The American Chamber of Commerce of Luxembourg is organizing an event tonight at the RTL TV studios called “IT, Society, and Culture”.
I will be presenting some reflections on how we went from a top-down approach of the Internet to a bottom-up proces and what the challenges are. My presentation is here in PDF format.
The main idea behind the presentation is that we have not yet reached the bottom-up phase, despite all the talk about blogs, YouTube, etc. The fact remains that the hoster of the blog or video sharing platform is still in a position to take down you web site. There is still someone, somewhere who can silence you. It is only when your platform will be under your total control that we will be able to the the user is the Internet, as Time Magazine puts it.
However, before we can reach that stage there are still some technical challenges we need to solve. If you wish to host your blog on your home computer, you need an easy to understand operating system and web server. It’s coming. You also need bandwidth. Asymetrical DSL won’t cut it. What you need is fiber to the home, with 100 Mbits both ways. You also need a fixed IP address. With current IPv4 addresses becoming scarce, IPv6 seems like the answer.
There are societal challenges, too. With IP everywhere and always on, we risk an Orwellian society where every one of your moves can be monitored. Will the average Internet user use the increased bandwidth to contribute something useful for the society, or post gore videos of men being hanged ?
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