Who Should Control the Internet? A Vanity Fair Feature | Hacker News Reader

Who Should Control the Internet? A Vanity Fair Feature

vanityfair.com

22 pointsekpyrotic9 comments

This is a great article that seems to have been passed over by a lot of people. The conference's three points brought ot the table by "Order" really seem to be completely missing the real crisis at stake outlined by this article's author in conjunction with the forced of "Organized Chaos". However, given that Organized Chaos has no organization and that DefCon is still really small, is there a chance at mkaing enough of an impact so that the real issues are brought up instead of internet taxation and requests for government surveillance?

in the end, nobody can control it, it being, by defininition, a collection of independent networks using some common protocols and whatnot to cooperate and communicate. thats why it exists in the first place.

"No".

No one should control the Internet. Unfortunately the only way to ensure that is to make it so no one can, and the changes required to make that a reality will make getting people to switch from IE6 look like a piece of cake. At any rate, if the US government is the "voice for Internet freedom" in Dubai this December, then every entity on the planet that isn't a government is going to lose something. The United States has absolutely no credibility or capability as a defender of freedom, on the net or otherwise.

>The United States has absolutely no credibility or capability as a defender of freedom, on the net or otherwise.

If you make childish statements you will be treated as a child, and rightly so.

Oh. Well thanks for the lesson, then. Glad to know that the US is highly regarded around the globe as a defender of freedom and liberty. Had I actually listened to what people around the globe had to say about that, rather than only to you, I might have thought otherwise.

Can you explain what is childish about that statement, instead of saying it is childish and leaving it at that?

> The United States has absolutely no credibility or capability as a defender of freedom, on the net or otherwise.

That's what folks always say, until they're subject to the alternatives.

I'm not sure any of the victims of CIA secret prisons in Poland [1] would agree with that, nor virtually anyone not fabulously wealth or a drug lord in South America, nor anyone not white in South Africa, considering a former President of ours still revered as second only to Jesus (Reagan) supported apartheid. Most of the Middle East is pissed at us with good reason, and lots of folks in parts of SE Asia still hate our guts. Actually you can pretty much assume anyone from the southern hemisphere is going to have a legitimate beef with the US at this point, excepting Aus and NZ.

It's really easy for Americans to forget the horrors that they have inflicted on the rest of the world in the past, since it always happened so far away. And it's especially easy for Americans to ignore the horrors they inflict on the world now, since they tend not to even hear about it these days through a combination of self-imposed censorship and, failing that, actual censorship of reporting from war zones. And especially the young tend to glorify war and the military, having grown up under a media regime which works at the behest of the Pentagon [2]. No, most folks would say that in the best case US involvement in a thing might be the lesser of two evils, but that usually it is not even that. America has been a blight upon the world since early into the Cold War, often with the full support of its people, and there is no reason to believe it is even capable of getting its act together and acting as a responsible world citizen, at this point.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/31/cia-secret-prison-p... [2] http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeyemonday/feature_151203.html

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