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."