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neutering the open web

Neil Postman's "Technopoly" e "Amusing Ourselves to Death", George Orwell's "1984", Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", Utopia e Distopia, Totalitarismo? Segway evidente - óbvio!- para a Open Web, e sobre esta, a neutralidade da internet. Segue-se um resumo retirados do geist mediático semanal.

The Open Web movement asserts a special role for public, cooperative, and standard World Wide Web communications; it opposes private, exclusive, proprietary Web solutions.
in Wikipedia 23 mar 2017

Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers and governments regulating the Internet should treat all data on the Internet the same, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication.
in Wikipedia 23 mar 2017

I

This is not speculative. This is really happening
The war for the open internet is the defining issue of our time. It’s a scramble for control of the very fabric of human communication. And human communication is all that separates us from the utopia that thousands of generations of our ancestors slowly marched us toward - or the Orwellian, Huxleyan, Kafkaesque dystopia that a locked-down internet would make possible.

The internet, it seems, is special. It’s the ultimate information technology - capable of supplanting the telegram, telephone, radio, cinema, television, and much more - and there’s no clear way to disrupt it. But the war for the commanding heights of the internet is far from over. There are many players on this global chess board. Governments. Telecom monopolies. Internet giants like Google and Facebook. NGOs. Startups. Hackers. And - most importantly - you.

If you do nothing, we will lose the war for the open internet. The greatest tool for communication and creativity in human history will fall into the hands of a few powerful corporations and governments.
in "The future of the open internet - and our way of life - is in your hands" 16 mar 2017

E para que não nos acusem de citar um qualquer anarquista bend on the destruction do mundo moderno como o conhecemos -capitalista!- usaremos como referência uma fonte que defende(!) o capitalismo e ainda assim grita aos quatro ventos que assistimos hoje a um atropelo de direitos e garantias em prol de interesses corporativistas monopolizantes *. Para a realidade dos States, mas não muito longe do que acontece world wide.

* Monopólios: maus, até que seja o teu monopólio.

This isn’t capitalism - it’s corporatism. Capitalism is messy. It’s wasteful. But it’s much healthier in the long run for society as a whole than central planning and government trying to pick the winners. Capitalism allows for small businesses to enter and actually stand a chance. Corporatism makes it impossible.
in "The future of the open internet - and our way of life - is in your hands" 16 mar 2017

Claro que, poderíamos sugerir que o anarchism provavelmente does it better porque removido o $$$ da equação tens a flexibilidade anterior minus o waste. Mas whatever.

Case in point:

Here are the 10 largest corporations in the world by market capitalization:
  1. Apple Inc
  2. Alphabet (Google)
  3. Microsoft
  4. Exxon Mobil
  5. Johnson & Johnson
  6. General Electric
  7. Amazon.com
  8. Facebook
  9. Wells Fargo
  10. AT&T
6 out of 10 of them are internet companies, and one of them is an ISP. Once you look past the last gasp of the banks and the oil companies, it becomes clear that these internet companies are the new order. They control information. They control the conversation. They control politics.
So what makes you think they won’t come to control the very internet they dominate?
in "The future of the open internet - and our way of life - is in your hands" 16 mar 2017

Não só a batalha pela internet está ao rubro, como há claramente vencedores destacados que se posicionam para consolidar as suas vantagens. E que beneficiam de um benefício de dúvida e ignorância geral para o fazer.

We blindly trust tech founders to be benevolent. You may think that the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Larry Pages of the world would know better than to abuse their power. But such scandals have happened in the past. We are not only placing faith in the temperament of the elite handful of tech company founders. We’re also trusting that other actors - who ultimately take over these organizations - will be benevolent.
in "The future of the open internet - and our way of life - is in your hands" 16 mar 2017

O novo capital em digital é atenção, e esta está a subir de preço -

Even as the costs of launching a website fall, the costs of reaching an audience continue to rise.
Half of all internet traffic now comes from just 30 websites. The remaining half is thinly spread across the 60 trillion unique webpages currently indexed by Google.
in "The future of the open internet - and our way of life - is in your hands" 16 mar 2017

- mas a infraestrutura que a sustenta é tudo menos imaterial: hardware e cabos que percorrem o planeta e entram-te casa a dentro, e também esta tem um custo, e também esta é uma frente pela qual se luta pela supremacia da internet. Segue-nos:

The mafia of the internet: the ISPs
As much as we may think of the internet as a placeless realm of pure abstractions, it has a physical structure. It’s not magic. And more people are waking up to this reality each day.

The internet is a series of copper and fiber optic cables that burrow through the ground and tunnel under oceans. We call this the Internet Backbone. The internet is then further distributed through regional backbones. Despite the involvement of huge telecoms, the internet backbone represents a fairly healthy market. About 40% of the internet’s backbone is controlled by smaller networks you’ve never heard of. The broadband internet market, on the other hand, isn’t healthy at all. This is the "last mile" of cables that plug into the internet backbone. And it’s full of ugly tollbooths, guarded by thick benches of lawyers and lobbyists.

These ISPs control millions of miles of copper cables that they buried in the ground and satellites they shot up into orbit. They constantly break the law, tie up regulators in lengthy court battles, and make it practically impossible for anyone - even Google - to enter their markets.

Historicamente, o utilizador final estava protegido dos abusos de monopólio dos ISPs pela obrigação destes tratarem todos por igual. Ora, igualdade não gera riqueza.

For the past two years, the public had a weapon against these ISPs. It’s called Net Neutrality.
in "The future of the open internet - and our way of life - is in your hands" 16 mar 2017

Aqui valerá a pena abrir um parêntesis: só faz sentido falar da neutralidade da net se no mesmo pacote -funny?- abordarmos a open web. Desta:

There’s only one word to describe the open internet: chaos. The open internet is distributed. It’s owned in part by everyone and in whole by no one. It exists largely outside of the boundaries of governments. And it’s this way by design. The open internet is a general purpose tool where anyone can publish content, and anyone can then consume that content. It is a Cambrian Explosion of ideas and of execution.
in "The future of the open internet - and our way of life - is in your hands" 16 mar 2017

Por oposição a muitos outros modelos. Exemplos:

Apple App Store isn’t a level playing field. It doesn’t resemble the open internet it was built on top of. Instead, it’s an example of a walled garden. Walled gardens look beautiful. They’re home to the most popular flora. But make no mistake, you won’t be able to venture very far in any one direction without encountering a wall. And every walled garden has a gatekeeper, who uproots plants that look like weeds. And Apple is one of the most aggressive gatekeepers of all.
in "The future of the open internet - and our way of life - is in your hands" 16 mar 2017

E, claro, o de sempre:

The ultimate walled garden: Facebook.

E de forma mais insidiosa, porque o faz, pelo seu inverso: Internet.org *

Those are people from extremely poor countries who were given a choice: they could either pay for the open internet or just get Facebook for free. They chose Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg may mean well, but he’s rapidly destroying the open internet.
in "The future of the open internet - and our way of life - is in your hands" 16 mar 2017

* Ah, aquilo da benevolência:

Internet.org is a partnership between social networking services company Facebook and six companies (Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Opera Software, Nokia and Qualcomm) that plans to bring affordable access to selected Internet services to less developed countries. It has been criticized for violating net neutrality, and by handpicking internet services that are included, for discriminating against companies not in the list, including Facebook's rivals.
in Wikipedia 23 mar 2017

Voltando à net neutrality:

The story of ISPs basically comes down to this:

They used to make a ton of money off of cable packages. But people discovered that once they had the internet, they didn’t care about cable TV any more - they just wanted data plans and so they could watch YouTube, Netflix, or whatever shows they wanted.

The ISPs don’t make nearly as much selling you a data plan as they used to make selling you a cable plan, though. So their goal is to return to the "good old days" by locking down the internet into "channels" and "bundles" then forcing you to buy those.

How do we prevent this? The good news is that we already have. In 2015, the FCC passed a law that regulated ISPs as utilities. This is based on the principle of "Net Neutrality" which basically states that all information passing through a network should be treated equally. The FCC’s Title II regulation created three "bright lines" that prevent ISPs from doing the following:

1. Blocking content from websites
2. Slowing down content from websites
3. Accepting money from websites to speed up their content

These rules made it so that no matter how rich and powerful a corporation is - and Apple and Google are the biggest corporations on Earth, and Microsoft and Facebook aren’t far behind - they can’t buy priority access to the internet.

Everyone has to compete on a level playing field. These tech conglomerates have to compete with the scrappy startups, the mom-and-pop businesses, and even independent bloggers who are running WordPress on their own domain. It’s as simple a tool as possible for protecting the capitalist free market internet from monopolies who would otherwise abuse their power.

The reason ISPs want to get rid of Net Neutrality is simple: if we stop treating them like the utility that they are, they can find ways to charge a lot more money. ISPs see an opportunity to double dip. They want to charge for bandwidth, and also charge websites what the Mafia calls "protection money." They essentially want to be able to say to website owners: "Those are some lovely data packets you’ve got there. It sure would be a shame if they got lost on their way to your users."
in "The future of the open internet - and our way of life - is in your hands" 16 mar 2017

O que nos trás de volta à open web e à atenção que todos precisam -funny?

Without traffic, the open web dies 
The ISPs wouldn’t need to block these websites. All the ISPs would need to do is introduce a slight latency.

Both Google and Microsoft have done research that shows that if you slow down a website by even 250 milliseconds - about how long it takes to blink your eyes - most people will abandon that website.

That’s right - speed isn’t a feature, it’s a basic prerequisite for attracting an audience. If an ISP artificially slows down a website, it’s practically as damaging as blocking the site entirely. Both of these acts result in the same outcome - a severe loss of traffic.
in "The future of the open internet - and our way of life - is in your hands" 16 mar 2017

II

Claro que os novos monopólios tha be não pretendem depender dos monópolios has been para sustentar os seus serviços. Logo, procuram substitui-los. Da Wired, "Facebook’s Epic Data Blast Is Good for Everyone—Especially Facebook" 21 mar 2017, sempre voluntariosa para fazer a apologia das novas tecnologias:

Companies like Google and Facebook are really reshaping telecommunications, they’re perhaps going to overshadow the needs of telecom companies.
Hardware companies may also lose some of their grip on the market, because Google and Facebook often build their own hardware infrastructure.
These tests represent the latest development in a much larger trend.
The internet’s biggest names—Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook—are all working to accelerate the evolution of the internet itself, pushing past the companies that traditionally built, deployed, and operated the infrastructure that underpins the global network.
AT&T didn’t show off this new optical transmission technology, based on a technique called probabilistic constellation shaping. The world’s largest social network did.

Facebook and Google have long pushed in this general direction, because it’s the only way they can continue to rapidly expand their already massive online empires. When they outgrew the computers and other data center hardware that served up their services, they built their own. Once they saturated online markets in the developed world, they started building high-altitude balloons, drones, and wireless antennas to make the internet accessible in entirely new locations. And as they pushed more and more data across the globe, they started investing in their own intercontinental cables.

All this work means that in the years to come, Google and Facebook and other internet giants will deliver far more complex applications to you far more quickly.
in "Facebook’s Epic Data Blast Is Good for Everyone—Especially Facebook" 21 mar 2017

O que só pode ser bom para toda a gente, especialmente para o Google e o Facebook.

Facebook has worked for years to freely share its infrastructure ideas and designs with the world at large. Such sharing only stands to reason. After all, a better internet is better for Facebook. Lucky for you, a better internet is also a better internet.
in "Facebook’s Epic Data Blast Is Good for Everyone—Especially Facebook" 21 mar 2017

Da lógica, faltou apenas o "e uma internet melhor é melhor para ti", mas essa a prudência aconselha que até a Wired, tão voluntariosa ao caso, se reserve ao silêncio.

III

Next: quando os ISPs enfrentam Googles e afins onde lhes dói: ads. Ou, $$$, ie, aquilo do capital no capital no mundo real.

old money