposition to freedom and democracy.
Guess what? I know you didn’t mean to do this, but you just sided with the U.S. lawmakers who are AGAINST net neutrality. The main argument AGAINST it is that the web should not be regulated. In order to ensure net neutrality, on the other hand, the net actually DOES NEED TO BE regulated.
This does not equate with the government firewalling our free speech. It simply has to do with making sure the companies that own the infrastructure by which we access the net (as well as owning parts of the backbone of the net itself) do not stifle innovation and artificially increase or fix prices for consumers simply because it is in their interests. Again, net neutrality REQUIRES REGULATION. If you really don’t believe in any sort of regulation, then I guess you’ll be okay with being deprived of or charged ridiculous amounts for using Skype or YouTube. If that is indeed your opinion, fine, but don’t come crying when your free speech ends up being limited not by the government, but by the corporations that control the wires.
TBL is right. The web should be completely free and unrestricted. Freedom in cyberspace drives creativity, innovation, and a global free market economy. The web is the ultimate communication media we have. It’s two way, it’s interactive – it can be made to do whatever, virtually. Let’s keep it that way. After all, how many 12 year olds had their material read by thousands of people before the web? How many public forums of open debate, on any subject, were there before the web? How many people had a voice, before the web? The answer is: not many. The barrier to entry to mass communication was prohibitively high. Only corporations, politicians, and the occasionally millionaire/billionaire could afford it. The web has transformed that. Instead of being a politically-charged money and power struggle, the unique nature of the web lays bare the essentials needed to capture an audience: creativity, innovation, and content. Sure, there is spam, and internet hoaxes, and money scams, etc etc. But the free nature of the web allows it to regulate itself. A supply and demand of content(/media/etc) and viewers(/users/consumers/etc).
And I think the unsaid reciprocal half of your statement is the real problem. Corporations, politicians and the politically connected/wealthy are now confronted with something they can’t control, can’t buy, and can’t make money off of. Here the playing field is substantially more level, and that scares them.
“Here the playing field is substantially more level, and that scares them.”
Good point! It’s been my observation that fear is a primary motivator for the vast majority of people. Actions that come from that fear or very often self destructive. Specifically what I mean is that government and/or corporate control of the net would actually hurt everyone, imo.
In the 80s and early 90s a powerful base of Internet designers and advocates were very libertarian in thinking, as far as Internet freedom was concerned. It’s really paid off. The net isn’t perfect, no, but its strengths vastly outweigh its weaknesses. I, for one, love having those weaknesses (spam, etc) because they also come with the strengths — freedom of speech. Okay in China and other countries they don’t have that but…..
Edited 2007-03-03 07:52
Must sting a bit to see the web evolving to where there is such a large share of it’s information being bottled up in proprietary plug-ins.
reminiscent to the ignorant legal questions back in the early 70s to Dr. Leary regarding his testimonies and concerns that the Federal Government legalize certain drugs only if the Fed let the American Medical Association test, certify and control dispersion of it.
In the end, Senator Ted Kennedy kept calling Leary unresponsive for not being willing to deflect his focus and agree or disagree to the “present danger” of legalizing these drugs to the general public.
The Fed wasn’t interested in expanding the fields of Neurosciences anymore than they’re interested in keeping the ubiquitous realms of the Internet a level playing field where vision, business acumen and courage are all fostered, without the need of venture capital.
The Fed wasn’t interested in expanding the fields of Neurosciences anymore than they’re interested in keeping the ubiquitous realms of the Internet a level playing field where vision, business acumen and courage are all fostered, without the need of venture capital.
Well that’s a rather cynical view, and a rather distorted one at that. Legalizing drugs and implementing net neutrality laws are two completely different situations, in just about every way.
Net neutrality is not a fringe issue. About half of the government, as well as important lobbies such as the consumer’s lobby, support it. Maybe that’s because unlike drugs, which actually can endanger health, net neutrality is incapable of anything like this. (Unless you want to make the analogy that it could risk the health of the telecom corporations. But there’s really not much of a case for that.) The politician that invited Berners-Lee did so because he agreed with him, not because he wanted to belittle him. So one stupid senator asked him a stupid question. Big deal. It wasn’t even related to net neutrality.
I might also point out that unlike the drug trade, the government already regulates the net, believe it or not. The U.S. government oversees ICANN, which administers domain names for the entire world. So I don’t see how the analogy of wanting to regulate drugs in the 70s fits at all, except in the sense of “oh I hate the U.S. government they suck and they want to ruin everything that’s good in the world just like the drug case.”
The point of Leary’s research was clinical. The results of the Fed made the drug culture what it is today, a fringe Society. Instead of using Leary’s work to address Alzheimer’s, Cancer, and other clinical diseases, it resulted in a massive surge of hedonistic use that Leary himself saw as a misuse of the drugs.
My point is simple: Let the overseeing standards bodies in the industries that make the Internet regulate it.
Let the Fed interface with this consortium and when necessary address any concerns raised by consumers about unfair business practices. If necessary, step in and help restore the playing field without taking over the playing field.
Edited 2007-03-03 20:10