FCC plan for open internet ‘perfect,’ Lessig – Chairman Julius Genachowski
“Preserving a Free and Open Internet: A Platform for Innovation, Opportunity, and Prosperity”
The fact is that we face great challenges as a nation right now, including health care, education, energy, and public safety. While the Internet alone will not provide a complete solution to any of them, it can and must play a critical role in solving each one.
And let us not forget that the open Internet enables much more than commerce. It is also an unprecedented platform for speech, democratic engagement, and a culture that prizes creative new ways of approaching old problems.
The lesson of each of these stories, and innumerable others like them, is that we cannot know what tomorrow holds on the Internet, except that it will be unexpected; that the genius of American innovators is unlimited; and that the fewer obstacles these innovators face in bringing their work to the world, the greater our opportunity as citizens and as a nation.
I am convinced that there are few goals more essential in the communications landscape than preserving and maintaining an open and robust Internet. I also know that achieving this goal will take an approach that is smart about technology, smart about markets, smart about law and policy, and smart about the lessons of history.
The fifth principle is one of non-discrimination — stating that broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications.
The sixth principle is a transparency principle — stating that providers of broadband Internet access must be transparent about their network management practices.
We have an obligation to ensure that the Internet is an enduring engine for U.S. economic growth, and a foundation for democracy in the 21st century. We have an obligation to ensure that the Internet remains a vast landscape of innovation and opportunity.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski
Re-Publish – The Pirate Bay: ‘Political trial of the decade’
The Pirate Bay: ‘Political trial of the decade’
The world has changed. Technical developments allow all of us to collect, store and share digitized information on an unimagined scale. The cost of storage, bandwidth and processing power is, for business purposes, essentially zero.
So the world has changed, and will continue to change. But it can change in two entirely different directions, depending on who lays claim to this fantastic tool.
On the one side, there is the public. Every human with access to the Internet has received fingertip round-the-clock access to all of humanity’s collective knowledge and culture. This is a fantastic leap ahead for mankind – much larger than when public libraries arrived 160 years ago, and comparable to how society changed with the arrival of the printing press.
On the other side, there are the current people in power, who would like to harness this power to build a surveillance machine – collecting information about regular Joes, and actively preventing the free exchange of ideas – that would make George Orwell look like a cheery, skipping optimist. Many powerful institutions are pulling in this direction.
The trial against the operators of The Pirate Bay, which starts next Monday, offers a glimpse into these two possible futures going head to head with each other. The trial is not about copyright infringement, it is about the power over knowledge and culture as such.
Behold, for instance, the prosecutor’s list of witnesses. Usually, you would expect a witness to have some sort of firsthand observation of the action being on trial. Here, it’s bigwigs from across the media industry. Managers of institutions. It’s not the operators as individuals that are on trial, it’s what the establishment regards as a threat to their society – the pervasive youth culture of freely exchanging culture and knowledge.
Consider, for instance, what one of the witnesses said in an interview recently. Rasmus Ramstad, CEO of Svensk Filmindustri, stated that all Internet providers that allow (!) access to sites like (!) The Pirate Bay should be shut down. This amounts to abolishing the postal secret, and requiring the Internet as a concept to be closed down.
What scares the establishment is that everybody are equals on the net. Everybody can share and receive freely. There is no central point of control. They are fighting tooth and nail to bring back the good old days, where there was a hard division into approved senders and passive consumer receivers, where the approved senders would compete for the wallet of the consumers. Essentially, they are trying to turn the Internet into a cable TV network.
At the same time, Big Brother is enacting new laws to store how we move through town in our daily lives for a year.
I’m hoping and working for the Utopian alternative to the two above. But it’s going to take a lot of political change. Politicians don’t understand what is at stake, and appear uninterested in anything other than progressing the Big Brother dystopia. The only recourse at present is to have them replaced.
Rick Falkvinge
Party Leader, The Pirate Party
Time to wake up…
On the eve of the swearing in of President Obama, I have been taking stock on what I call ‘The Online World’ and my role.
LOL – as if I really have any role, more likely that of a virtual lizard, skittering across a virtual rock, my tiny talons scrabbling for purchase as I slide down the rock face, into the abyss.
I have excellent impulses, but I am easily distracted, and I find myself doing a great deal of triage, working with wacky open source products. I have finally found a couple of hard core PHP/SQL playahs who kin help me stem the times of malware and teenage defacers, but the tide I find myself surfing these days ends up being a bit too bleeding edge for my liking.
So I am here, working it out on the fly, keeping hopeful…
