Re: Court Strikes a Blow Against Freedom Online
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/31753/
I considered that if the Internet or later the "Internet 2" become so regulated, people will return to using dial-up to access bulleten boards like in the old days. So groups like NR would comprise of a number of computers that we just dial into in order to access and post information. But then there is this; I will just quote a small part from the article as it is fairly large:
But now, the phone companies are lobbying Washington to kill off what's left of "common carrier" policy. They wish to operate their Internet services as fully "private" networks. Phone and cable companies claim that the government shouldn't play a role in broadband regulation: Instead of the free and open network that offers equal access to all, they want to reduce the Internet to a series of business decisions between consumers and providers.
Besides their business interests, telephone and cable companies also have a larger political agenda. Both industries oppose giving local communities the right to create their own local Internet wireless or wi-fi networks.
So basically this could be extended to make any wide-area-network other than the government approved internet..."illegal".
It will be interesting to see the sort of propaganda that will be created over the next few years to get people to go along with this. That AOL stuff is just a taster I imagine.
(Interestingly the "Internet is bad" video is quite how I imagine the Controllers feel about the masses having access to such a wealth of information).
