Doc Searls wrote a wonderful editorial about keeping the net free that I’ve only just gotten round to reading — “Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes” is 12 days old, but it’s well worth a read. Doc coherently and comprehensively lays out the urgent risk to the Internet arising from incumbents’ bad views of how the net worls and what it’s for, and a program for addressing it.
Advocating and saving the Net is not a partisan issue. Lawmakers and regulators aren’t screwing up the Net because they’re “Friends of Bush” or “Friends of Hollywood” or liberals or conservatives. They’re doing it because one way of framing the Net–as a transport system for content–is winning over another way of framing the Net–as a place where markets and business and culture and governance can all thrive. Otherwise helpful documents, including Ernest Partridge’s “After the Internet” fail because they blame “Bush-friendly conservative corporations” and appeal only to one political constituency, in this case, progressives. Freedom, independence, the sovereignty of the individual, private rights and open frontiers are a few among many values shared by progressives and conservatives. All are better supported, in obvious ways, by the Net as a place rather than as a transport system.
(via EFF Mini Links)