The Mixed Company of Net Neutrality

08:30 PM Jun 22, 2006

Succinctly put wrap of the net neutrality from world wide web inventor (and glancing-down-at-the-cue-cards-reader) Tim Berners-Lee. As Lawrence Lessig puts it, you can really tell who's wearing the white hats on this by the company they keep. And what they do.

It's a fraught moment for the future architecture of the online society. The current Harpers (no link available) has a wonderful article touching on the way the Reagan reaction's eviscerating antitrust enforcement powered the rise of Wal-Mart's competition-warping private tyranny -- in contrast with an instance of earlier, vigorous enforcement against a company much less dominant than Wal-Mart in the interst of keeping a marketplace relatively open. [some DIA users have had things to say about Wal-Mart, of course.]

So the familiar intellectual tricycling about that old trump canard "unnecessary regulation" discourages, and may prevail this time. But it may also guide the nascence of its future political resistance -- well, at least abroad -- by kicking in doors with the jackboot upon which all this freemarketry cant depends. It would be apt indeed for ethereal bits and bytes -- the nexus today of the mystical and mundane -- to reify themselves anew as the eternal battleground where grist confronts mill.

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