Variations on a theme:
* “The net regards censorship as a failure, and routes around it.” — John Gilmore, SUN Microsystems & EFF co-founder.
* “The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it.” — Mark Pesce, Writer, consultant, Sydney, Australia
* “The web regards centralization as a failure, and routes around it… by moving to the edge.” — Stowe Boyd, /Message blog
* “The net regards the middleman as a failure, and routes around it.” — Terry Heaton, PoMo Blog
Anybody have any others to add?
John Markoff had an interesting article in the New York Times this weekend entitled “Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S..” In the piece, Markoff notes that “The era of the American Internet is ending” since “data is increasingly flowing around the United States,” instead of all flowing though our country, as it once did. Markoff focuses on how that “may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.”
Indeed, it may. But what I also found interesting about this fact is the implications it will have for the future of content regulation. As Harvard’s Yochai Benkler told the Times, “This is one of many dimensions on which we’ll have to adjust to a reduction in American ability to dictate terms of core interests of ours.” Content controls are one way that lawmakers enforce what they perceive to be a country’s “core interests.” As less and less Internet traffic flows through the U.S., it could become increasingly difficult for American lawmakers to impose their particular vision or morality on the Internet.
And that’s both good and bad news.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.