Day: 1 August 2008

You may have noticed that I push back against badly designed DRM and IPR. There are many reasons: I am not in favour of laws that treat everyone like criminals; I do not believe that the internet is primarily a vehicle built for Hollywood to distribute its “content” while protecting itself against “criminals”; I believe that intellectual property legislation is dated, irrelevant, no longer fit for purpose and inherently unusable; I could go on and on.

It’s not just about intellectual property. The same is true when it comes to discussions about the other two “i” words, identity and the internet. For identity also read privacy, for the internet also read net neutrality.

Where all this comes together is in the context of waste. Wasted opportunities, particularly in education, in healthcare and in government, opportunities wasted because people, often ill-informed, make decisions, often ill-judged, that continue to treat the internet as an extension of Hollywood, the music industry and publishers. And, buoyed up with the moral indignation that precedes such actions, and by the self-satisfaction that succeeds them, it is normal and understandable that nanny-state decisions then follow.

Which is why I found what Bill Thompson wrote instructive. Do take a look at a recent post by him in Index on Censorship, headlined Fools Rush in Where Programmers Fear to Tread. I particularly like this bit:

The real danger is not that politicians ask for things that the current network architecture cannot support, but that the network could be changed to make those things possible.

The Web is live, it is two-way, it is writeable. That is what makes it the Web, its interactive participative nature. The value proposition of the web in education, in healthcare and in government relies on this two-way-ness.

The Web is not about broadcast, it is not about access control, it is not about audiences and content. It’s not about Publishing 1.0, or for that matter Publishing 0.0.

If the people who make such decisions insist on using the metaphor of the Information Superhighway, then let us try and stop them from putting cattle grids every 100 yards. Because that is what is happening. Cattle grids that slow us down, make us more vulnerable to attacks from highwaymen.

There is one overarching reason. The waste of it all.

Cloudy
My thoughts are scattered and they’re
Cloudy
They have no borders, no boundaries
They echo and they swell
From Tolstoy to Tinker Bell

Simon and Garfunkel, Cloudy

Hugh has a great post on “the cloud” today. One that should make all of us think. As Tim O’Reilly tweeted, this is an important post. Monkchips‘ observations here, as referenced by both Hugh and Tim, are worth reading.

I have always had this sense that there is no longer any room for artificial monopolies, that the market will provide a self-correcting mechanism. But I have always been wrong on this. We can argue about why this is so, but not about the fact. Microsoft, Google and Apple are facts.

Open standards, open platforms and open source are ways to prevent this happening. Ways to guarantee that history won’t repeat itself. But this needs coherent communal action, something that is hard to achieve in emergent environments.

Maybe the VRM community should take this on.

I started this post with a quote from a Simon and Garfunkel song. We need to make sure that what we do in cloud computing doesn’t sound like the end of that song:

They don’t know where they’re going/And, my friend/Neither do I.

So read Hugh’s post. Read what James Governor has to say. And help us all figure out how to prevent what would otherwise be the expected outcome.

[After publishing this post, I walked into the kitchen, to be greeted by Joni Mitchell singing Big Yellow Taxi. And it reminded me: I really don’t know clouds…..at all…..]