A lot of smart people are making arguments for open source, net neutrality, and Internet values.
Doc Searls (right) is among those who make great technological arguments. Matt Stoller is just one of many who make great political arguments.
The winning arguments are economic arguments. These are the arguments that will win the day.
And the best economic argument is the simplest one.
Sharing accelerates innovation.
In order to compete economically we need to accelerate change. We need to be free to work together in order to do that. Rapid back-and-forth communication is the only way to get the upper hand on such competitors as China, which fear free thought and thus repress it.
Open source and a free, wide Internet are the only ways we can do this. A proprietary model benefits only the owners of specific inventions, who then can work only within their silos to exploit them.
We have seen how university research, technological innovation, and human communication are all hampered when access to the tools of thought are limited. Free people, free groups, and free thought are the way to economic growth. As it was in the beginning of our country, so it is now. Only more so.
Our backwards laws have a direct impact on innovation, which in turn
impacts economic growth. We need a post-industrial legal system so we can learn and innovate faster.
A system that benefits mainly the creators of earlier inventions, or
generations’-old content, is less efficient at creating new stuff. The
key to gaining the benefits from innovation is being first to market,
in volume. Anything else is eating your seed corn.
We can see this in the open source marketplace. A growing commons of
software code enables innovation in every direction. It’s not just the
software companies involved in open source which benefit, but any other
companies which want to use that code, or combine that code, in order
to create new services, new businesses, new value.
We had much faster technology growth in the 1990s, with a free
Internet, than we have had this decade, with a limited Internet. Other
countries have been able to catch up with the U.S. this decade, even
surpass us in many areas (like wireless) because our innovators have
been hamstrung.
For our economy to grow we need not only to free our people as
individuals, but as groups, and as companies. We need more engineers,
more writers, more developers in every area, fewer lawyers and
accountants. Lawyers and accountants can only deal with the past, with
past actions. Innovators create the future.
What has been happening is that the proprietary industries have
monopolized the economic argument. It is in a proprietary company’s
individual interest that its own past assets be highly valued, and that
few new assets be created elsewhere. That’s true. But it is not in the
nation’s interest, not in the national economy’s interest, that the
future should be hamstrung by the past.
This is the argument we need to start making, now. We need to be
making it in the blogosphere, but also in the media. The sooner these
arguments are understood and implemented in our policy, the sooner we
can become competitive again.
It seems to me that we are heading into a new period of feudalism, only this time the corporations are the the nobility. Just as previously, the serfs believe very strongly in the devine right of their masters to rule over them (i.e. all these arguments that the only ethos a corporation need have is profitability). This sort of thing seems to be human nature and in the long run you can’t go against your own nature.
It seems to me that we are heading into a new period of feudalism, only this time the corporations are the the nobility. Just as previously, the serfs believe very strongly in the devine right of their masters to rule over them (i.e. all these arguments that the only ethos a corporation need have is profitability). This sort of thing seems to be human nature and in the long run you can’t go against your own nature.
Perhaps it’s time to revisit John Perry Barlow ‘s essay/paper, The Economy of Ideas, as well as Stewart Brand’s general premise that “information wants to be be free”, focusing on the relationship of information to human rights, with specific regard to this country’s founding fathers’ agreement that both the press and speech are innately free and should not be abridged.
Perhaps it’s time to revisit John Perry Barlow ‘s essay/paper, The Economy of Ideas, as well as Stewart Brand’s general premise that “information wants to be be free”, focusing on the relationship of information to human rights, with specific regard to this country’s founding fathers’ agreement that both the press and speech are innately free and should not be abridged.
Only the most powerful,and elite have been able to monopolise on the capitalism of computer technologies,and still get away with it,even when they by their own definition steal the technologies of universities,and private small companies.
If memory serves it was the University of Iowa that created the conversion of internet addresses into readable text,a standard used by all browsers today.
Microsoft itself having many third party technologies incorporated into the Microsoft product.
Not to mention the enormouse amounts of settled lawsuits that Microsoft has paid millions out to,including Sun Micro systems.
Microsoft usuing these technologies under the disguise of closed source,it definantly required companies to have currently broken companies policies and under the user end agreements,and violating the current copyright laws,its obviose that a company had to decompile certain Microsoft products to reveal whether the technologies in use were original,or copied source code.
It appears however that today only those large corporations that have the resources,financially to decompile are doing it to copy certain aspects for their use and then close the source to everyone else.
Microsoft is by far not the only company doing so.
Imagine that there were no further innovations to the television,and 50 years later we were still watching in black and white(I like B/W movies),and still had the only option of turning an outside antenna to get a reception,only a select few in the information technologies are developing at their leisure because of no competition in the area,whilst the people of this nation are under a misconceived notion that they are protected by anti-competition laws,that does little to no good for neither improvments as their is no financial incentitive to do so,nor does it help to control a fair price to the consumer’s.
Only the most powerful,and elite have been able to monopolise on the capitalism of computer technologies,and still get away with it,even when they by their own definition steal the technologies of universities,and private small companies.
If memory serves it was the University of Iowa that created the conversion of internet addresses into readable text,a standard used by all browsers today.
Microsoft itself having many third party technologies incorporated into the Microsoft product.
Not to mention the enormouse amounts of settled lawsuits that Microsoft has paid millions out to,including Sun Micro systems.
Microsoft usuing these technologies under the disguise of closed source,it definantly required companies to have currently broken companies policies and under the user end agreements,and violating the current copyright laws,its obviose that a company had to decompile certain Microsoft products to reveal whether the technologies in use were original,or copied source code.
It appears however that today only those large corporations that have the resources,financially to decompile are doing it to copy certain aspects for their use and then close the source to everyone else.
Microsoft is by far not the only company doing so.
Imagine that there were no further innovations to the television,and 50 years later we were still watching in black and white(I like B/W movies),and still had the only option of turning an outside antenna to get a reception,only a select few in the information technologies are developing at their leisure because of no competition in the area,whilst the people of this nation are under a misconceived notion that they are protected by anti-competition laws,that does little to no good for neither improvments as their is no financial incentitive to do so,nor does it help to control a fair price to the consumer’s.