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Maj Krek

The Enduring Myth of the 'Free' Internet - Peter Osnos - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...273515

internet myth free accessofinformation

shared by Maj Krek on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The Enduring Myth of the 'Free' Internet
  • The mantra of a "free" Internet has shaped the prevailing view of how we access information and entertainment in the digital age.
  • the role of the broadband Internet is reaching a stage where anything less than total availability at minimal prices is a matter that deserves far more attention than it is currently getting.
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  • But access to this "free" information on the Internet, as everyone acknowledges as soon as it is pointed out, is not gratis.
  • The leading beneficiaries of all these charges are the big multi-platform companies, the pipes for content and digital services
  • the devices that connect us to search engines, countless websites, social media, and e-mail bring us vast amounts of content for which we do not pay separately.
  • 100 million Americans do not have high speed Internet at home, largely because of high costs and the lack of available infrastructure.
  • the Internet is the key to economic growth in the 21st century
  • One promising initiative, at least as it applies to speed and access, comes from Google Fiber. This is a project the company is developing in Kansas City as a trial of what would be a far faster broadband network using fiber-optic communication.
  • No other company can match Google's projected speed, but the price it is planning to charge for that service so far is higher than slower providers
  • For all the progress in delivering information and entertainment in the Internet era, Americans deserve and should demand something closer to the ideal of what is possible with our technology.
Maj Krek

Kill the Internet-and Other Anti-SOPA Myths | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...rnet-and-other-anti-sopa-myths

internet myths SOPA nation

shared by Maj Krek on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • in the wake of protests by dozens of websites and large numbers of their users, as well as a virtually unanimous chorus of criticism from leading progressive voices and outlets, including Michael Moore, Cenk Uygur, Keith Olbermann, Alternet, Daily Kos, MoveOn and many people associated with Occupy Wall Street. Judging by the fervor of the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests, a casual observer might think the advocates of the anti-piracy bills were in the same moral league as the torturers at Abu Ghraib.
  • But before we celebrate this “populist” victory, it’s worth remembering that the defeat of SOPA and PIPA was also a victory for the enormously powerful tech industry, which almost always beats the far smaller creative businesses in legislative disputes. (Google alone generated more than $37 billion in 2011, more than double the revenue of all record companies, major and indie combined.)
  • One example of anti-SOPA rhetorical over-reach was a tendency by some to invent sinister motives for the sponsors. On his usually brilliant show The Young Turks, Uygur said that SOPA’s sponsors were “pushing for a monopoly for the MPAA and to kill their competition on the Internet.” This is untrue. They wanted to kill those entities that steal their movies and make money off them, either directly or indirectly. There really is a difference
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  • that stopped allowing children to put up their own drawings of characters like Mickey Mouse because of fear of copyright lawsuits. Examples such as this, or of a theoretical risk of parents being charged for the right to have kids sing “Happy Birthday”, are demagogic. The underlying issue is scale. There is a profound moral difference between loaning a friend a book and posting, without permission, the content of bestsellers for commercial gain—and people and legislators ought to take that distinction into account.
  • since iTunes and Amazon and are surviving, Napster’s original model was legally killed and Kim Dotcom was apprehended, no new laws are needed. The status quo may be what we end up with, but that doesn’t make it inevitable or right. Human beings have created the piracy problem and although, like any kind of crime, society can’t eliminate it entirely, we can decide whether or not to seriously try.  
  • What is good for Google and Facebook is not always going to be what’s best for the 99 percent. (And of course Microsoft and Apple et al. are extremely aggressive when it comes to protecting their intellectual property rights).
  • on the content of some of the Kool-Aid that has recently been served and help swing the pendulum back, if only a little, in a direction in which intellectual property can be nourished. Otherwise, we will be complicit in accelerating the trend of the last decade, in which those who write code get richly rewarded, while those who write the music, poetry, drama and journalism that are being encoded have to get day jobs.
  • To be sure, the legislators who crafted the ill-fated bills and the film industry lobbyists who supported them have little to be proud of.
  • In a widely viewed anti-SOPA/PIPA speech on Ted.com, Internet philosopher Clay Shirky similarly attributed dark motives to the studios. The targets are not Google and Yahoo
  • If he means a friend sharing Marianne Faithfull’s version of “Visions of Johanna” with me on Facebook, then the accusation is absurd.
  • ek in his 25,000-square-foot compound surrounded by a fleet of Merced
Blaž Gobec

SXSW 2011: The internet is over | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...sxsw-2011-internet-online

sxsw future guardian trends internet over

shared by Blaž Gobec on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • After three days he found it: the boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has disappeared
  • If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won't, of course, because they'll be too busy playing with the teleportation console
  • If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they're doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like
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  • when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed. You're still creating the web, but without the conscious need to do so. "Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications,"
  • Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world's leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft.
  • Three billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn't some of that energy be productively harnessed?
  • His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail.
  • A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you've failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score?
  • "is an interactive technology inspired by snakes."
  • the internet is distracting if it stops you from doing what you really want to be doing; if it doesn't, it isn't. Similarly, warnings about "internet addiction" used to sound like grandparental cautions against the evils of rock music; scoffing at the very notion was a point of pride for those who identified themselves with the future. But you can develop a problematic addiction to anything: there's no reason to exclude the internet,
  • we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like computers. We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation. But "we were not meant to operate as computers do," Schwartz says. "We are meant to pulse." When it comes to managin
  • g our own energy, he insists, we must replace a linear perspective with a cyclical one: "We live by the myth that the best way to get more work done is to work longer hours."
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