isen.blog

Doc Searls, writing in IT Garage, says,

. . . think a bit about what the Supreme Court's Brand X decision means . . . All the big boys: the PC makers, the chip makers, the mobile equipment providers, the "consumer experience" deliverers (including Virgin, its many holdings and the rest of the entertainment industry), the patent, copyright and [Intellectual Property] absolutists, the parochial national interests, and — most of all — the carriers by the grace of whose fiber and wiring the Net is made available — all want to control you: what you can do with their services and devices, what you can buy, who you can buy it from, and how you can use it. The free and open Internet, a World of Ends built on an end-to-end, peer-to-peer architecture, is slowly being privatized and nationalized, one DRM file, one blocked port, one platform silo, one walled data garden, one legislative action, one regulatory decree, one Supreme Court decision and one national cyberwall after another.

This is what we are fighting, folks. The open and free marketplace the Internet provides is shortly going to look like the best darn mess of few-to-many distribution systems for "content" the world has ever known. It will not be the free and open marketplace it was in the first place, and should remain. The end-state will a vast matrix of national and private silos and walled gardens, each a contained or filtered distribution environment. And most of us won't know what we missed, because it never quite happened.

That's one scenario. As I wrote recently, them lemons might make some tasty lemonade, but we're going to have to squeeze.

Technorati Tags: BrandX, DRM, WalledGardens