Gore on democracy
Great speech by Al Gore. It’s not about the Internet, but here’s a snippet from the end:
The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.
Al Gore for president! [Tags: AlGore democracy media]
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Now, please square his comments on a free internet with his support for McCain/Feingold. I’d ask the same question of tons of Republicans, including Bush, who signed that abomination into law.
The goal of those laws is to fully regulate speech, so that no political information (beyond what the current incumbent allows) is allowable during campaign season.
Anyone associated with that mess is no patriot.
Sorry David. I think Gore’s speech was a waste of time.
It costs a hell of a lot more to produce a TV show than it does a blog. Barring worldwide censorship, corporates will not be able to control what gets said and featured on the Internet as Mr. Gore is maintaining they have been able to do on TV. He knows this so why the worry?
Not sure how sincere his commitment is to ensuring the Internet remains free and open when he spends 42 pages railing against the evils of television and concludes by proposing government regulation as a solution.
Politicians often do that – scare people into thinking their freedom is at stake as a pretext for taking it away from them.
I enjoyed the speech. I think what Noel may be missing is how corporations will likely influence the evolution of the web into their favor. The net will evolve, the million dollar question is, ‘Who will control/steer that evolution?’ Corporations arent likely to take control over night. Instead they will slowly creep into the framework and slowly shift directions of the web into their favor. Then before we know it, they have control. Yeah yeah, I know a little paranoid, but has anyone turned on the radio recently? If not try it out, it’s basically 3 large corporations controlling what was designed to be public airwaves. That wasnt supposed to happen,right?
Great topic David.
I actually think it’s far worse than Will’s comment says. The international effort to design the “next generation net” is well underway. The forces supporting the locking down of the Internet are the most powerful institutional forces on the planet. Just today in the Boston Globe there was an article about how a conflict among the major providers is fueling calls to put the Internet under the control of the UN, and the UN is NOT a friendly place for the Net to be.
America currently dominates the Internet through its control (via ICANN) of the single address system. Europe has historically supported this arrangement, but the UN now wants a governing role.
I agree that if control over the Internet is given to the UN or any other intergovernmental body, we could expect some bureaucratization of the Internet, but not censorship, like for example, what the Chinese government are imposing.
If these negotiations fall through, the worst that would happen is that other countries or territorial blocs would start running their own domain name system and changes would be made to the root file zone. In other words, we’d have multiple internets.
It won’t change the fact that anyone with a good idea and a talented group of people around them can with minimum investment take that idea to a worldwide audience. More paperwork maybe, but the barriers to entry on the Internet are not comparable to either radio or TV, both of which require substantial investment to produce and host a broadcast.
Big corporates can and will buy their way into the Internet, but dominating it the way they did radio and TV is in my opinion not going to happen. The power is shifting to little groups of people with something interesting to say and show.
President Al Gore Here —
Just wanted to announce my new blog, the Official President Al Gore Blog.
I’m a hip cat.
President Al Gore Here —
Just wanted to announce my new blog, the Official President Al Gore Blog.
I’m a hip cat.
I was there, and all I could think of was that Al, like so many, have missed the point that, while we are inundated with Information, and have a great deal of Knowledge, we have lost the ability to Reason.
How? Because we have no time for Contemplation–a necessity in the ability to Reason. We are too busy chasing all that information and have such a grand fear of being out of the loop that we just do not have the time to think, consider and reason.
When Reason leaves Discourse, all you have is rank emotionalism. Emotionalism, connected with the zeitgeist of Romanticism…well, do I have to explain where that one leads???
The break-down of the domain name system will not lead to “multiple internets”, and not just because that is logically impossible.
As for the Gore speech; I cannot help it, but I guess politicians always sound like weasels to me. I interpreted his speech as: “I’ve started this great new TV station, and if you don’t watch it, horrible things will happen to America”. He may not have meant it that way, but that’s how I read it.
Still, he has a point about how television is far more a one-way street than it could be.
Branko, the U.S. position in the negotiations is that “a single addressing system is what makes the Internet so powerful, and moves to set up multiple internets would be in no one’s interest.”
It is possible the US is overreacting. Please feel free to tell us why you think it would be “logically impossible” for a breakdown in the single addressing system to lead to different countries hosting their own Internet.
Noel, first, the Domain Name System is not the basic addressing system of the internet, it is merely a mapping laid on top of that. A very useful and ubiqitous mapping, but a mapping nonetheless. Anyone who wishes to do so can invent and introduce a competing map of IP numbers.
If you want to worry, worry about the RIRs. Who, by the way, are not a single monolithic entity, but five regional organisations.
But that is not why it is logically impossible for there to be two internets. The internet is the connection of different networks through common, lowest-demoninator protocols. If this super-network of network would break up, for instance over disputes over the applications of the internet protocols, there would not be two internets, but zero. The resulting networks would not be internets.
Branko, I know it’s possible to change the DNS – so does everyone on the planet – but up till now, the world has left control over it in ICANN’s hands which is now being disputed.
I think you’re arguing terminology – defining the word ‘Internet’ as the collection of global networks with a single addressing system we know today. If the ‘Internet’ gets broken up, it’s no longer an ‘Internet’, right?
The point in my view is not so much the word or technical term we use to describe it, but is instead the possibility that different countries or territorial blocs may start hosting a separate though connected ‘web’ of their own, defined by their own addressing system.
Also, if you think we should worry more about the ‘RIR’s’, please at the same time tell us what ‘RIR’s’ are and do and why we should worry about them.
RIRs are the organizations that hand out the IP numbers; they are the ones that take care of the real addressing system of the internet.
“If the ‘Internet’ gets broken up, it’s no longer an ‘Internet’, right?”
Right.
I am using terminology, but I don’t think I am arguing semantics. As you yourself indicate, it matters whether there is one internet. Zero internets or two or more would not be the same. Not just technologically (I don’t care much about the technology), but also how the network is perceived by its users.
AOL and MSN tried to supplant the internet, tried to tell their customers that it was better to stay where they were. The customers demanded access to the real thing. AOL and Microsoft caved.
The only way governments get to dictate what the internet looks like is by harsh rule. Breaking down the domain name system is going to be horribly inconvenient, and it’s going to take years to get past that, but someone will invent a better domain name system that is even lest susceptible to centralized control.
But Branko, if the governments of the countries that want more control over the Internet than America is willing to relinquish, take that control away from ICANN and set up their own domain name system (and perhaps tinker in other ways too), it won’t matter much if someone invents a better system if they refuse to use it. The power here really does lie with governments and/or NGO’s, rather than businesses, no matter how big they may be.
Personally, I would not like to see it taken away from ICANN since the Internet has worked very well in their hands. I think that some of the desire to break ICANN’s hold stems from geo-political unhappiness over American foreign policy. But this really has nothing to do with how well the Internet works under ICANN.
Governments are not the users of domain name systems; users are.
That’s true. Though try telling that to the Chinese. ; )
The US government, through ICANN, controls the DNS. Whether the UN gets its governing hooks into the Internet or other countries start running their own DNS isn’t so concerning to me. It’ll maybe be more inconvenient, more bureaucratic, but it won’t be censorship, at least I’m hoping it won’t be.