Reflections

2012-12-12

The UN-ITU conference on the Internet:

there are three players:

People: they think everything is free, but it is not.

Companies: they want money. In absence of micropayments this means advertising.

Government: they want control. Not necessarily censorship.

Google, FaceBook, Twitter: they behave like non-elected, authoritarian governments and operate globally.  Meddling from them is worse than meddling from the government.

In democracies government can be chosen. In private enterprise that is not so.  The real power is with the shareholders and the advertisers, not with the users.

Adverts are however a tax that is maybe paid more by the wealthy than by the poor, hence it can be argued that it is a redistribution of wealth.   But it is not transparent, and the model puts censoring pressure on the publishers.

There must be strict separation of powers:  transport & bandwidth should be independent from content & storage.