There are huge markets just waiting to be created, once we let people control their own data. There are enormous edge applications to be created with this data, once we're secure that it won't be turned against us by either big business or big government.
At stake in the politics of the Internet is nothing less than the direction we take as a society. We can remain like Canada, or we can become like Mexico.
The way out remains a floor price under energy so alternate domestic production comes on-line, it means getting out of Iraq, it means accepting responsibility for our own cupidity and playing smarter. The answer to fear is to stop being afraid.
Unlike most, I think this issue actually cuts both ways.
Guilty until proven innocent, and even then suspect. In the case of ICANN, Dyson was not. In the case of Goodmail, she may not be. Innocent until proven guilty is not the right standard when guilt means so much.
Our boy Ben is Eric Bruckner, a Hitler Youth who finds himself in America, surrounded by a loving American family, and who resists de-programming until the end of the picture.
We're trading what won us the Cold War for the Soviet hand which lost it. And it won't take 45 years -- it seems at times as though we're in a car, heading for a cliff, and the idiot behind the wheel has the accelerator mashed to the floor, and he's laughing maniacally... And we can't wake up. But we will. Probably at the bottom of the gorge.
It sort of depends on Lou Dobbs. He can continue the Howard Beale impersonation toward its natural conclusion, or he can start trying to right the ship, interviewing people with real solutions to propose.
All the businesses which propose to pay Goodmail for speedy delivery say they have gone through this process. They could prove it. Goodmail, or someone else, could charge them for it. And then their list would be whitelisted, as a list, with the audit being renewable on a periodic basis.
Given this model of the Internet, the adventure has barely begun.
