Tim May writes:
Seriously, Mike's comments about cable being a "vaster wasteland" (a nice EFF paraphrase of the famous FCC Commissioner's comments in the 60s), is important.
I proudly take credit for "a vaster wasteland"--a phrase that occurred to me in a flash of insight as I was doing a revision of the Open Platform paper. I hope that if I repeat it a lot, it will become a self-perpetuating meme.
Does anyone expect the NII will offer hard-core porn on its networks?
In the long run, I expect it will, yes. On a properly designed NII, it would be impossible to prevent, although of course anyone could bar it at his or her home.
I don't know what the solution is, except that I'm naturally skeptical about the government having _anything_ to do with it. (I've read the CPSR pitch on NII and it scares the crap out of me. I've read the NII articles in "Whole Earth Review" and elsewhere and I have the same reaction. I've read the Open Platform proposal from EFF and find it better, but still overly oriented toward government solutions.
Well, we knew we weren't going to please the purest Libertarians, but we did try to make it palatable to them--after all, we have genuine entrepreneurs on our Board of Directors, and they *do* believe in free markets. Open Platform is our way of getting there from here.
Finally, I'm still trying to dig out the NII docs themselves, the ones Tom Kalil has pointed us to.)
Did he say they were online? If this has been discussed before, I missed it.
Strong crypto fundamentally collides with many of the stated public policy goals surrounding the National Information Infrastructure.
I don't think it collides with EFF's public policy goals, although it may collide with Tom Kalil's. --Mike