The Internet Is A Communications Platform, Not A Content Platform
from the wait-a-second... dept
It seems that any time you hear someone saying they're trying to reach the "middle ground" on an argument, you might want to suspect their motives. That was the case a few months ago when some think tank wanted to reach a middle ground on file sharing, which was really a thinly veiled explanation for why the entertainment industry should control the internet. We've now got another one, which is even scarier. TheRegister has published an excerpt from a paper supposedly about "media literacy" which claims its looking for a "middle ground" between "etopians" who want the internet to remain open and the regulate and control crowd who want to ban and filter everything. However, the conclusions are anything but a middle ground. They're saying that people are stupid and can't handle the internet as is, and that there should be a separate internet that is more like TV, with acceptable providers handling the content, and acting as the guides to all the content out there. This is mischaracterizing the debate. It's not a middle ground at all, but a fairly radical solution. There's already a TV out there. This is designed from the wrong mindset. The internet is not a content platform, but a communications one. This article flips that around and assumes that it's a content platform -- for the sake of the content providers.
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