"In the middle east, we've seen the power of the Internet in the Arab Spring. I believe we are in for a lot more of that sort of thing and that it will not be limited to repressive governments, but to all large institutions that seek to control people and their free will. This is the cultural revolution that I referred to in my talk with Erick at Disrupt.

I think investors should be aware of what is coming and seek to invest in it where it is investable. I'm curious what the AVC community thinks of this investment thesis and where we should be looking for opportunities that fit into this thesis."

After 15 years of fighting the sharing of culture in the name of an obsolete copyright regime, governments of the World are uniting to control and censor the Internet. The black-out of the Egyptian Net, the US government’s reaction to Wikileaks, the adoption of website blocking mechanisms in Europe, or the plans for “Internet kill switches”[1] are all major threats on our freedom of expression and communication. These threats come from corporations and politicians, unsettled by the advent of the Internet.

"These are provocative ideas. Very analogous to the ideas found in the ping hub discussions and the peer to peer discussions. It would be fun to try and build a heuristic prefeching/pushing privacy respecting http proxy server swarm along these lines. No doubt somebody already has."

"The RIAA doesn’t stop at manipulating copyright law to gouge artists and the public. They also use their lawsuits as leverage to argue for control over any technology that could be used to distribute music. For example, they have pushed to require all wireless access points to be encrypted and closed, to restrict technologies like BitTorrent and other forms of peer-to-peer distribution, to impose bandwidth caps on home internet users, and to monitor traffic through service providers. Such efforts directly hurt free software. Because free software authors around the world work by collaboration, they rely on open distribution networks to move software, data, and conversation around. In particular, peer-to-peer technologies make this easier and cheaper for people with less bandwidth, and so are a powerful means of boosting grassroots free software distribution and development efforts."

"As for being legal, let's talk now about the dirty secret of how newspapers operate. They misappropriate content all the time.

Look, I was in a newsroom for years. A newspaper graphic needed doing? You found a book with a drawing, used that without asking the author for explicit permission because shoving in a mention in the "source" line was good enough. Following on a story that a rival paper wrote? You damn well read that other story, which got you up to speed, but heaven forbid you ever mentioned that the other publication came out with the news first. If you did, that was only if you could do a story that suggested you had the "real" scoop that the other publication had wrong."

"So the plan, when we’re not within WiFi range, is provide Internet access to Coworkout participants that don’t have their own cellular data card with one of these — a Verizon V740 EvDO card:..."

"Some of the claims here are sketchy — Geocities as a precursor to blogging? Really? — and suffer from web-centrism. After all, the world wide web was one of the LEAST interesting or effective things on the internet to spend your time on in the mid-1990s; usenet and email, which was mostly done over PINE or ELM servers in terminal clients, were where it was at. (I had a proto-blog my freshman and sophomore years of college whose “subscribers” were people in my email address book — most of whom were friends-of-friends I didn’t know.) All the same, it’s worth reading and remembering a little of what it was all like."

"If sites really needed permission to link to others, the Web would be a very different place. It's hard to imagine there would be a Gawker, or for that matter a TMZ, a Wikipedia, or anywhere else that embarrasses the subjects of posts. In another example of an effort to stop linking, a city lawyer in Sheboygan, Wis., demanded that blogger (and political critic) Jennifer Reisinger remove from her site a link to the police department. Reisinger has sued various city officials for violating her First Amendment free speech rights. Her case is pending in federal district court in Wisconsin. Let's hope the judge in Reisinger's cases sees linking differently than Judge Darrah did. If cases like these come out the wrong way, the Internet could go from a Web to a series of one-way roads."

I'm skeptical.

"The recent disruption marked the final blowup in a year-long game of chicken played by Sprint Nextel and Cogent and brought to light an uncomfortable reality: The Internet is held together by collection of secret contracts struck between private companies, free from government oversight and regulation."

"ICANN recently has wanted to make a lot of changes to its standard Registrar Accreditation Agreement. It found that it was was constrained by an even earlier version of the consensus policy process idea, and has found this frustrating. So it wants the flexibility to make changes without going through a policy process, and it’s (initially) saying that although those changes can be overridden in some ways they will automatically become effective if they are *not* overridden."

"The Internet has been around since the 1960s, but it was the development of the Mosaic browser in 1933 at the University of Illinois that made it possible to simply point and click your way to information that not only contained text, but also graphics."

"...via an archaic telephone-based network of low-quality printers..."

Wonder how accurate info is after two years.