Doc Searls' "Saving the Net" essay has a lot of good stuff in it. Here I want to draw attention to one of his points, which might be lost in the overarching argument, about net politics and partisan politics:
Advocating and saving the Net is not a partisan issue. Lawmakers and regulators aren't screwing up the Net because they're "Friends of Bush" or "Friends of Hollywood" or liberals or conservatives. They're doing it because one way of framing the Net--as a transport system for content--is winning over another way of framing the Net--as a place where markets and business and culture and governance can all thrive. Otherwise helpful documents, including Ernest Partridge's "After the Internet" [2003-Bryan] fail because they blame "Bush-friendly conservative corporations" and appeal only to one political constituency, in this case, progressives. Freedom, independence, the sovereignty of the individual, private rights and open frontiers are a few among many values shared by progressives and conservatives. (emphasis added)
The old left-right, liberal-conservative continuum, which we inherited from the French Revolution's legislative seating arrangements in the 1790s, doesn't hold up too well in cyberspace. Doc undercuts this a few paragraphs down by mentioning conservatives opposed anything socialist-sounding (the Dems, post DLC, are into this move as well), but the idea still holds. It's really easy to find putatively liberal congresscreatures energetically calling for censorship of online content, for example, and nominal conservatives arguing for freedom of speech. It's been more than a decade since Sir Tim unleased the web, and a generation since the internet shared files, and the politics still haven't settled down into the common groove.
Some of us have been saying this for a while. Larry Lessig has made this point many times, as well. There's a libertarian aura around this pro-net approach, but it doesn't make the translation to the larger, contemporary spectrum of conservative thinking.
It's just extremely difficult to translate such an awareness into politics, at least in the United States, since we seem deeply locked into the liberal-Democrat-left vs conservative-GOP-right duopoly.
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