It’s time to stop debating whether the Internet is an effective tool for political expression, and to move on to the much more urgent question of how digital technology can be structured, governed, and used to maximize the good it can do in the world, and minimize the evil.
…the Consumer Groups note Bell Canada’s somewhat thin argument on s. 36 to the effect that throttling is examination of the “application header of the content but not the content itself.” This is akin to arguing that one is listening into a telephone conversation and identifying the language being spoken but not listening to the words. However, this is a false analogy, as Bell does influence the content of the message by blocking the usability of the P2P protocol by slowing it down, thus rendering its purpose (to quickly download large files) moot. To continue the language analogy, Bell is effectively listening in for, say, Mandarin Chinese and making sure the call breaks up and drops out to the point that half of the speakers simply abandon the call.
The great evil that we as Americans face is the banal evil of second-rate minds who can’t make it in the private sector and who therefore turn to the massive wealth directed by our government as the means to securing wealth for themselves. The enemy is not evil. The enemy is well dressed.
… an institution can be corrupted in the same way Yeltsin was when individuals within that institution become dependent upon an influence that distracts them from the intended purpose of the institution. The distracting dependency corrupts the institution.
In the context of big data, overconfidence can lead people with good intentions to base big policy decisions on faulty logic. We live in an era of soft paternalism, with policy makers eager to bake into policy new default settings for society. Mostly these are good ideas, but now and then we make big mistakes.
Big Data and the Stalker Economy – Forbes (via tkudo)
Though Silicon Valley’s newest billionaires may anoint themselves the saints of American capitalism, they’re beginning to resemble something else entirely: robber barons. Behind the hoodies and flip-flops lurk businesspeople as rapacious as the black-suited and top-hatted industrialists of the late 19th century. Like their predecessors in railroads, steel, banking, and oil a century ago, Silicon Valley’s new entrepreneurs are harnessing technology to make the world more efficient. But along the way, that process is bringing great economic and labor dislocation, as well as an unequal share of the spoils.
Rob Cox at Reuter. Go read his whole essay, “Silicon Valley’s underserved moral exceptionalism”
Every time we come up with a technical solution that protects privacy, the websites come up with something they want to do that is broken by this privacy protection, and so they find a workaround for it and they basically break the privacy protection.
This notion that apps should pay for bandwidth is insane. Telcos should pay developers a commission for helping them sell bandwidth.
Tim Bray, Developer Advocate at Google
The great evil that we as Americans face is the banal evil of second-rate minds who can’t make it in the private sector and who therefore turn to the massive wealth directed by our government as the means to securing wealth for themselves. The enemy is not evil. The enemy is well dressed.
Larry Lessig, from Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop it.
You might think they’d grow faster with all-you-can eat, but I think it’s a testament to the fact that service providers are educating users more on their impact and IP footprint … People understand they have a 2GB or 3GB cap or whatever, so they are consuming as much as they can to get their money’s worth. Those with unlimited aren’t concerned, but aren’t using as much.
Excited Pixels