The Battle for the Internet
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The session was intended to be a discussion of who would be fighting for the soul of the internet and where. The martial title, however, brought in relatively militant discussants, so we mostly talked about government, control, crime, and openness.
The players
I've arranged them from Left to Right, depending upon their commitment to the past models of control, Top to Bottom, based upon their praiseworthiness. (Since this is a wiki, feel free to revise my opinions.)
NANOG
Nokia
Government Agencies
OLPC
Microsoft
Intel
Google
ICANN
Telecoms
Content Owners
Comcast & Cox
Verisign
Commercial Spies
Russia and China
Pornographers
Organized Crime
The "battlefields" identified were mostly issues rather than locations. However, Africa and Asia were discussed briefly as places where cell phones were vital additions to their lives, not just alternative internet devices.
Battlefields
- DRM: The content owners vs. the consumers with the PC industry caught in the middle.
- Knowledge
- Anonymity
- The conservatives described the needs for dependable authentication claiming the internet's anonymity is far too pervasive.
- Liberals observed that anonymity is a constitutional right.
- Identity Integrity
- Being impersonated can be a problem
- Being authenticated in a blog comment can allow you to build credibility.
- Encryption
- Conservatives and liberals agreed that the barriers to adoption have been usability and enterprise customers, not government, wanting to control users.
- Traffic Blocking is an issue. If you count Comcast and Cox blocking Bit Torrent, the US does more than any other country.
- Transparency
- The biggest complaint against Comcast service tweaking was their misleading customers.
- Google and others can be collecting information, but we don't know what -- the new Panopticon.
- Literacy