There’s a very interesting Fresh Air regarding government control structures and the internet. About halfway in, Who Controls the Internet, Illusions of a Borderless World authors Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu explore the partnership between the federal government and industry that facilitate trust in Ebay. According to the authors, over 800 investigators work with Ebay tracking down fraud cases; summarizing their words, without this governmental partnership, the costs of using Ebay and many services like it would be prohibitively expensive (You can hear this part about 27 minutes in to the broadcast). A highly recommended listen, even for those of us who keep up with these issues.
Update: I stumbled across this very interesting post by Ethan Zuckerman, his thoughts about a privacy lecture given by Jonathan Zittrain. The lecture is entitled Internet Governance and Regulation: The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. The talk is fascinating and available as a high-quality video stream here. Again, very highly recommended.
Tags: internet
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
I did a lot of research on the ethics and implications of the internet back in the day. Still it would seem, without direction – without structure a large body cannot prosper.
So do we sacrifice the expanse of the WWW for some direction as to tap its potential or do we doddle along progressing in every which way so we can have a sink of information with no plug hole.
Someone controls it, just at a height that we can’t really determine; and it is a control so light handed it makes little visual impact…