We can't grow a post-industrial economy with a Chinese Internet. If people are constantly watching what they say and who they connect with, they are going to censor themselves, and good ideas are going to be left unthought.
More to the point, any marketer can be a publisher.
The Bells in this case occupy the political center, the corporatist agreement of establishment Washington. But in a time of excess, such a center never holds.
Open source has a lot to say about the last few American elections. Fact is that, as we have moved toward computerized voting, we have also moved toward closed source voting. The code that defines how voting machines work is a closely-guarded secret. This makes the results naturally suspect. As a computerized task an election […]
This is a fate too monstrous for the major media to contemplate. Because if it were all true, they would be complicit. The blood would be on the hands of every reporter who turned away, who ignored the evidence, who was just too scared to go on, or who actively participated.
Credibility, in the open source world, is not a commodity. That's what I mean when I write, "We're all journalists now." I was taught this truth at a very young age, and have tried to hew to it. I live and work with as much transparency as I can.
If we had bits freely available, from a variety of sources, I’d gladly drop the network neutrality debate and let the phone and cable guys offer their private, walled gardens in competition. I know how that would turn out.
The carriers have worked themselves up to the point they believe that their network is the Internet when it’s just some plumbing we have to repurpose as a transport despite its flaws and chokepoints.
In the case of non-hydrocarbon energy, the top floor will be most relevant at first. If you can get your costs under that top floor, you can be profitable. And we need to keep that floor high as far as we can see, in order to stimulate all kinds of domestic supply.
If the Bells and cable companies can favor one set of speakers over another, because they paid an additional tariff to use "their" access to "you," then those favored speakers are more free to be heard than you are, or I am.
