Jack Jansen on Thu, 11 Jan 96 11:52 MET |
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Re: The Disappearance of Public Space on the Net |
Recently, Jason Wehling <jason@ee.pdx.edu> said: > > I have a couple questions and comments about this. First, I am currently > doing research on a book I'm working on about the Internet as a tool for > political activism. Part of the work I have done is looking for control > of the Net. And what I've found doesn't look pretty. > [...] > > It seems to me to be obvious that the Net is moving away from it's > somewhat chaotic, but nevertheless centralized and public backbone of NSF > to a more decentralized, but nonetheless private backbone of the Regional > Bells and Long-distance providers. Jason, I don't see what it is that doesn't look pretty. The net is indeed moving to a commercial and more distributed system in the US, but this is a situation that existed from the start in Europe: the government-sponsored educational networks only switched to IP in a rather late state, before that all internet connectivity was provided by free-market parties (albeit by more-or-less non-profit organizations). While the commercialism may be a Bad Thing, I see little reason to worry about control: in Holland, for example, there are two companies with international infrastructure, and attempts by one of them to exercise control over their part of the net would probably lead other national providers to setup their own international links in a short time. Look at how fast Compuserve reverted their decision to ban the sex-related newsgroups for an example of how hard a time providers have if they try to exercise control over content... -- Jack Jansen | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++ Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl | ++++ if you agree copy these lines to your sig ++++ http://www.cwi.nl/~jack | see http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm