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miriam_eThis makes worrying reading. John Walker is not some newcomer with paranoiac fantasies. He is technologically very capable and has many years of programming for the internet under his belt. One of his coolest creations is SpeakFreely, a free internet telephony program. He has become worried about recent stealthy trends among large corporate ISPs to demote users to becoming just consumers instead of network peers.
Read his article about it: The Digital Imprimateur
...Earlier I believed there was no way to put the Internet genie back into the bottle. In this document I will provide a road map of precisely how I believe that could be done, potentially setting the stage for an authoritarian political and intellectual dark age global in scope and self-perpetuating, a disempowerment of the individual which extinguishes the very innovation and diversity of thought which have brought down so many tyrannies in the past....
This is not just theoretical -- sadly it has already begun. Read it and see if we can't reverse this trend.
I should mention that the first two thirds of the article is written the way the proponents of these restrictive technologies would describe them. The last part of the article talks about the implications, though I have to say he didn't dwell as much on the disadvantages as I'd have liked. You really do need to read the long pro- section to gain an understanding of what the problems are. Jumping to the summation won't really give you much insight into what the technologies will do.
Read his article about it: The Digital Imprimateur
...Earlier I believed there was no way to put the Internet genie back into the bottle. In this document I will provide a road map of precisely how I believe that could be done, potentially setting the stage for an authoritarian political and intellectual dark age global in scope and self-perpetuating, a disempowerment of the individual which extinguishes the very innovation and diversity of thought which have brought down so many tyrannies in the past....
This is not just theoretical -- sadly it has already begun. Read it and see if we can't reverse this trend.
I should mention that the first two thirds of the article is written the way the proponents of these restrictive technologies would describe them. The last part of the article talks about the implications, though I have to say he didn't dwell as much on the disadvantages as I'd have liked. You really do need to read the long pro- section to gain an understanding of what the problems are. Jumping to the summation won't really give you much insight into what the technologies will do.
