Save the Web!
Louis: I killed the Internet; http://j.mp/GKD5eR RWW: How to save it; http://j.mp/GJdJ2K #Web http://eicker.at/TheWeb
Louis: I killed the Internet; http://j.mp/GKD5eR RWW: How to save it; http://j.mp/GJdJ2K #Web http://eicker.at/TheWeb
Jarvis: We don’t need no regulation. We don’t need no thought control. – Leave our net alone! http://eicker.at/NetControl
The Internet and Web are, need, and will stay open – this gorgeous discussion proves it once again; http://eicker.at/OpenWeb
Time: “Is Google In Danger of Being Shut Out of the Changing Internet? – The upcoming IPO of Facebook, the flak surrounding Twitter’s decision to censor some tweets, and Google’s weaker-than-expected 4th-quarter earnings all point to one of the big events of our times: The crazy, chaotic, idealistic days of the Internet are ending. … The old Internet on which Google has thrived is still there, of course, but like the wilderness it is shrinking. … The danger to Google, in other words, is that as social networking, smartphones and tablets increasingly come to dominate the Internet, Google’s chance to earn advertising revenues from searching will shrink along with its influence. … Don’t get me wrong: Google is still a force, just as Microsoft, Intel and IBM are. But they are no longer at the epicentre of the zeitgeist. Like Microsoft before it, Google can fight the good fight on many different fronts. Whether it can ever find an engine of growth capable of supplanting its core business is another question.”
Battelle: “It’s Not Wether Google’s Threatened. It’s Asking Ourselves: What Commons Do We Wish For? – If Facebook’s IPO filing does anything besides mint a lot of millionaires, it will be to shine a rather unsettling light on a fact most of us would rather not acknowledge: The web as we know it is rather like our polar ice caps: under severe, long-term attack by forces of our own creation. … We lose a commons, an ecosystem, a ‘tangled bank’ where serendipity, dirt, and iterative trial and error drive open innovation. … What kind of a world do we want to live in? As we increasingly leverage our lives through the world of digital platforms, what are the values we wish to hold in common? … No gatekeepers. The web is decentralized. Anyone can start a web site. … An ethos of the commons. The web developed over time under an ethos of community development, and most of its core software and protocols are royalty free or open source (or both). … No preset rules about how data is used. If one site collects information from or about a user of its site, that site has the right to do other things with that data… Neutrality. No one site on the web is any more or less accessible than any other site. If it’s on the web, you can find it and visit it. … Interoperability. Sites on the web share common protocols and principles, and determine independently how to work with each other. There is no centralized authority which decides who can work with who, in what way. … So, does that mean the Internet is going to become a series of walled gardens, each subject to the whims of that garden’s liege? – I don’t think so. Scroll up and look at that set of values again. I see absolutely no reason why they can not and should not be applied to how we live our lives inside the worlds of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and the countless apps we have come to depend upon. … I believe in the open market of ideas, of companies and products and services which identify the problems I’ve outlined above, and begin to address them through innovative new approaches that solve for them. I believe in the Internet. Always have, and always will.”
Winer: “I don’t love Google but… John Battelle is right. Google defined the web that we like, and the web we like defined Google. Having Google break the contract is not just bad for Google, it’s bad for the web. – Two take-aways from this: 1. We should be more careful about who we get in bed with next time. 2. We probably should help Google survive, but only to the extent that they support the open web that we love.”
Scoble: “It’s too late for Dave Winer and John Battelle to save the common web – The lesson today, four years later, is that the common web is in grave threat, not just from Facebook’s data roach motel but from Apple’s and Amazon’s and, now, Google. … Now do you get why I really don’t care anymore? The time for a major fight was four years ago. – I understood then what was at stake. – Today? It’s too late. My wife is a great example of why: she’s addicted to Facebook and Zynga and her iPhone apps. – It’s too late to save the common web. It’s why, for the past year, I’ve given up and have put most of my blogging into Google+. I should have been spending that effort on the web commons and on RSS but it’s too late. … I’m not going back to the open web. Why? The juice isn’t there. … What’s Dave Winer’s answer? He deleted his Facebook account and is working hard to try to get people to adopt RSS again. Sorry, Dave, but Twitter is a better place to get tech news. … So, cry me a river. I’m a user. I tried to stick up for the common web in 2008. Where was the protest then? I was called an ‘edge case’ and someone who should be ignored. … Today? No, don’t put me on stage at conferences. Get regular people, like my wife, who could tell you why they don’t like the open web and, why, even, they are scared of it. … John, where were you? At least Dave has been consistently trying to keep us putting content on blogs and on RSS, which ARE the open common web. It’s just that it’s too late. We’re firmly locked back in the trunk and the day for blowing open the trunk has come and gone.”
Winer: “Scoble: I’ll go down with the ship – Then I saw the web. It meant everything to me, because now there was no Apple in my way telling me I couldn’t make programming tools because that’s something they had an exclusive on. I was able to make web content tools, and evolve them, and get them to users, and learn from our experiences, without the supervision of any corporate guys, who see our communities as nothing more than a business model. – So Scoble, you can go enjoy whatever it is you like about Facebook. I can’t imagine what that might be. I don’t use it because that would be like going back to the system that didn’t work. I’d rather work for a very small minority of free users, than try to be an approved vendor in a world controlled by a bunch of suits. For me that’s the end. I’d rather go make pottery in Italy or Slovenia. … To me Facebook already feels over. I really don’t feel like I’m missing anything. Look at it this way. There’s lots of stuff going on right now that I’m not part of. That’s the way it goes. Me and Facebook are over. It’s going to stay that way. And if I’m on a ship that’s sinking, well I’ve had a good run, and I can afford to go down with the ship, along with people who share my values. It’s a cause, I’ve discovered, that’s worth giving something up for.”
Boyd: “Facebook is the new AOL, despite the market cap. But it’s headed for a hard landing for other reasons than Winer is pushing. Facebook will fail because of the imminent rise of social operating systems – future versions of iOS, Mac OS X, and Android – which will break the Facebook monolith to bits.”
Dyson: “Is the Open Web Doomed? Open Your Eyes and Relax – I’m wading into an argument that I think may be overblown. With Facebook going public and Google threatened by apps and closed services such as FB, is the open web doomed? You might think so after reading the dueling blog posts of John Battelle, Robert Scoble and Dave Winer in the past few days. But things are a bit more complicated. … So what’s the difference between paternalism and our duty to save people from tyrants or from companies whose privacy statements are incomprehensible? If people are happy with Facebook, why should we disturb them? If the Iraqis weren’t going to topple Saddam Hussein, what right – or obligation – did we outsiders have to do so? … Of course, we can also be part of the backlash…I’m not saying don’t be part of the backlash; I’m just suggesting that the backlash will work – abetted by the march of technology and user neophilia. … Right now, we’re moving slowly from open data and APIs and standards, to a world of Facebook and apps. We’re likely to see abandonment of the DNS by consumers both because of those apps, and a tragedy of the commons where new Top-Level Domain names (.whatevers and .brands) confuse users and lead to more use of the search box or links within apps. … I don’t actually think we’re facing a world of no choices. In fact, we all have many choices … and it’s up to us to make them. Yes, many people make choices I despise, but this is the world of the long tail. Of course, the short, fat front is always more popular; it all gets homogenized and each individual gets either one central broadcast, or something so tailored he never learns anything new, as in Eli Pariser’s filter bubble… That’s exactly when some fearless entrepreneur will come along with something wild and crazy that will totally dominate everything 10 years later.”
Twitter censorship becomes nationalised: starts censoring tweets country by country; http://eicker.at/TwitterCensorship
Twitter, 2011: “The Tweets Must Flow – The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is both a practical and ethical belief. On a practical level, we simply cannot review all one hundred million-plus Tweets created and subsequently delivered every day. From an ethical perspective, almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits. – At Twitter, we have identified our own responsibilities and limits. There are Tweets that we do remove, such as illegal Tweets and spam. However, we make efforts to keep these exceptions narrow so they may serve to prove a broader and more important rule – we strive not to remove Tweets on the basis of their content. – Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users’ right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed.”
Twitter, 2012: “Tweets still must flow – As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content. – Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country – while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why. – We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. As part of that transparency, we’ve expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects … which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter. … One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user’s voice. We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t. The Tweets must continue to flow.”
GigaOM: “The company said laws around what content is legal to distribute differ from country to country, and the new system will allow it to remove tweets only for users in a specific area, rather than censoring the entire network. But no matter how Twitter phrases it, this news is going to concentrate attention on one thing: that a corporate entity, however well-meaning, controls which tweets are seen or not seen. … Of course, making it public didn’t help Twitter in its fight to resist the court order – in the latest decision in the case, a court ruled that it would have to turn over the data, which includes IP addresses and email addresses – but at least it made it obvious what was happening. … That said, however, the reality is that Twitter has just opened itself up to all kinds of conspiracy theories about what tweets it is or isn’t withholding – and on whose behalf it is removing them. … More than anything else, Twitter’s announcement highlights both how integral a part of the global information ecosystem it has become, and how vulnerable that ecosystem can be when a single entity controls such a crucial portion of it. How Twitter handles that challenge will ultimately determine whether it deserves the continued trust of its users.”
RWW: “In an email, Twitter spokesperson Jodi Olson said the company was not backing off its commitment to free expression. – ‘Just to be clear, this is not a change in philosophy and there are still countries to which we will not go,” Olson said. ‘We hold freedom of expression in high esteem and work hard not to remove Tweets.‘ – The three major, U.S.-based social networks are all currently banned in China, a country analysts all agree is crucial for future growth. While Twitter’s post did not specifically mention China, it clearly positions the company ahead of Facebook and Google+ in articulating a career policy for handling content that may rile Chinese government officials. … ‘This launch gives us the ability, when we have to, in response to a valid legal request, withhold a Tweet in a specific country and to keep that Tweet visible for the rest of the world,’ Olson said Thursday. ‘Our policy in these cases is to 1) promptly notify the affected users, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so; 2) withhold the content in the required countries only, rather than worldwide; 3) clearly indicate to viewers that a Tweet or Account has been withheld, and 4) make available any requests to withhold content through our partnership with Chilling Effects.‘”
VB: “Should you believe the company’s assertions (and we do), you can boil it all down to this: Twitter has craftily granted itself the ability to honor the requests it has to in order to remain operable in some countries and yet still simultaneously uphold its commitment to freedom of expression. – Twitter has also made a promise to be more forthcoming with members about any tweets it decides to withhold from them. The company has decided to make public a page with a record of cease and desist orders, and will attempt to let a user when his or her tweet is withheld.”
TC: “In a way, it’s a good solution: countries where it is forbidden to speak ill of God or well of Hitler will now be able to extend those restrictions to Twitter. But, on the other hand, countries where it is forbidden to speak ill of God or well of Hitler will now be able to extend those restrictions to Twitter. … The problem is that in a way, that is worse. Twitter, and the net in general, are by nature a global communication platform. National conflicts on the internet (for example, an album being released in October in the UK and December in the US) are strange and illogical. Before this announcement, Twitter was a global platform on which something was either said or not said, on a global scale. Now, Twitter’s new power to enforce censorship depending on your country both legitimizes the blocks and concedes international territory specifically to countries that ‘have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.’ This diplomatic casting of the restriction of speech, from a company that is built around the idea of free communication, is troubling. … A meta-national community like Twitter must both transcend and respect its constituent parts, and that requires some tough decisions. Let’s hope they made this decision with the promise of better global communication in mind.“
IEEE: The making of Diaspora. Four young coders are planting the seeds for the post-Facebook future; http://eicker.at/DiasporaSummary
Wikipedia: “Diaspora (stylized DIASPORA*) is a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service, providing a decentralized alternative to social network services like Facebook. The project is currently under development by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, students at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The group received donations in excess of $200,000 via Kickstarter. A consumer alpha version was released on November 23, 2010. … Diaspora works by letting users set up their own server (or ‘pod’) to host content; pods can then interact to share status updates, photographs, and other social data. It allows its users to host their data with a traditional web host, a cloud based host, an ISP, or a friend. The framework, which is being built on Ruby on Rails, is free software and can be experimented with by external developers.”
IEEE: “Journalists and bloggers have called Diaspora ‘the Facebook killer,’ ‘the Facebook rival,’ ‘the anti-Facebook,’ ‘Facebook’s challenger,’ and ‘another Facebook wannabe.’ … The guys, however, don’t see themselves as competition. … They’re taking a stab at reengineering the way online socializing works by building an entire network of networks from the ground up. They hope that in the process they will help promote standards that other social sites … will use to bridge their services. … Choice, interoperability, and the chance to invent your own networking experience are what federated networks such the Diaspora pods are all about. … They don’t like that Facebook owns the data they share through the site and can mine or sell it to advertisers at will. … Above all, they don’t like that most ordinary people and many Web engineers have come to believe that seven-year-old Facebook represents the be-all and end-all of everything online socializing will ever be. … ‘The problem with Diaspora right now is it’s not designed to work with other providers out of the box,’ says Ben Zhao, a network security expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara [listen to an interview with Zhao].”
Diaspora Wiki: “Diaspora needs you! – Diaspora is an open source project, which means all our code and documentation is available for free to anyone online. It also means that, while there is a core team working on the project full time, it only thrives because we have a wonderful set of volunteer collaborators who help out in their free time. – Some of these volunteers are developers and help with the code, which is the ‘traditional’ way to help out an open source project, and is awesome. But many are not developers, and their contributions are awesome too. … Come talk to us. The best ways to get in touch in realtime are our Convore group, or IRC. Tell us what you’re interested in working on – code, tutorials, feature ideas, mockups, running a pod, helping with the wiki, other – and we can help you figure out how to get going.”
UberMedia plans a Twitter competitor, Twitter plans to buy UberMedia’s TweetDeck. Any winners? http://eicker.at/TwitterUberMedia
Facebook‘s Open Compute Project demonstrates that even computing infrastructure is a commodity; http://eicker.at/OpenCompute
Loukide: Restricting developers undermines the ecology that made Twitter valuable; http://eicker.at/TwittersEcosystem
Making business and systemic risks in proprietary ecosystems: Twitter suspends UberMedia; http://eicker.at/ProprietaryEcosystems
GlobalWebIndex: Internet platforms are increasingly the entertainment platform of choice; http://eicker.at/PassiveExperience
Jarvis: “The internet’s not broken. – So then why are there so many attempts to regulate it? Under the guises of piracy, privacy, pornography, predators, indecency, and security, not to mention censorship, tyranny, and civilization, governments from the U.S. to France to Germany to China to Iran to Canada – as well as the European Union and the United Nations – are trying to exert control over the internet. – Why? Is it not working? Is it presenting some new danger to society? Is it fundamentally operating any differently today than it was five or ten years ago? No, no, and no…”
We don’t need no regulation.
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the network
Government: Leave our net alone
Hey! Government! Leave our net alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.
The Internet and Web are, need, and will stay open – this gorgeous discussion proves it once again; http://eicker.at/OpenWeb
The Web goes dark on January 18, 2012, protesting #SOPA/#PIPA: Wikipedia, BoingBoing, many more; http://eicker.at/J18 #J18
White House: Combating Online Piracy while Protecting an Open and Innovative Internet; http://eicker.at/PiracyInternet #SOPA
A UN report declared Internet access a human right last summer: Cerf argues why it’s not; http://eicker.at/InternetHumanRight
Petri on Judiciary Committee’s SOPA hearings: I just want the nightmare to be over; http://eicker.at/SOPAnightmare
Internet censorship made in the USA: SOPA and PIPA are a major attack on Internet freedom; http://eicker.at/InternetCensorship