Rushkoff Proposes We Fork the Internet 487
Shareable writes "Douglas Rushkoff: 'The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network — its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation — is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them — that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere.' And he goes on to suggest citizens fork the Internet & makes a call for ideas how to do that."
No account for reality.... (Score:5, Insightful)
In Soviet Russia, Internet Forks You (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:He's right (Score:3, Insightful)
But the Internet was always "in the hands of policymakers". They funded its creation and have regulated its development.
Don't let the fact that the telcos have gotten away with so much convince you that the Internet has hitherto been some kind of golden age Wild West of freedom.
This is just more anti-net neutrality FUD.
Re:No account for reality.... (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter how you start a system like this, you're going to end up with a governing body at some point. People want order, they want to be told what to do, and there's always people that are willing... and on rare occasion capable of doing such.
You underestimate people. First, the 'sheep' argument, even in the veiled form you give it, is a cynical and lazy cop-out. Out there, somewhere, is likely a group of people who similarly think you're a sheep because you don't question some choice you make that they think is bad. But you aren't. If you learned about it, you might agree or disagree with them, but it's just a matter of learning about it.
Secondly, most people don't actually like being told what to do. They may not always understand how they're following orders, but they usually get pretty upset once they realize they're doing it. You talk to most people, and most of them are generally irritated by the various ways in which they feel they're supposed to be 'following orders'. Perceptions of those orders and their source varies widely, but almost nobody likes to think they just follow them blindly.
So, as I said, I think you severely underestimate people. And I think you're doing it because you don't want to do the hard work you would feel compelled to do if you didn't have such a negative and pessimistic opinion. Pessimists are right much more frequently than optimists, and that's because pessimism is a fundamentally lazy outlook.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I have an idea... (Score:2, Insightful)
No one's telling you not to purchase anything. Never have been. You can have all the truly awful Xfinity streaming service you want. But the thing is, without last-mile competition, the last-mile provider sure will start to suck, just as surely if it were a government run monopoly. Create competition, and net neutrality will stop being so important, because people will prefer providers that don't filter. But absent real competition, with low barriers to entry and some restrictions on anti-competitive tactics by the existing mega-ISPs, we're fucked.
I've seen the Comcast-controlled internet, and it is Xfinity all the way down.
Re:He's right (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be stupid, we shouldn't give the Internet to policymakers, who are, after all, just tools of the rich. We should cut out the middleman and give it right to the rich.
As with all debates about regulations, the rich and powerful would like us to think that we have two choices: regulations they will control and thus get what they want, or no regulations, which means they get what they want. They want us to think we can't win. They want us to feel that our best weapon for controlling their abuses, government regulation (otherwise known as "the rule of law"), is a tool they control. But they only control it if we let them. Regulations are like guns, useful and morally neutral tools, but dangerous in the hands of the uninformed or evil. Well, the rich and powerful can pry regulations from my cold, dead hands.
To mix a metaphor, I am not going to throw the rich into the briar patch of deregulation, that is exactly what they want.
Don't overestimate people (Score:3, Insightful)
You are wrong on most of your arguments. Take the xray scanners at the airports. They "randomly" send people to get xrayed, doing them no good, yet, 95%+ just go along with it. They don't care how they work. They don't care how much damage those devices are causing or could be causing. They don't care that their risk of dying from the scanner is higher than from a terrorist blowing up the plane (based on government's own numbers!). They don't care....
So I say, do not overestimate people.
Unfair competition (Score:4, Insightful)
How many stories do I have to find where municipalities decided they had waited long enough and started to roll out their own fiber-to-the-home networks, only to be hit by a lawsuit from one of the Big Companies citing unfair competition? You have to be a Business (written with a capital) in order to do anything that a Business Might Ever Do or else it's unfair competition.
Re:He's right (Score:5, Insightful)
But the Internet was always "in the hands of policymakers". They funded its creation and have regulated its development.
Not really. Before the mid 1990s, "policymakers" was mostly Jon Postel (a single person "ran" the Internet more efficiently than ICANN and its bureaucracy). Getting routable addresses was just a matter of asking for them, and anyone with sufficient competency was able to get a SLIP line up and running on a reasonable budget. The only "regulated" central point of failure was name resolution, and that's a service that runs on top of the Internet, not part of the Internet. There really was a "golden age Wild West of freedom"; just because you didn't experience it doesn't make it any less real to those of us who had "internet" before you were born.
If you think the government will somehow make the Internet more "fair", then you are a fool. The very fact that they acquired regulatory power illegally (without any legal Constitutional or legislative authority to do so) demonstrates despotism on their part. At least with private corporations, you can choose a competitor.
The best parts of the Internet exist in spite of government, not because of it. The best that can be hoped for its future is benign neglect. The power of the FCC should be limited to open air RF propagation. It is already a tyrannical organization that oversteps its power and limits freedom in a variety of ways, and there is nothing about its recent actions that suggest any goals otherwise. This is nothing but a power grab in the name of a mythical "net neutrality" that has never been and can never be.
Re:I have an idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I want to purchase services from a provider available to me that prioritizes YouTube and Netflix over Torrent traffic, why the heck shouldn't I be able to?
What happens when the only provider in your area is one who prioritizes Torrent Traffic over Netflix and Youtube?
Try to see it from everyone elses perspective - when you've only got 1 or 2 choices, there is no real choice. If both of them choose to prioritize traffic, against your interests, you are left with no alternatives. Too bad, so sad, a neutral net was fun while it lasted? Why are we having such trouble keeping it that way?
If you are going to retort with some statement proclaiming the positives of Capitalism, this is one situation where a Free Market doesn't apply: it is virtually impossible for anyone to produce a competing product: They've monopolized the net. They own the wires. Which wasn't even built by them, it was built with taxpayer money. They paid a pultry sum, assumed control, and avoid spending any money to upgrade it and instead gouge customers.
No really, do you think this would be an issue if everything worked the way you are envisioning it through your rose coloured glasses? If I could just start up an ISP with no traffic shaping, shifting, blocking, prioritizing, etc etc - I would make a TON of money from all the people willing to buy that service, more than half of Slashdot viewers I'm sure.
The problem is - that's not possible. Even if I went and managed to set up this giant multinational organization with buildings all across the globe housing tons of servers, I can't just "plug myself into" the net. I'd still have to run through the backbones of giants like Comcast and their rules will always apply to their equipment.
Re:No account for reality.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No account for reality.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I came in here to say this. Glad you already did.
The sad fact is that 95% or more of the public doesn't give a damn if a corporation influences the internet. As long as they can still get their porn and play Farmville, they're happy. Those of us who understand what's actually at stake with net neutrality are in the vast minority, and everyone else is being inundated with messages from the corporation about how terrible it would be if they weren't allowed to shit all over the net. Those people won't care about net neutrality until they start having to pay $15/day in data fees to get new sheep in Farmville, and by then it'll be too late. We're long past the days when the government actually breaks up monopolies, and so unlike what happened when Bell Telephone got to big for the public's good, the few major companies who control the internet will be allowed to retain that control.
And if someone, once people realize how screwed they are, starts making this new-internet-that's-not-the-internet, the companies will suddenly make Farmville data and 30 minutes per day of porn data-charge-free, and all the people who were pissed off will be placated, leaving once again only those of us who pay attention to what's going on, and again, there aren't enough of us to build the uncorruptable network of our dreams.
Re:He's right (Score:2, Insightful)
> You claim that "IF" the law makes private interconnecting networks between two people without prior legal authorization,
> we will not be able to form a second Internet. What a huge If!
Really? Have you ever stopped to consider the existing list of things you and your neighbor cannot do without prior legal authorization? Then consider the things you can't youself do without the government's permission. And they already regulate communications in a heavy handed way. Everything from your local town granting the local cable company a franchise (read as monopoly) to the FCC regulating everything that uses, produces or receives RF energy.
If your block setup a local net you would probably get away with it, especially if wireless. A lot of groups start doing it and eventually governments will regulate it. If there are enough people doing it to matter market share wise you have become yet another service that the government will 'need' to regulate.
Re:He's right (Score:5, Insightful)
That would never work by itself.
You are speaking of Mesh networking which is absolutely the way to go to help create a truly anonymous infrastructure beyond the controls that we so despise right now. However, you can't link Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix with Mesh networking. You also cannot get around the fact that the pipes need to be quite large between high density areas.
Businesses and data centers could never operate on a Mesh network either. They will still need to operate the way they do now, which is actually fine. We let the telcos operate their networks with the peering and transit agreements that allow packets from Los Angeles to make it all the way through the desert to Las Vegas.
What we need do to is get the city and communities to use their collective bargaining power and operate wireless POPs throughout the city and rural areas. Let the Mesh network attach to those POPs as needed. This would get us our anonymous infrastructure free of controls and still have the enormous bandwidth available to link our populations effectively.
What needs to be stopped above all else are the ISPs selling customers bundled packages of bullshit when we could just as easily be getting all those services online and not attached to a physical address someplace.
Of course none of this will happen because we need to be watched and controlled to be safe. Part of that of course is allowing corporations to butt rape us.
Re:No account for reality.... (Score:4, Insightful)
You are speaking in generalities. Look at what has actually happened on the Internet over time: usenet was driven out by moderated web boards. Home pages were driven out by Facebook. Decentralized email is being driven out by a small handful of huge webmail providers. Now, even the idea of general-purpose computing is being driven out by handhelds and tablets that only run software from a manufacturer-approved "app store."
Usenet wasn't driven out over by one web board, it was driven out by millions of them so it's still distributed. Usenet failed because it had no effective means of dealing with spam and the decline was rapid because everyone had access to the web, usenet server access and quality varied greatly. And that instead of making two web boards and let popularity decide, you had many flamewars and again no one to settle them. And the role of sharing binaries has been taken over by P2P which is definitively distributed.
As for home pages being taken over by Facebook, most people didn't operate their own hosting service to begin with (hello Geocities) but I'll agree this has been centralized. But for the privacy nuts out there, how many of you had a working login system for your friends so you could share something just with them and not the whole world? Or to interact with one person in particular? If you talk about losing privacy, then home pages and public blogs were getting up on the podium and blasting it out over a megaphone for google to index. Home pages covered not even 1/10th of the uses Facebook has.
Regarding webmail, well the ISPs asked for it. If want wanted to change ISP - or had to change ISP as you moved, you had to take the hassle of changing email address and notifying lots of people and update all contact information everywhere and still there'd be people you can't reach or pay just to keep it active. Plus very, very often I couldn't send mail from anywhere else, like say at work or a web cafe or whatever as "relaying was denied". Which meant that everywhere you want, you had to get some local account to send mail. And no IMAP service so you couldn't just peek at it. There were so insanely many good reasons not to use it, I can't even begin to count.
Finally regarding locked down devices, even as "general" as the iPhone and pretty much everything else with a CPU is I consider it more of an appliance. It has some need-to-have functions (shame on the alarm clock) and nice-to-have functions (playing Angry Birds) but I'm not killed over the fact that it doesn't do everything. Not really much more than that I have a Wii that only runs what Nintendo wants (I haven't done any homebrew) anyway, it's not like this debate is new. I have my general purpose computing device in a PC running Linux. I know I could probably get one in a mobile form factor too, if I wanted. But in my day-to-day life, an appliance does the job just fine.
Re:He's right (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahhh, bullshit. We choose our government also. Even if only by being so compliant. We have crappy products and crappy politicians for no other reason that we enable it for the god of convenience.
You don't choose your government. You get a choice between a few bad options every few years to create the illusion of choice.