[free-sklyarov] Compromise? Balance?

[Paul Gowder]

I'll add my own two centimes to this one.  Such commentary basically being: 
that's why we're on the march.  The new anti-corporate activism is the 
opposing force to this "total control" universe, and the geektavists in the 
world need to get with the program.

It's not just the internet that creates the power 
structure.  Fundamentally, the total informational control over the 
internet is just a new dimension to the total economic control (ie. 
globalism, with capital being mobile and labor being forced to stay in one 
place by immigration laws, with the expected monopolistic effects), the 
total political control (of bought politicians) and the total environmental 
control (again, capital is mobile.  Nature is not.  if capital were 
prohibited from flocking to nations with no environmental protections, 
maybe the people of the several nations would have some power.) that 
corporations presently have.  The Sklyarov affair is archetypal.  Capital, 
a corporation, reached across international boundaries to pluck out the eye 
that offended it.  It did so using its political control to enforce its 
economic and informational control.  All Adobe didn't do was chop down an 
old-growth forest.

It's all the same problem.  It's all the same solution -- weaken corporate 
power, increase democratic power.  Hence the people in Genoa protesting the 
G-8 are working for exactly the same thing as the people in San Jose 
protesting the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov.

The internet is Not Special.

         -Paul

ps.  Love the e-mail address Eric.

At 04:03 PM 7/28/01, Eric C. Grimm wrote:
>William Ahern says:
>
>But, the internet gives power to the people. The internet is the great
>equalizer, and that's why all of those lusers out in dot.com land are so
>frustrated rent seeking.
>
>But, in order to keep it that way, and to keep the capacity for change in
>OUR hands, we need to keep it open. (that means fighting things like the
>DMCA and and also more subtle things like data-differentiation on  the
>network, like what the big backbone providers are pushing for (think about
>the ATM craze)).
>
>So, on-the-whole things are probably brighter than what one could
>superficially take from your piece  . . .
>
>__________________________
>
>I certainly agree with you, at least to a point, William.  The Interent
>certainly CAN be (or, more acurately, can become again) the "great
>equalizer."  But certainly, no particular future is foreordained or
>inevitable.
>
>The Internet is what we (collectively) make of it.  And, if we are not
>careful, the Internet and information technology generally it is at least
>equally likely to become -- as professor Lessig puts it -- "the instrument
>of perfect control" as it is to enhance freedom.  Based on observing both
>technological and legislative developments for some time, I hate to say that
>I must put myself squarely in the camp of the "pessimists" along with
>Lawrence Lessig -- and perhaps our own resident editorialist / "journalist"
>/ kibitzer from Wired.
>
>At least if the arrow of legislation over the past several years points in
>the general direction of where we are headed (and we can look to other signs
>like software licenses or frequency of surreptitious insertion of data
>collection mechanisms into both Interenet content and "client" software
>code), then I have to say the day of "perfect control" may be much closer at
>hand than the dawn of "perfect freedom."  But again, that will be so only if
>people make it so.
>
>What say you?


--
	-Paul Gowder

"It's because they're stupid. That's why everyone does everything."
     - Homer Simpson

	<paul at paultopia.net>

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