An interesting post that I have place verbatim for the following reasons:
1. Its Importance (generally speaking)
2. Lot's of Link Love (A-List Blogger Style see: LinkBlog and Summary to see what My Blog does with these links)
3. Time-to-show on Memeorandum (how, when, and if at all, are results that are of personal interest)
Anyway, read the post from Doc Searls titled: Saving the Net from the pipeholders
"I've spent much of the last two weeks writing an essay that just went up at Linux Journal: Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes. It's probably the longest post I've ever put up on the Web. It's certainly the most important. And not just to me.
I started writing it after a recent surprise visit by David Isenberg to Santa Barbara. He's the one who got me — and, I hope, us — going.
I finished writing it yesterday after David Berlind published threeexcellentpieces, which I highly recommend reading, and acting upon.
For guidance during the rest of this thing (whether they knew it or not), I also want to thank David Weinberger, Dave Winer, Steve Gillmor, Kevin Werbach, Cory Doctorow, Don Marti, Richard M. Stallman, Eric S. Raymond, Susan Crawford, Larry Lessig, John Palfrey, Chris Nolan, Jeff Jarvis, Craig Burton, Andrew Sullivan, Paul Kunz, Dean Landsman, Matt Welch, Sheila Lennon, George Lakoff, Om Malik, Phil Hughes, J.D. Lasica, Virginia Postrel, Chris Anderson, Esther Dyson, Jim Thompson, Micah Sifry, John Perry Barlow, The EFF, the Berkman Center, the Personal Democracy Forum and others I'm overlooking but will fill in later when I have the time.
Although it's kinda huge, Saving the Net wasn't written as a Finished Work, but rather as a conversation starter — a way to change a rock we're pushing uphill to a snowball we're rolling downhill.
Larry Lessig started rolling it at OSCON in 2002, and in various other ways before that, and the whole thing has been too damn sisyphean for too damn long. Time to change that.
There's a thesis involved: that the Net is in danger of becoming what Kevin Werbachcalls'a private toiled garden for the phone companies', but that the real enemy is in how we understand the Net itself. We have choices there, and those choices may mean life or death for the Net as most of us have known it — and taken it for granted — for the last decade or more.
A couple days ago I spoke to a group of about thirty local citizens here in Santa Barbara County, gathered in the County supervisors' conference room to discuss forming a broadband task force. Early on, I asked people what the Net was. The answers were varied, but had one thing in common: it was a place, and not just fiber and copper."