Off you go… into the purple yonder!

The first in a series of reports titled “The Producer Electronics Revolution, Part I” by Doc Searls is an excellent read, and it touches on a lot of the pressure we’ve been seeing to close and lock down our open world - be it on the level of content, network infrastructure, or software. Doc says we are going to win - I really hope so, or this world will become a very boring place. I think we are winning when it comes to software - Free Software is clearly on a roll. We’ve been making some inroads on the content level with things like Creative Commons, but open content is still pretty much a fringe phenomenon. Lots of work to do there. The network infrastructure has traditionally been open, but some greedy telecom companies (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc) are lobbying hard to reduce the internet to some sort of shopping highway under their control. They want to kill network neutrality, which would be a very, very bad thing. This is a major threat, which is clearly outlined in this excellent The Nation article.