Where the Internet has been failing -- where the liberal blogosphere has been failing -- is that it, too, has been living in the eternal now. The philosophical underpinnings which conservatives in the 1960s built so painstakingly, brick-by-emotional brick -- simply don't exist.
The Thesis is just being born. It is the Open Source Thesis of compromise, of connectivity, of transparency.
By defining a difference between "news" and "blogs," then putting ads against the "blog" results while integrating the two services, Google could yet square this circle. There would be no ads around "news" results (so the media couldn't complain about Google "stealing revenue") and it would be able to monetize everything (through the ads next to the blog results).
The goal of any regulatory policy should be to encourage economic growth, not to give the government money, not just to make a profit for any particular player. Your problem is herewith solved.
The depth of the political re-arrangement implied by open source politics is this. To the extent you accept open source, open networks and open spectrum you are progressive. To the extent you denounce them you are regressive.
It’s been a while since we played the 1966 Game. So let’s review the rules. The idea is that you look for modern analogs to the important players who made 1968 so memorable. But remember that this is something of a Bizarro World exercise. Now it’s the Republicans who are the insiders, the dominant Thesis […]
It will take time for truly-neutral networks -- muncipal, wireless, Google - to to come on-stream. But once they are there, and consumers see the difference between The Real Internet and the phony IMS variety the phone and cable opolists are pushing, the older companies will be well and truly dead.
Republicans may prefer to think it Reagan's legacy, but it was Nixon who built the beliefs that must be broken. The idea of the enemy. The enemies list. The media, the academics, the nay-sayers, sex, drugs, moral relativism. The idea that if we just kill enough of "them" then "we" will finally be "free."
In terms of raw political power, the "out" party is practically much closer to power than was the case 40 years ago.
My favorite news story this week is this one. The Macon Telegraph reports that a 45 foot tall American chestnut has been found, thriving, on Pine Mountain in FDR State Park, just a quarter-mile from one of the former President’s favorite fishing holes. As late as the 19th century a canopy of chestnuts, up to […]
