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    It's Our Web?

    Knight 2007 News Challenge Winner

    How about this for a video game? Free Speech TV has put out a short video about the current and threatened enclosure of the Internet:

    Disclosure: The video is produced by Steve Anderson, whose COA News is a client of Agaric Design Collective.

    Some surprising background on the current extent of concentration and tracking supplements the video.

    Ironically, it comes off a little like an ad for the FreeSpeech.org community, but I strongly agree with the premise of online spaces under the control of regular folks, meaning notably open source free software and not legally owned by corporate stockholders.

    I would go farther and say that anything with network effects - the more people who use it, the more valuable it is (see Microsoft Office, MySpace) - must be open in key ways and ideally under some sort of (genuine not government) democratic control. And we who care about this have a responsibility and an opportunity to help make an awesome aggregator under these auspices.

    That's not in the FreeSpeechTV project, as far as I know, but I'm glad to see them step up to help people claim our web.

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    The problem is that the remedies proposed would undermine the characteristics of the Internet that have made it such a fantastic engine of innovation -- primarily the right to innovate without permission from an incumbent who may be threatened by your innovation.

    bradburnham
    #DontBreakTheInternet: How the Web Became a Political Force vs. SOPA

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