Internet

Overview

The internet is both a powerful tool and, increasingly, the subject of a number of issues, a battleground upon which those issues are fought over, and itself the target of verbal and legislative attacks as the enemies of transparency and citizen empowerment seek to prevent it from being used as a tool to further those goals.

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Issues

• Internet access is becoming a crucial issue as the world moves increasingly online; the United States lags behind due to the efforts of telecomm industry lobbyists
• War on the internet relates to efforts to reduce the internet's effectiveness as a tool for transparency and citizen empowerment:
  • Internet neutrality relates to whether or not it should be legal for owners of internet infrastructure to favor transmission of certain content
  • Internet radio has become an issue in that new rules in the United States seem to be unfairly penalizing internet radio stations as part of an overall media consolidation effort aimed at eliminating independent media and thereby suppressing dissent
• Internet-based infrastructure refers to internet-based tools and resources for managing and maintaining civilization (not to be confused with the infrastructure of the internet itself, i.e. the technical underpinnings and devices which allow the internet to function)
• Internet governance is the idea that the internet could be used as a substrate upon which a new, more citizen empowering form of government could be built. (Fears by the powerful that this will happen are likely to motivate a war on the internet, regarding which as yet there have been only opening moves which conceivably may mean nothing more than they seem to mean.)

proposed legislation

• The Internet Community Ports Act would have been a really bad idea, but fortunately it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.

Phenomena

• Anonymous is an activist group with origins in an internet forum

Myths

• Al Gore did not claim to have invented the internet, although he did play a key role in funding early expansion of the backbone.

Related Pages

• More recently, the internet is emerging as a powerful new accountability arena – or, more precisely, as the host for a growing number of accountability arenas, in the form of web sites and other services – whose potential is only slowly being realized as new software is written and as more people become familiar with its use.

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia
• Conservapedia
• dKosopedia (stub-sized article as of 2007-08-21)
• SourceWatch as of 2008-01-24 has many related pages but no central page for "internet"

Filed Links

1. redirect template:links/smw

Articles

• 2007-08-15 Internet is "the new Afghanistan": NY police commissioner: New York police commissioner Raymond Kelly says the internet is the next breeding ground for terrorists "because it provides ideology that could radicalize Westerners who might then initiate home-grown attacks".
  • This seems patently ridiculous. Does he have any evidence for this?
  • The only way in which this doesn't seem ridiculous is if you interpret "home-grown attacks" as "domestic dissent".
  • Personally, I've been wondering what has been taking the establishment so long to start squashing free speech on the internet and turning it into another centralized medium like TV, radio, and newspapers. Obviously the internet neutrality battle was one such effort, but it really seemed like they were missing an opportunity to poison the popular perception of the internet early on, before most people were familiar with it. Now here comes this, so maybe they're finally getting out the big guns. If there's more of this, it'll probably be time to start a war on the internet page. -W.
• 2007-06-08 The internet is destroying the world as we know it by A.N. Wilson, The Daily Mail (UK)