OverviewThe internet is both a powerful tool and, increasingly, the subject of a number of issues, a battleground upon which those issues are fought over, and itself the target of verbal and legislative attacks as the enemies of transparency and citizen empowerment seek to prevent it from being used as a tool to further those goals.
- Internet access is becoming a crucial issue as the world moves increasingly online; the United States lags behind due to the efforts of telecomm industry lobbyists
- War on the internet relates to efforts to reduce the internet's effectiveness as a tool for transparency and citizen empowerment:
- Internet neutrality relates to whether or not it should be legal for owners of internet infrastructure to favor transmission of certain content
- Internet radio has become an issue in that new rules in the United States seem to be unfairly penalizing internet radio stations as part of an overall media consolidation effort aimed at eliminating independent media and thereby suppressing dissent
- Internet-based infrastructure refers to internet-based tools and resources for managing and maintaining civilization (not to be confused with the infrastructure of the internet itself, i.e. the technical underpinnings and devices which allow the internet to function)
- Internet governance is the idea that the internet could be used as a substrate upon which a new, more citizen empowering form of government could be built. (Fears by the powerful that this will happen are likely to motivate a war on the internet, regarding which as yet there have been only opening moves which conceivably may mean nothing more than they seem to mean.)
 proposed legislation
- The Internet Community Ports Act would have been a really bad idea, but fortunately it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.
- Anonymous is an activist group with origins in an internet forum
- Al Gore did not claim to have invented the internet, although he did play a key role in funding early expansion of the backbone.
 Related Pages
- More recently, the internet is emerging as a powerful new accountability arena – or, more precisely, as the host for a growing number of accountability arenas, in the form of web sites and other services – whose potential is only slowly being realized as new software is written and as more people become familiar with its use.
- dKosopedia (stub-sized article as of 2007-08-21)
SourceWatchas of 2008-01-24 has many related pages but no central page for "internet"
 Filed Links
 version 2
- 2008-07-21 [Talk|Index] World's Oldest Bible Goes Online § “Handwritten in Greek more than 1,600 years ago - it isn't exactly clear where - the surviving 400 or so pages carry a version of the New Testament that has a few interesting differences from the Bible used by Christians today. .. The Gospel of Mark ends abruptly after Jesus' disciples discover his empty tomb, for example. Mark's last line has them leaving in fear. .. "It cuts out the post-resurrection stories," said Juan Garces, curator of the Codex Sinaiticus Project. "That's a very odd way of ending a Gospel." .. James Davila, a professor of early Jewish studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland, said the Codex also includes religious works foreign to the Roman Catholic and Protestant canons -- such as the "Epistle of Barnabas" and the "Shepherd of Hermas," a book packed with visions and parables. .. Davila stressed that did not mean the works were necessarily considered Scripture by early Christians: They could have been bound with the Bible to save money.”
- 2008-06-15 [Talk|Index] Obama Seen Beating McCain in Web War § “A record-breaking 46 percent of Americans have used the Internet to get political news and share their thoughts about the campaign this year, according to a survey released today by the Pew Research Center. .. And while Sen. John McCain may have been the first major presidential candidate to harness the power of the Internet for fundraising in 2000, the survey finds Sen. Barack Obama is winning the online political war in 2008.”;
- 2008-05-08 [Talk|Index] Where did the Web rumors about Obama come from? § “...it's unlikely that any campaign or political professional is associated with creating the sordid stuff – the fallout would be a political nightmare ... In fact, they tend to be the work of committed political amateurs. .. One practitioner in Virginia, who hates Obama like a dog hates cats, led a reporter through his efforts. Because the man is a retired clandestine CIA officer, identifying him could endanger officers or operations that remain classified, so McClatchy will not reveal his name. .. In late 2006, convinced that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for America, he decided to start an anti-Obama operation. He combed the public record on Obama. He used a couple of allies and informants â€” half-jokingly dubbing his group "The Crusaders" â€” to learn about Obama's background, especially his Africa connection and how he came to be the editor of the Harvard Law Review. .. He assembled a dossier on Obama, including allegations that Obama attended a madrassa, or Islamic religious school, in his youth in Indonesia.”
- 2008-04-22 [Talk|Index] Tweetbomb - A Tweet To Shake The World § “A simple message, less than 140 characters, is sent out to followers around the world and within hours, perhaps minutes, more than 100 million people have been mobilized to act.”
- 2008-03-28 [Talk|Index] BBC Chief Has Radical Designs on Internet § “Mr. Thompson's push raises a counterintuitive possibility: The world's oldest and largest public broadcaster may emerge as a pioneer of new ways of delivering TV news and entertainment. The taxpayer-financed BBC doesn't have to worry about advertisers or delivering results to Wall Street. It owns most of its own shows, so it can control how they appear online. As such, the 85-year-old global behemoth can focus on the industry's most pressing problem: keeping viewers in the Internet age.”
- 2008-03-06 [Talk|Index] Revenge of the Experts § “The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals.” Many of the arguments in this article seem flawed.
- 2008-02-04 [Talk|Index] Connecting The Many Undersea Cut Cable Dots § by Richard Sauder: “The last week has seen a spate of unexplained, cut, undersea communications cables that has severely disrupted communications in many countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. As I shall show, the total numbers of cut cables remain in question, but likely number as many as eight, and maybe nine or more.”
- 2008-01-21 [Talk|Index] Why Kids On The Internet Are Scientology's Most Powerful Enemy § “This weekend, an anonymous Internet group (named Anonymous – these are not masters of subtlety) started a war with the Church of Scientology by hammering the group's web site; Scientology.org is down after a brief traffic spike.”
- 2007-09-27 [Talk|Index] Conyers Introduces Internet Tax Moratorium Extension Legislation § “Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) introduced the "Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA) Amendments Act of 2007."”
- 2007-08-15 Internet is "the new Afghanistan": NY police commissioner: New York police commissioner Raymond Kelly says the internet is the next breeding ground for terrorists "because it provides ideology that could radicalize Westerners who might then initiate home-grown attacks".
- This seems patently ridiculous. Does he have any evidence for this?
- The only way in which this doesn't seem ridiculous is if you interpret "home-grown attacks" as "domestic dissent".
- Personally, I've been wondering what has been taking the establishment so long to start squashing free speech on the internet and turning it into another centralized medium like TV, radio, and newspapers. Obviously the internet neutrality battle was one such effort, but it really seemed like they were missing an opportunity to poison the popular perception of the internet early on, before most people were familiar with it. Now here comes this, so maybe they're finally getting out the big guns. If there's more of this, it'll probably be time to start a war on the internet page. -W.
- 2007-06-08 The internet is destroying the world as we know it by A.N. Wilson, The Daily Mail (UK)