When you make a commercial like this, you're really just begging for a parody
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Someone fixed the Rock God Siri commercial! (via +Stu Maschwitz)
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If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it
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*Leave Our Net Alone*"
The internet’s not broken.
So then why are there so many attempts to regulate it? Under the guises of piracy, privacy, pornography, predators, indecency, and security, not to mention censorship, tyranny, and civilization, governments from the U.S. to France to Germany to China to Iran to Canada — as well as the European Union and the United Nations — are trying to exert control over the internet.
Why? Is it not working? Is it presenting some new danger to society? Is it fundamentally operating any differently today than it was five or ten years ago? No, no, and no.
So why are governments so eager to claim authority over it? Why would legacy corporations, industries, and institutions egg them on? Because the net is working better than ever. Because they finally recognize how powerful it is and how disruptive it is to their power.
And that is precisely why we must fight against their attempts to regulate it, to change it, to throttle it, to oversee it, to insert controls into it, to grant them sovereignty over it. We also must resist the temptation to compromise, to accept the lesser of evils. Last week, Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell warned of the danger of the U.N. asserting governance over the net, but then he turned around and argued that “merely saying ‘no’ to any changes to the current structure of Internet governance is likely to be a losing proposition.”
Why? I repeat: It’s not broken. This is why I urged French President Nicolas Sarkozy to take a Hippocratic oath for the net. This is why I have come to side with Sen. Al Franken on at least this: Net neutrality is not regulation; it is protecting the net from companies trying to change it. This is why the Reddit community is writing the Free Internet Act.
This is why I argued in Public Parts that we must have a discussion of the principles of an open society and the tools of publicness that enable it. This is why I wrote Public Parts. And that is why I’m posting the last chapter of the book, which argues that governments and companies are not protectors of the net and that we must be.
It’s not broken. Don’t fix it. Leave our net alone.
********
Post with many embedded links here: http://www.buzzmachine.com/2012/02/27/leave-our-net-alone/
Last chapter of Public Parts here: http://www.buzzmachine.com/publicpartsconclusion/
* Sung to the tune of: Pink Floyd – Another Brick In The Wall (HQ)
We don’t need no regulation.
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the network
Government: Leave our net alone
Hey! Government! Leave our net alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.
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Reddit was among the leaders in the protest movement brought the SOPA/PIPA fast-track to a grinding halt recently and for that they deserve tremendous praise.
While complaining about bad stuff is easy to do, at least with the internet as it's constituted today, coming up with real positive alternative ideas is a lot harder.
Thankfully Reddit has stepped up to the plate with a proposal for the Free Internet Act. Unlike SOPA and PIPA which were largely written in secret by lobbyists for the old-school content industry, FIA is an open-source at attempt at writing legislation. As it stands today, it contains some real common sense ideas for true copyright reform that would enable and encourage creativity rather than stifling it in the name of preserving entrenched business models.
Of course since it's not coming from lobbyists that are proving huge quantities of campaign donations and junkets and it includes common sense ideas, it has absolutely no chance of passage. On the other hand, since the legislators took notice when hundreds of thousands of actual voters stood up and said no, anything is possible.
Go over and take a look at the FIA in progress and then content your senators and representatives and demand that they introduce this bill and vote for it.
#sopa #pipa #freespeech #fia #reddit #congress #freeinternet
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The Free Internet Act is Reddit's crowdsourced SOPA alternative
If you’re fed up with the way the debate about online piracy is going, perhaps you should draft your own legislation like the folks at Reddit. The Free Internet Act is currently open and freely-editable over at Google Docs, and focuses on preventing censorship of nearly any kind. Rather than put the rights of content owners first, the FIA aims to "promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation by preventing the restriction of liberty and preventing the means of censorship." T…
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GM's EN-V concepts are one look at a possible future for personal urban mobility that encompasses electric drive, autonomous capabilities and vehicle-to-vehicle communications.
#cars #autonomousdriving #en-v
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Heading into the next decade as the world gets more urbanized, the two biggest problems we're going to have deal with in transportation are energy use and congestion. Some of the smartest people in the business are already thinking of solutions today, but it seems clear that smaller physical footprints that take up less space on the road and smarter vehicles that can talk to each other and drive themselves to avoid congestion will almost certainly be part of the solution.
#cars #congestion #energyuse
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Bill Ford Jr. says plan now for future traffic jams
Dearborn— His family made its fortune selling cars to the masses, but now Bill Ford Jr. is fretting about selling too many.
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