Tag Archives: Internet

FCC plan for open internet ‘perfect,’ Lessig – Chairman Julius Genachowski

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“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

FCC Statement of Net Neutrality

Doris Lessing thinks ‘blogging’ is not writing !

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I am with TechDirt on this one:

“Furthermore, as she goes on to lament a lack of interest in books as a necessary core for a new generation of writers, she mocks “blogging” which is actually helping more people write more than they would otherwise. It’s an elitist stance to suggest that just because it’s short-form and online it doesn’t matter. It’s also wrong. Studies have shown that students these days are much more comfortable writing — in large part because they spend so much more time communicating via the written word online.”

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men’s libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.

Out of touch is putting it mildly. There are great possibilities for text, reading, writing and the preservation of knowledge and history in it’s purest form because of the growth of the blogging community on the Internet.