Internet

One of the recurrent questions that people have about the future of the Internet is, So how are creators going to make money in the digital environment?  The good news is that the Free Culture Forum – a Barcelona-based international gathering of free software, free culture, creators and policy activists – has addressed these very questions in a major “how to” guide that was just released.   

In “Sustainable Models for Creativity in the Digital Age,” the FCF affirms: 

We can no longer put off re-thinking the economic structures that have been producing, financing and funding culture up until now.  Many of the old models have become anachronistic and detrimental to civil society.  The aim of this document is to promote innovative strategies to defend and extend the sphere in which human creativity and knowledge can prosper freely and sustainably.

This report is aimed at policy reformers, citizens and free/libre culture activists to provide them practical tools to understand the policy options and revenue models, and the importance of the commons in the new digital marketplaces.

For decades, Congress has delegated the fate of our public lands, the air, water and wildlife to federal agencies, where a familiar dynamic of regulatory capture and corruption quickly takes root.  It’s depressingly routine:  industry foxes are appointed to guard the chicken house, they make politically motivated judgments about scientific data, they engage in legalistic subterfuges and throw blankets of secrecy over the data and decisionmaking.  A complicit Congress cuts budgets in order to cripple regulatory effectiveness. 

So here’s an interesting idea for changing the political ecosystem of regulation:  Use Web 2.0 platforms to let citizens participate directly, and let the data be seen by everyone, in near-real time, on the Web.  Reinvent regulation as an open source project, as it were, so that everyone can participate and industry money and interventions cannot so easily corrupt the process.  

The U.S. Government’s ongoing crusade against WikiLeaks and the Egyptian Government’s shutdown of the Internet for five days force us to ask the question:  How shall the commoners retain their right to communicate with each other when their own governments intervene to stifle communications that threaten their power?

Eben Moglen, a long-time free software advocate, is promoting a great insurance policy:  decentralized, portable, personal servers.  He calls them “Freedom Boxes.”  The idea is that everyone should have a small, cheap personal server about the size of a cellphone charger.  Such devices already exist, he points out in today’s NYT, and cost about $99, and will likely become cheaper in coming months and years.  (A speech that Moglen gave on this topic, “Freedom in the Cloud,” on February 5, 2010, can be seen on YouTube here.  )

What’s missing at the moment is the software to make them easy to use.  So Moglen is calling upon the software programmers of the world to develop free software that could make the Freedom Box a viable, pervasive part of the Internet infrastructure.  We would no longer have to depend upon the good graces of a Google, Facebook or Internet service provider to reliably connect us or transact business for us.  We would have assured communications and commercial relationships without the threat of government interference or snooping, often through underhanded means.

John Naughton, writing in The Guardian (UK), is one of the few observers to see the WikiLeaks case for what it is:  “the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet.  There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.”

It’s difficult to make predictions about a story that is still unfolding, but the U.S. Government’s response to the WikiLeaks disclosures make two things quite clear:  1) that the world’s oldest democracy is not really committed to open debate, citizen accountability and due process; and 2) nation-states, in quiet collusion with key corporations, share an interest in curbing the open Internet in order to limit its disruptive impact on their power.

While the U.S. lectures China about the virtues of an open Internet, what happens when that very ideal is applied to the U.S. Government?  The disclosures expose stunning deceit, mendacity, incompetence and corruption, and the U.S. Government goes into attack mode against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.