Quotation Of The Day: Net Neutrality With Very Brief Comment Edition

From this IO9.com post:

[Eliminating net neutrality] is the first step toward a world where corporate monopolies on content start affecting not just what you can see and read online — but also how you gain access to it. The signal will be out there, but your ISP just won't deliver it to you.

An internet without network neutrality will look a lot like television does now. You'll depend entirely on your cable company to get broadcasts, and they will only deliver their handpicked channels in their cable packages. There will probably be a little room for the web equivalent of public access television, but it will be so underfunded and slow to load that almost nobody will see it.

The post is in response to proposed F.C.C. rules changes. This decision is just one more item on the list of reasons that makes me glad I did not vote to re-elect President Obama. I really can't imagine a Mitt Romney administration being able to give away more to corporate America than the Obama administration has during the past two years.

Quotation Of Day: Who Controls The Web Browser Controls The Country Edition

I seriously may have trouble sleeping after reading this David Frum post:

. . . something like half the country continues to use some version of Internet Explorer. Many of these people open up to whatever Microsoft has set for them as their home page, and they gather their news from whatever happens to show up there. They're probably swing voters too.

The most important question in American politics in the next month will be: who gets the blame for a government shut down - or, even more terrifying, an outright default. That question will likely be settled by people who do not know how to change the default settings on an Internet browser.

Quotation Of The Day: Breaking The Internet Edition

First, the context from this Washington Post article:

. . .  one of the world’s most popular browsers, Firefox, is experimenting with new restrictions on the use of cookies — bits of computer code that allow companies to monitor users as they move among Web sites.

The news has sparked a fervent debate about the economic value of online tracking and the importance of cookies to the smooth functioning of the digital world. On the day of Firefox’s announcement last month, an official from the Interactive Advertising Bureau tweeted that the browser’s maker had launched “a nuclear first strike” against the industry.

And then the response:

“We’re at the risk of an arms race here,” said Peter Swire, a Clinton administration privacy expert who is now an Ohio State University law professor. “This could break the Internet. It interferes with existing browsing modules, and it puts bigger pressure on users to take escalating steps to protect their privacy.”

The Internet: Idealism And Unintend Consequences

Evgeny Morozov gives a history lesson of the Web and declares that it is "a utopia no longer."

The people who "founded" or "created" the internet fell into two camps:  engineers and cheerleaders.  The engineers seem to combine hippie and communitarian streams of thought.  They may have been a bit naive.

But studying the history of the internet is impossible without studying the ideas, biases, and desires of its early cheerleaders, a group distinct from the engineers. This included Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, John Perry Barlow, and the crowd that coalesced around Wired magazine after its launch in 1993. They were male, California-based, and had fond memories of the tumultuous hedonism of the 1960s.

These men emphasised the importance of community and shared experiences; they viewed humans as essentially good, influenced by rational deliberation, and tending towards co-operation. Anti-Hobbesian at heart, they viewed the state and its institutions as an obstacle to be overcome—and what better way to transcend them than via cyberspace? Their values had profound effects on the mechanics of the internet, not all of them positive. The proliferation of spam and cybercrime is, in part, the consequence of their failure to predict what might happen as a result of the internet’s open infrastructure. The first spam message dates back to 1978; now, 85 per cent of all email traffic in the world is spam. [emphasis mine]

 As the last sentence in the prior quotation illustrates, freedom has some unintended consequences.  There were of course others.

While we are being empowered as consumers, we are simultaneously being disempowered as citizens, something that the cyber-libertarian digital prophets didn’t foresee. “Electronic town halls” never took off either. When Barack Obama tried to hold one shortly after being elected president, the most popular question posed to him concerned the legalisation of mari-juana. The internet does not and cannot replace politics—it augments and amplifies it. The Tea Party in the US does not limit its activism to social media, but uses it as part of a broader political campaign. Politics is still primary and technology secondary.

However, one set of intermediaries may well be on the decline—print media—which has been quickly jettisoned by the younger generation. Search engines and social networking sites hold as much power today as newspapers and radio stations did three decades ago. The fact that they prefer to disguise their editorial practices in the form of nominally objective algorithms doesn’t make them any less political and influential. [emphasis mine.]

As with almost any situation, the second generation must determine how to proceed.

The founding fathers of the internet had laudable instincts: the utopian vision of the internet as a shared space to maximise communal welfare is a good template to work from. But they got co-opted by big money, and became trapped in the self-empowerment discourse that was just an ideological ruse to conceal the interests of big companies and minimise government intervention.

The current state of affairs is not irreversible. We still have some privacy left and internet companies can still be swayed by smart regulation. But we need to stop thinking of the internet as a marketplace first and a public forum second. What is long overdue is a fundamental reconsideration of the primacy of the internet’s civic and aesthetic dimensions. It’s time to decide whether we want the internet to look like a private mall or a public square. [emphasis mine]

Ignoring Orwell and Madison

Via big boy blogger Andrew Sullivan, this post provides more proof that English teachers have failed when they teach Orwell.  The Obama administration and the FBI want to avoid the messy court system and just force ISPs to turn over customer records without a court order.

The original Washington Post article states that the FBI wants to use "national security letters . . . which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, [and] require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret."  The article quotes Stewart A. Baker, a former senior Bush administration Homeland Security official,  who says "the proposed change would broaden the bureau's authority. "It'll be faster and easier to get the data," said Baker, who practices national security and surveillance law"

Well let's do it then! Who can question the idea that the government should have things easier?  After all isn't the problem that government is too bloated and inefficient?  The most logical solution is to make it easier for government to invade privacy.

On the other hand, a wise man once told me that following the course of least resistance is what makes rivers and men crooked.  James Madison, an even wiser man, asked a great question in Federalist 51:  "But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?"  Madison concludes, "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself"

Given that the legislation purpose is to make life "easier" for the government and given that looking for ease is a problem that may lead to corruption, wouldn't it be better to make it more difficult for "the greatest" and most powerful reflection of human nature to spy on its citizens?

However, if we Americans are going to forget  basic folk wisdom about men and rivers and Madison's more intellectual musings, we'll probably not raise a fuss about this assault on liberty.

Just When I Was Getting Ready To Convert To Cyber Utopianism--

This Foreign Policy article made me get all warm and cynical again.  The whole article is worth a read, but this summary says it all.

Two decades in, the Internet has neither brought down dictators nor eliminated borders. It has certainly not ushered in a post-political age of rational and data-driven policymaking. It has sped up and amplified many existing forces at work in the world, often making politics more combustible and unpredictable. Increasingly, the Internet looks like a hypercharged version of the real world, with all of its promise and perils, while the cyberutopia that the early Web enthusiasts predicted seems ever more illusory.

Oh well, I'm sure some administrator will figure out how to make the Internet revolutionize education and make teachers unnecessary.