You May Be Able to Get There From Here

What’s great about this one is how it fits with the mock desktop enviornment:

There’s an interesting book by John Zittrain, which can be read from free at the Yale Press site. (It’s incidentally a nicely designed site.) I started reading it today, and I’m looking forward to purchasing a hard copy, which is also nicely packaged.

The author’s premise for the book is quite simple- it asks what the future of Internet will look like. This seems not to be a static prediction, though, but a cautious look at how we have computed on the web, the technologies that will transform the web, and the problems ahead if the web is not reformed :

The PC and Internet were the engines of those innovations, and if they can be saved, they will offer more. As time passes, the brand names on each side will change. But the core battle will remain. It will be fought through information appliances and Web 2.0 platforms like today’s Facebook apps and Google Maps mash-ups. These are not just products but also services, watched and updated according to the constant dictates of their makers and those who can pressure them.

From Art Brodsky in the Huff Post:

Most congressional Republicans oppose the idea of giving consumers freedom on the Internet. They take shelter in their anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric, preferring to allow Internet freedom to apply to the corporations which own the networks connecting the Internet to consumers, rather than to consumers themselves. There could, of course, be a larger discussion about the meaning of “conservative” and Republican, and whether the two are synonymous.

It’s nice to see comprehensive coverage of this issue on the front page of the Huff Post this week.

I think that I’m in favor of more (Ted Stevens) conservatives making ludicrous claims about the net and net neutrality, because such comments and positions give more publicity to the importance of protecting the rights of all internet users. In other words, democratic candidates will have a reason to fight on these issues because they’ve been aired publicly.