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Internet Diversity

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Last Updated on Monday, 13 February 2012 13:36

Written by MrB

Is it more dangerous for a few private individuals to control the Internet, with the power to turn it off whenever it suits their political needs, or the US Congress and SOPA? Honestly, I'm not sure. But maybe it's time to challenge the dominance of the worlds largest websites.

I'm against SOPA but I contribute & donate to Wikipedia. I believe in it (or at least I used to). I didn't authorise the caretaker to use it as a political tool. That's the peoples data Jimmy, not yours (legal disclaimers notwithstanding).

Maybe the fight needs to be about Internet diversity instead of Internet freedom? Maybe that IS true freedom. Google, Facebook, Wikipekdia and a long list of others are using your data to fight their political battles, to ensure their place on top of the pile (whether financially or egotistically incentivised). They are no better than that great demon Microsoft. If anything they may be worse. They, after all, are only builders of information vessels, we provide the content to fill them and we need to take back ownership of our data.

A few non-elected, shadowy private individuals should not have the power to play god with the worlds information and we were wrong to give them that power. But we continue to do so. We are about to be lead into the great "appliance age" where we can't even control what software or access our devices have. That will be decided by Sony, Google and Apple for us. That compounds the problem and is another battle that we desperately need to fight.

If you truely believe in Internet freedom use an alternate search engine for a month, test out a different mail provider or social site, try a new source of news for a week. You might be surprised what you find. The blackout might have been an excellent idea. Maybe people will realise just how few baskets we have put out eggs and what might happen when they get too hungry for all the power.

• Search - duckduckgo.com
• Share - diasporaproject.org
• Remember - evernote.com
• Write, calculate & be productive - www.libreoffice.org
• Operate - fedoraproject.org
• Operate - linuxmint.com
• Email - www.fastmail.fm
• Email - www.zoho.com/mail/
• Talk - www.ekiga.org
• Listen - www.freesound.org/browse
• Listen - librivox.org
• Learn to share - creativecommons.org
• Be secure - www.gnupg.org - www.gpg4win.org(Win)
• Get trusted - www.cacert.org

Some more of the real threats to the Internet

• Microsoft attempts to kill Linux and others. As anticompetitive as it gets
• The coming war on the general purpose computer