Food for thought: MIT’s Technology Review has this article on “Taming the Web,” that deconstructs the myth that “information wants to be free,” by critically examining the assumptions about the Internet which underlie it, but, in fact, may not be as iron clad as popularly believed:
Nonetheless, the claim that the Internet is ungovernable by its nature is more of a hope than a fact. It rests on three widely accepted beliefs, each of which has become dogma to webheads. First, the Net is said to be too international to oversee: there will always be some place where people can set up a server and distribute whatever they want. Second, the Net is too interconnected to fence in: if a single person has something, he or she can instantly make it available to millions of others. Third, the Net is too full of hackers: any effort at control will invariably be circumvented by the world’s army of amateur tinkerers, who will then spread the workaround everywhere.
Unfortunately, current evidence suggests that two of the three arguments for the Net’s uncontrollability are simply wrong; the third, though likely to be correct, is likely to be irrelevant.
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