Destiny

Your Thoughts determine your Actions,

your Actions determine your Character,

and your Character determines your Destiny.

(Robert A. Cook, "Walk with the King today, and be a blessing")

Nations Clamping Down on Internet Freedom

Scott Bradner comments that Internet Freedom is under attack by nations around the world, in his article Goodbye Internet, we hardly knew ye?

"Throughout its history, the Internet, in most places, has been essentially free from government regulation. There are significant exceptions -- a few countries do quite an effective job of controlling Internet content and a number of countries control specific Internet technologies such as encryption and VoIP. But, on the whole, the Internet has been left alone.

"Governments, in general, do not much like the Internet, or at least the Internet-based activities that they do not control. Some governments, such as China, have established strong controls over the Internet in their own countries. Venezuela has just proposed to do the same.

"Restructuring the Internet so that each country has a control point could easily wipe out the ability of Internet users to find out what is going on in the world.

"But we do not have to wait until the UN acts to see the future. The U.S. government recently seized a bunch of domain names without letting the owners contest the seizure.

"News reports show that the U.S. government pressured PayPal and Amazon to stop supporting WikiLeaks, again without any due process. You do not have to be a fan of WikiLeaks to understand that letting the U.S. government decide, on its own, without the legal process defined in our Constitution, what should and what should not be accessible on the Internet is not a recipe for freedom. Maybe they can take pointers from China."

(for more, see Goodbye Internet, we hardly knew ye?, by Scott Bradner)

(Also see 10 Ways the Chinese Internet is Different From Yours)

Facebook is Big Brother, not Google

"Here is what Ryan Singel says in a deep-dive post that gets to the meat of why Facebook scares Google so much.

Singel argued "it's because Facebook with its Like Button and other social plug-ins, has found "a way of placing ads anywhere on the Net with a granularity Google can only dream of -- in no small part because Google promised its users never to go down that path." Singel added:

"One, there's so much interaction and information being shared inside Facebook that it has become a decent-sized replica of the Web inside the Web. And Google can't crawl and analyze much of what happens in there. That's a problem when your goal is to organize the world's information. Google is blind to this because much of what happens on Facebook remains in Facebook. ... The problem is that Google built a wall between user search data and advertising -- and the mammoth financial success of AdWords proved that the separation was fine at the time.

"Two, Facebook knows who you are and has the right to use that information because you explicitly gave it to them. Google has different kinds of data that reveal a lot about who you are and what you are interested in -- some of it very private. But very little of that data is information you explicitly told the company to share, and they've assiduously promised not to use your search history and e-mail data to profile of you."

(For more, see Why Facebook Has Google over a Barrel: Social Ads, by Clint Boulton, 11/15/2010)