Very interesting… The new information ecosystem: cultures of anarchy and closure Siva Vaidhyanathan - openDemocracy

artistic visions of sars… Sars Art Project

Saving the Net

ow to get past the intellectual and political logjams that threaten Linux and the Net.

At the same time that media concentration restrictions are being removed, such that three companies will own everything, so too are neutrality restrictions for the network being eliminated, so that those same three companies–who also will control broadband access–are totally free to architect broadband however they wish. “The Internet that is to be the savior is a dying breed. The end-to-end architecture that gave us its power will, in effect, be inverted. And so the games networks play to benefit their own will bleed to this space too.”

And then Dr. Pangloss says, “but what about spectrum. Won’t unlicensed spectrum guarantee our freedom?” And it is true: Here at least there was some hope from this FCC. But the latest from DC is that a tiny chunk of new unlicensed spectrum will be released. And then after that, no more. Spectrum too will be sold–to the same companies, no doubt.

So then, Dr. Pangloss: “When the content layer, the logical layer, and the physical layer are all effectively owned by a handful of companies, free of any requirements of neutrality or openness, what will you ask then?”

Posthuman Law
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_7/wagner/
It has been an unspoken assumption that the law is made by humans for humans. That assumption no longer holds: The subject of information policy is increasingly flows between machines, machinic rather than social values play ever-more important roles in decision-making, and information policy for human society is being supplemented, supplanted, and superceded by machinic decision-making. As the barrier between the human and machinic falls with implantation of chips within the body and other types of intimate relationships, and as dependence upon the information infrastructure continues to grow, the question of the rights of technological systems themselves is entering the legal system. This paper explores information technologies as the policy subject, as determinant of the values that inform information policy, and as policy-makers. All of these are manifestations of a transformation in the legal system so fundamental that it may be said that we are entering a period of posthuman law

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Hijack ’suspects’ alive and well