Whimsley: On the Media on The Social Media

Blogs and Bullets: Breaking Down Social Media - Whimsley

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Net Neutrality

For those of you that listened to Bill Cunningham and Brian Anderson discuss Net Neutrality on WLW on December 22, 2010. Here is a very simple diagram that explains what "Net Neutrality" is really about.

The Open Internet

Basically, if the internet is left neutral or open, an ISP must allow access to all of the internet thru your ISP connection BUT,.. if we allow corporations to defeat Net Neutrality then the ISP will become like the cable company, charging you for each piece of the internet just like cable tv packages of today. YouTube might be 20$ a month, Facebook 10$, The Blogger Channel another 5$, a News and Weather package 10$, etc. The ISP and Big Media corporations will carve up the Internet, charge you for each portion you receive and have complete control over what is available. You'll pay more and you'll never see another Wikileaks.

Cunninngham and Anderson support the "Cable TV - Big Media" model but did want to admit that so they turned it into a "fairness doctrine" tirade that really made no sense. They were feeding their listeners a bunch of crap to support the very people that are the most dangerous to a free, open internet. The show was corporate propaganda at its finest.

I've said for years that it won't be government that kills the freedom of the Internet in America, it will be capitalism/greed.

tnb

The WikiLeaks wake up call

The WikiLeaks wake up call - Opinion from Al Jazeera

John Naughton: The WikiLeaks wake up call

Will a backlash against the WikiLeaks phenomenon have significant implications for the future of the Internet?

The current row over the latest WikiLeaks trove of classified US diplomatic cables has four sobering implications.

The first is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the Net.

As the backlash unfolds - first with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on ISPs hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay/PayPal suddenly withdrawing services to WikiLeaks and then with the US government attempting to intimidate Columbia students from posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook - the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured.

The response is vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the Net.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called 'liberal' democracies that are desperate to shut WikiLeaks down. Consider, for example, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On January 21 last year, Hilary Clinton, US secretary of state, made a landmark speech about Internet freedom in Washington DC which many observers interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google.

"Information has never been so free", declared Mrs Clinton. "Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable."

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity. The United States' belief in that truth is what brings me here today."

Secondly, the one thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they comprehensively expose the way political elites in Western democracies have been lying to their electorates. The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the US-Anglo-European adventure in Afghanistan is doomed (because even the dogs in the street know that), but more importantly that the US and UK governments privately admit that too.

The problem is that they cannot face their electorates - who also happen to be the taxpayers who are funding this folly - and tell them this. The leaked dispatches from the US Ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Karzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon was when the US was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it clear that the US is as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam.

The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and Brussels cannot bring themselves to admit this. Afghanistan is, in that sense, the same kind of quagmire as Vietnam was. The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians, but otherwise little has changed.

Thirdly, the attack of WikiLeaks ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. The 'Terms and Conditions' under which they provide both 'free' and paid-for services will always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. Put not your faith in cloud computing: it will one day rain on your parade.

Finally, what WikiLeaks is exposing is the way the Western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (the US and UK in not regulating their financial sectors); corrupt (Ireland, Italy; all other governments in relation to the arms trade) or recklessly militaristic (US and UK in Iraq) and yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way.

Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted in a really effective way, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

As the Guardian's columnist Simon Jenkins put it: "Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure. As Jefferson remarked, the press is the last best hope when democratic oversight fails, as it does in the case of most international bodies."

WikiLeaks - TIME Magazine

WikiLeaks' War on Secrecy: Truth's Consequences - TIME

A pretty good article. One of the better US media reports on the leaks including a great cover.

Copied from this:

Assange still has that "James-Bond-Villain" look in this one.

A few thoughts.

I do believe this will ultimately create a more secretive, locked-down government and corporate world. Future leaks will be fewer as governments and businesses revise their internal rules to lockup information. Laws will be changed so world governments can quickly shutdown and more easily prosecute these internet-based, nation-less entities like Wikileaks.

This could very well be the beginning of the end for the internet as we've known it. Government officials and business leaders around the world must be looking at this and realizing that an open internet provides a perfect media for leaks and is a serious threat to their power. I expect there will be a push around to tighten up the rules and change the paying field so the powers-that-be can more quickly control this sort of thing.

An easy way to establish control would be to give the internet to the carriers so that Wikileaks has to work with an ATT, Verizon or Comcast like entity to publish their stuff on the Web so that if you want to read my blog either you will have to pay Verizon for the "Independent Blog" channel or i'll have to pay them just to be listed (or both). Either way, i'll have to play by their rules and they won't have to be as friendly as they are now.

The internet of the future could end up being like cable TV is today but instead of a few hundred channels there will be a few 100,000 or maybe a million, each striving for ratings, continually lowering the bar in their quest for market share. Eventually we'll have 637,000 channels and nothing on. At least nothing threatening to our ruling class.

tnb