ideas in motion: still enjoying the internet while it's here

By now, most of us take the internet for granted, not unlike any utility resource. Its popularity is seldom considered together with its vulnerability--technical, behavioral, political, etc. In fact, I would ponder as whether or not the vulnerability of the internet grows with its popularity, especially beyond reaching some adoption threshold.

Here are two directions in which the internet as we know it today may go into:
  1. 1. Stuff of any value won't be free of charge;
  2. 2. Countries, or groups thereof, will enforce permanent or temporary "safe areas;" communications in and out of such areas will have to be cleared at router level.
In evaluating the above suggestions, just consider the "unipolar world" as a brief between bi- and multi-polarity, and the fact that advertising alone cannot pay for it all. In fact, if one really understood the eventual costs of the "free stuff," one might volunatrily want to pay for it, no strings attached. Just like paying to have your phone number unlisted...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As the old saying goes:
“Power corrupts,
and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The most serious threat to free speech
is that Google “cooks the books” on web searches,
allows selective “Google Bombing”,
and have effectively highjacked Usenet,
the last, global, free speech forum.

Google has become the self appointed “Moderator”
of almost all posts that appear on Usenet,
and unlike the former DejaNews Google massages the search results,
selectively bans folks from using and posting to “Google Groups”, and
they smear posters who express facts, ideas and opinions
that the Google Management does not want the public exposed to.

They even return a cryptic “error message”
when one pursues a line of taboo searches.
“Error
We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests ..”

To see how Google “cooks the books” and selectively allows “Google Bombing”
carefully compare the search results
between a Google and a Bing search.
http://www.bing-vs-google.com/?q=jew&sourceid=Mozilla-search

It is clear to the astute researcher that Google cannot be trusted to deliver honest results.
— Tom Potter

fCh said...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/25/lets-kill-the-cpm/