Howard Rheingold has a good piece in CIO Magazine, The War Over Innovation. Some key excerpts:
"...if today's PC and Net users aren't vigilant, the future might not be as user-centric as the past. It all depends on what kinds of laws and restrictions will be burned into next-generation hardware and operating systems."Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at October 1, 2003 10:47 AM | TrackBack"Today, collective action can involve devices as well as social contracts."
"A future of smart mobs and self-organized media is plausible as long as the owners of tomorrow's communications devices remain free to use the emerging media in any way they choose. However, a war over control of innovation might change all that, and the attack is already gathering force."
"Fortunately, the war isn't over—and what we know, say and do now counts. Hundreds of millions of people have tasted the freedom, power and opportunity that personal computing and the Internet have made possible. Once they understand what's at stake, they can use the very media that is the spoil of the battle to self-organize collective action. Politicians won't try to get away with quite as much if enough people know about it, innovators will be motivated to make yesterday's centralized media obsolete as quickly as possible, and entire populations will reshape our media environment the way we did when we built the Web by posting webpages and listing our favorite links."