The war is already lost

Laura Weinstein writes:

"The current Craigslist battle is but a harbinger of the titanic struggles to come over who controls the Internet and its content.
Even if you couldn't care less about erotic ads and have never used Craigslist, this is still a war of importance to you -- and to your children who will ultimately inherent the Internet and its controversies.

It is imperative that we take the strongest possible stand -- right now -- against inappropriate governmental meddling and threats relating to Internet content. There are forces in play whose ultimate goal is to twist the Internet into a prescreened, lowest-common-denominator, governmentally-straitjacketed and impotent shadow of its current self, and in the process eliminate untold numbers of important future applications before they can ever be born.

Controlling communications means controlling the future. We should not and must not allow political grandstanding and associated threats to undermine what we have built or snuff out the wonders still to come.

As Lily Tomlin used to say, "And that's the truth."


Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com
I couldn’t agree more.
Behind all this there is the huge interest of those whose existence is highly mined by the Internet.
Those are people who find too exhausting adapt to the new mean of communication, to the new markets and find it easier and more productive to just impose their old view (which is highly profitable because monopolistic).

It is like imposing taxes to imports because that means to lower the prices.
Competition for them means to pay politicians to make laws to defend their products.
Democracy is a word without meaning, and ideologies, morality and religion something useful to attack the competitors...

They are against globalization because that means competition and of course they hate the Internet, because it is the first real global market.
Instead of fighting abuses they fight the mean, not even considering that destroying it would be much worse than cleaning.
But I guess they do not realize that the war is already lost.
Certain politicians need money and are willing to do Anything to get it.
But they mostly need votes...