Re: [wg-review] 11. IDNH Vote now - all those in favor

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Sat, Jan 13, 2001 at 04:36:18AM -0800, Phil King wrote:
> Who owns the internet?  Cindy, The internet is not a thing to be owned, it
> is a dynamic society that is difficult even to define, as by the time a
> definition of the ongoing interaction of participants is formulated, it's
> outdated, almost. In my humble opinion

The Internet is not a society, and your opinion is missing a vital
component, illustrated in this post from the NANOG list:

> Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2001 09:44:09 -0500
> From: Shawn McMahon <smcmahon@eiv.com>
> To: nanog@merit.edu
>    
> Subject: Re: net.terrorism
> On Tue, Jan 09, 2001 at 08:07:48AM -0500, William Allen Simpson wrote:
> >
> > > the position to be net.gods and for political reasons destroy the free
> > > character of the internet. 
> > >
>   > I've been involved for over 20 years, and don't remember this "free
>
> > character".  Perhaps there is a language translation problem?
> 
> Yeah, last time I checked, the Internet was primarily made up of
> privately- owned pieces of cable, hooked together through
> privately-owned pieces of equipment, residing in privately-owned
> buildings, monitored and maintained by employees of privately and
> shareholder-owned companies. 
>    
> Information may want to be free, but fiber optic cable wants to be a
> million US dollars per mile. 

That is, the Internet is a physical entity, it is in fact owned, and it
is owned by private enterprise, almost entirely.  It is *not* owned by
the public at large, and, despite widespread belief to the contrary, for
the public at large guarantees of "freedom" on the Internet are quite
limited.  For example, though the Internet has floods of free speech,
there is no global right of free speech on the Internet: whatever
ability you have on the Internet to express yourself is conditioned
entirely by your ISP. 

This is analogous to the old maxim "freedom of the press is limited to
those who own presses". 

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain
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