"The Web should be ours: People should have the ability to shape the Internet experience and be able to contribute with content without requiring permission from a central entity."
Honest question: Why?
No other network is supposed to be "ours". Roads, telephones, mobile networks and so on. Why is the internet supposed to be different and special?
I mean, yes, as a Utopian ideal, but realistically, I dont see how long term that flies. I cant help thinking that up till now we have been lucky and spoiled, but in the end, everything gets controlled and regulated.
Because it works really well in the long term if it's ours. It means that innovation can come from many more people than if it were a regulated network. And that's not just a possibility, that has actually happened lots of times.
A possible contribution is "write a search engine", and see where Google is today.
It means that innovation can come from many more people
Like democracy, the purpose is not "efficiency" but epistimology. By opening up, we have the potential to get betting understanding of the world and tools to explore it. Granted, that brings risks (of abuse). But there are more abuses that those who seek to contol it will ultimately commit if for no other reason than the temptation (NSA, classic example).
I don't think roads, telephones and mobile networks are an apt comparison -- it's more about the freedom of making your content freely available, rather than the actual physical network.
A better comparison might be the ability to distribute your own newsletter or pamphlets on the street. You can buy a domain name and a hosting provider and have your own personal page to share, whether it be funny cat pictures for your family, a personal blog, a venue for your own artistic endeavours, or political dissent.
Why should it be regulated who gets to put their own mark on "the web"?
Because freedom of speech and freedom of expression. And being regulated does not mean lack of control or any kind of censorship. Network neutrality written in law is regulation. And I like it.
> No other network is supposed to be "ours". Roads, telephones, mobile networks and so on.
It may not be your opinion that they are supposed to be "ours", but the opinion that they are or should be is certainly fairly common, though the idea of what it means for them to be "ours" vary from an acceptance of current regulatory regimes to a wanting extensive decentralisation of control.
But the internet is special in this respect in that it currently is still reasonably outside of the control of both governments and private entities. That is not just due to history but also due to the nature of the network: It is a "meta network" layered on top of a bunch of physical networks, but that can be layered on top of "anything" that can move packets from one addressable note to another. It takes a lot to enforce control if you at the same time want people to be able to exchange information: Unless you are going to do complicated cryptoanalysis of every single packet passing through the system, people can establish their own new layers on top.
Tor, for example, is just an early precursor to what we can expect to see popping up, since experimenting with layering is so easy (you can set up your own "proto VPN" with a few dozen lines of shell script on many OS's), and people have incentives to avoid control.
Honest question: Why?
No other network is supposed to be "ours". Roads, telephones, mobile networks and so on. Why is the internet supposed to be different and special?
I mean, yes, as a Utopian ideal, but realistically, I dont see how long term that flies. I cant help thinking that up till now we have been lucky and spoiled, but in the end, everything gets controlled and regulated.