On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 1:19 PM, Richard Shockey <richard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Good point. My personal bugaboo is the resurgence of walled gardens. A > platform that connected us is now dividing us. > > Which suggests: NO WALLED GARDENS. > > RS> Game, Set, Match. Sorry that argument is over. I don't think it is, the question has just changed. We don't have the walled gardens that the carriers hoped for with WAP but we still have the consequences of AOL Messenger long after AOL has ceased to be a significant force. Instant messaging is still Balkanized: https://xkcd.com/1810/ https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/chat_systems.png The only apps we have that are not walled gardens are mail and Web. And mail is currently under threat from alternatives which offer usable end-to-end security which implementations of S/MIME do not while OpenPGP implementations are actively hostile to the user. It isn't just a few left wing agitators worrying about 'big tech' or the 'fearful five' at the moment. I have been talking to Republican Senators and House members with the same concerns. It is not merely the concentration of market power that is worrying people, it is the casual negligence many of the technologists show when it comes to security risks. The question I see is who is going to be in control. Will it be the user or someone else. Zuckerberg didn't want his 'community' to think bad thoughts so there is no way to disagree with people. And so there is no way to say that 'this post is a lie', 'this poster is a sockpuppet'. And the results of those decisions are two national security disasters. There is a natural tendency for technology people to assume that what people want is more 'freedom'. Which invariably turns out to be more freedom to perform the type of actions that the technologist wants them to engage in. 'Internet Security' is seen exclusively in terms of preventing censorship and protecting personal confidentiality. While those are important, they are not the only things that are important. Policy makers worry about a much broader range of concerns. They worry about headline grabbing issues such as child abuse. But they also worry about cyberbullying, stalking, bank fraud, advance fee frauds and much more. At the moment, there is only one member of the fearful five that is considered to 'get them' at the policy level. Two more do not get in the way but don't help very much either and two are considered to be actively harmful. We have to have a plan to make the Internet safe for users, yes. But what we also need at this point is a plan to protect society from the Internet itself. The Internet is the greatest productive engine in history, it magnifies human capital exponentially. And it does that for criminals as well as the law abiding.
