Communications of the ACM
Why Internet Governance Should Be Left to the Engineers
If governments really care about the Internet, they should stay out of the engineers way.
Credit: Euan Rocha/Reuters
As the Internet and the disruptive innovations it spawns are becoming economically, politically, and culturally vital for the world’s three billion users (and counting), there's been a worrisome though unsurprising outburst of initiatives across governments to figure out ways to control it, suppress it, or otherwise extract value from it.
From The Washington Post
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Cassidy Alan
Finally, in this new area, it becomes clear to somebody at the Washington Post, one of the most enthusiastic champions of government interference in the free market, that at least in new networking and computing technology, is a bad thing.
"Net neutrality" is pushed by dual-track influences as in all such demands for government intervention. Politicians always put the hidden agendas behind seductive labels, like "neutrality". Cuo bono? Governments that control information for the benefit of the "deciders" in them, and the corporations that cooperate with those "deciders" for benefit. Unfortunately that includes almost all of the hybridized "private" sector in the world today, including the USA, to varying degrees.
Senator Lieberman's comment some years back that the US should institute a kill switch for the Internet like China has, should have been a shocker for the somnolent American body politic and especially the computing community. Thank God that the Internet is a thorn in the side of interventionists, dictators, and would-be strong-arm governments.
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