The internet has always been a wild and wooly place. If big business conglomerates have their way, then who pays will get to dictate things like:
-a search engine can pay ISPs to guarantee that it will open faster than other search engines,
-businesses can pay search engines to increase their ranking in search query responses,
-a large company can block access to rival companies' music download sites, or to websites that express opinions and values contrary to its' own.
-an ISP can choose to allow access only to their preferred providers of on-line consumer goods [translation: preferred providers=those companies that shelled out money to the ISP.]
-the small independent upstart-- company or blogger-- will be lost in the shuffle unable to shell out cold hard cash to remain on the fast-track of internet services or to remain on the internet at all.
Don't believe it??? We have already seen some pretty bad things with the Digital Media Restrictions--oh, "Rights" Act. Things like the release of Sony's rootkit that had the potential to and did harm the computers of the unsuspecting who tried to make a copy of Sony CDs. [Current USA copyright laws allow for one back-up copy to be made. That too may change].
Companies routinely try to extend copyright laws to prohibit reverse engineering. Look at almost any EULA [End User License Agreement] and you will find it there.
Education can be had at the following websites:
http://savetheinternet.com
http://www.eff.org
http://www.illegal-art.org/
http://chillingeffects.org/index.cgi
Ignore at your own peril.
~radical sapphoq
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