On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 10:47 PM, Dino K<[email protected]> wrote: > What if the topic said, Bill would give Bill Gates control over the > Internet? > > > -dk
Ah but that's putting it into the hands of a single private corporation. What could possibly go wrong? Actually, the scary thing is that's the way these things *usually* work out these days. Corporations have the money, money is speech, speech is influence, so no surprise that they can arrange for all kinds of giveaways from our elected representatives. But this is definitely a tricky one. The government regulates the airwaves, by way of the FCC. No one raises much fuss about that, since the spectrum is a natural resource owned by the public and we need a neutral third party to arbite access or chaos ensues and the medium becomes unusable. The Internet on the other hand is composed largely of equipment in private hands. Yet from a layman's view, it is a transport for data not unlike the airwaves regulated by the FCC. And our society is increasingly dependent upon that medium. So you want to say, hey that's private property the government has no business interfering with private property. But really it's a mistaken believe to think that property rights are absolute. Even your home can be taken away due to "eminent domain" laws. A law enforcement officer can commandeer your vehicle while pursuing a suspect. Some corporation makes an accusation that you stole data from them, and watch how quick the FBI comes and takes all your computers as evidence, based on merely an accusation (this has happened, by the way). My point is, the government is *us* or the closest equivalent we have, so if *we* decide the Internet has become in some ways a resource that requires the protection of the government, then I don't think it's really Tea Party material. It's in the same line of non-absolute property rights we enjoy today. The things that concern me more from a geek point of view is stuff like Software patents Net neutrality Criminal search and seizure laws DMCA locked hardware/DRM Perpetual copyright Anticompetitve behavior in cell phone industry ... I look at kill switches for the Internet more like when Bush grounded the airplanes after 9/11. It isn't something that you want to happen all the time, but in retrospect it was probably a prudent thing to do. Could it be done with the Internet? Without a plan ahead of time, probably not, because regulation of the airline industry is much stronger and the Internet is a looser confederation of private system, almost completely self regulated. -- John. _______________________________________________ LinuxUsers mailing list [email protected] http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
