I'm not usually a free market fundamentalist. I believe that government has a role in providing a level playing field for corporations, to protect natural resources, to ensure minimum standards for workers, and to guard against monopolies and other unfair restraints on trade.
But I have to agree with Fox News columnist Arthur Herman on one thing: The Internet has been developing just fine, and we don't need more government intervention.
Some countries, including China and Russia, are backing proposals that would give individual governments more control over the Internet, and they're pushing this agenda at a United Nations meeting in Dubai this month -- a meeting that is closed to the public, by the way.
Today, non-profit, non-governmental organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium and ICAAN make major policy decisions about the Internet.
That doesn't mean local governments can't regulate the Internet at all. Governments can, and do, regulate Internet service providers, prohibit copyright and trademark infringement and child pornography, and much more. Some countries take that even further: China requires all Chinese websites to register with the government and comply with censorship instructions. That nation's government regularly restricts access to foreign news sources and social networking sites. And Syria completely shut down the Internet last Thursday after rebels seemed to gain ground in the country's ongoing civil war.
But some governments want to expand their oversight of the Internet even further, by banning anonymity from the Internet, or requiring content providers such as media organizations to pay to transmit over the Net.
Internet luminaries are reacting with alarm. Google VP and Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf -- one of the key people who helped create the Internet -- is urging people to sign a petition against these attempts to expand local governmental control over the Internet.
According to the ITU, revisions to the existing treaty -- WCIT-12 -- are necessary to help expand access to the Internet throughout the developing world.
But that's just not true, World Wide Web inventor and W3C director Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC on Tuesday.
It seems that at the moment the growth of the Internet is spectacular and the developing countries have the highest growth rate. Today connectivity is clearly becoming ubiquitous -- we need to look at other concerns such as net neutrality and whether governments spy on the Internet and whether they block it.
Under one proposal, for example, it would be legal for a country like Syria to turn off all Internet access in the country -- as long as the country notified the UN Secretary General of the suspension. The proposal, known as TD 54, was leaked and is available to the public.
There's also a proposal by European Telecommunications Network Operators to allow telecoms to charge for priority traffic. In response, the non-profit Center for Democracy & Technology wrote: "Such a change would stifle innovation by increasing barriers to entry into online content markets."
The public outcry has been huge. Almost 3 million people have signed a petition for a “free and open web.”
A similar petition to “protect global Internet freedom” has been signed by more than 1,400 organizations in 177 countries -- including groups like the Albanian Institute of Science, India's Centre for Internet and Society, and Indonesia's Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.
This outcry has already led to one positive effect: Leaders of the government delegations decided to open the plenary sessions of the conference to the public.
The conference will continue until December 14.
So unless you're a telecommunications company looking to make big bucks from charging fees for priority traffic or a government seeking more control over the Net, you still have time to put pressure on your political representatives to do the right thing.
— Maria Korolov is president of Trombly International, an editorial services company that provides coverage of emerging technologies and markets. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years.
The internet is a connection of computers (generally servers), that stay online all the time and process requests from a client (such as your internet browsers). Nobody really owns the internet, and everybody is free to host their own servers unless you are limited by your ISP. However, who knows how long this will last.
I know one thing is clear...many governments want to increase regulation and censorship of the Internet. I hope the US stand strong in their position on censorship.
Iran's decision of developing their own web was not appreciated by all and sundry as it was considered too naive solution of the Iranians cyber problems!
But now what these governments are up to..they are somehow doing the same thing, blocking people's access to various sites,and urging them to start
It's not a question of whether a technology can be used illegally. My car can be used as getaway vehicle by bank robbers -- but they're not going to arrest me unless I specifically start a business renting out cars to bank robbers, knowing that they're going to rob banks.
Same thing for Rapidshare. It can be used for both legal and illegal purposes.
The question is -- does Rapidshare know about the illegal purposes ahead of time? When it finds out about illegal use, does it immediately comply with the law? And does Rapidshare's business model deliberately encourage and promote illegal use?
In the car example -- if I run a car rental business, and the cops come to me and say, bank robbers used your car, I better cooperate.
And if bank robbers come to me and say, hey, can we rent a car to rob some banks? I'd better say; Hell, no.
And if my business partner turns to me and says, Hey's there's a real unmet need there for getaway vehicles. How about we spread the word -- on the down-low -- that we're okay with it and, as long as you pay cash, we'll be really forgetful about what you look like? I'd better get a new business partner.
I don't personally know which category Rapidshare is in. I don't know their business model, or what thinking went on behind the scenes, and whether they're working with authorities to help reduce infringement, or actively working against them to make infringement easier.
At some point, if there's enough of a case there, it will go to court, and we'll find out.
All people is copyright infringement , no body seems to care about the legitimate users of the megaupload. Rapidshare had almost same model as them. Most of these filehosting companies run on this model.
And there is another 'Safe Harbor' start lobying like Rapidshare.
Not sure what you mean exactly in terms of proof. Statistics about piracy in China are remarkably unreliable. Global media and software companies tend to count every single potential instance of an illegal download as evidence of money taken out of their pockets -- whether or not there's any evidence that the download replaced an actual purchase.
So as more people in China go online, the more examples of this kind of piracy there will be.
However, the amount of legal media is increasing as well, and the legal environment is improving as well.
I started covering this in 2007, 2008 -- my staff and I in Shanghai were doing stories for The Hollywood Reporter about just this. (I was still Maria Trombly back then.)
Today, Chinese websites have to take down infringing content when anyone complains (just like the US) and court cases have moved on to how fast this stuff is taken down, such as this suit won by Chinese writers recently:
In another sign -- when I started covering this five years ago, the top places for pirated movie and TV show streaming wer Chinese sites like youku and tudou. Today, there are still plenty of streaming sites, but they've moved elsewhere.
I'm not saying the problem in China isn't huge. I'm saying that the progress that's already been made is phenomenal, but in past five years that I've been watching it.
The ThinkerNet does not reflect the views of TechWeb. The ThinkerNet is an informal means of communication to members and visitors of the Internet Evolution site. Individual authors are chosen by Internet Evolution to blog. Neither Internet Evolution nor TechWeb assume responsibility for comments, claims, or opinions made by authors and ThinkerNet bloggers. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose.
In the fall of 2011, around 160,000 students in 190 countries enrolled in a Stanford-sponsored online course about artificial intelligence. About 23,000 completed the course and got certificates, including 248 who got a perfect score. The university offered the same course the old-fashioned way to students sitting in Stanford classrooms. None of the those students got a perfect score.
I don't wear a watch. I haven't worn one years. If I'm carrying a phone -- any phone -- I always know what time it is and don't have to worry about time zones or daylight savings time. And I don't want to have an iPod or an iPhone that I can wear on my wrist. Again: Why? If I want to sport one while jogging, there are plenty of bands you can already buy that do that.
Organizations are expending enormous resources to improve their internal productivity by implementing cloud, adding collaborative applications, and investing in analytics solutions. Individually, we can improve our own productivity, even during sometimes lengthy meetings, by using free note-taking apps like Evernote or Microsoft OneNote.
Saunders predicts the decline and fall of America’s Internet empire, and explains how the Internet of the future will be multi-lingual as well as multi-national.
Saunders explains how Internet users in North America are already vastly outnumbered by those in the rest of the world – a situation which is only set to accelerate.
The United States' taxpayer-funded technology delegation to Russia turns into a mortifying embarrassment for anyone even remotely proud to be American.
The city of San Francisco is on the leading edge of using the Internet to provide government transparency. It is providing WiFi for its have-nots, and its DataSF.org initiative is putting the city's valuable data back in the hands of its citizens, with innovative results.
How do you recognize an Internet bubble when you see one? Saunders explains how all bubbles have four symptoms in common – and takes a swipe at Google and Twitter into the bargain.
Global communities are changing the nature of innovation on the Internet from a fiscal model based on greed, to an organic model based on greed, posits Saunders.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
A recent release of the popular TweetDeck app for Twitter power-users gives new life to software that had previously taken a wrong turn. Here's a quick walk-through of the new TweetDeck, to show you why it should be at the top of your Twitter toolkit.
Twitter's changes are clearly aimed at being more Facebook-like, and this is because both companies are vying to serve the mobile social network market. But can that market work for anybody, given how difficult it is to push ads to social-update readers?
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
Email This
