Free Porn to end in 2012!?! Bare Boobs Bust Net Neutrality WIDE open!

This is the video that rocked the world of apathetic, porn-consuming, uninvolved teen-agers the world over, and just incidentally reveals exactly why "Belgum" became a swear-word in the mouths of the distant ancestors of Zaphod Beeblebrox.



Now hundreds of thousands, if not literally millions of people have become aware of what they probably thought was a boring technical issue that was too inherently complicated to care about.

Well, whatever you think of Athena - and to be honest, I haven't figured out what to think myself - they bring forward two good reasons why anyone with a pulse and functional hormones should care. And they also have put down some supporting sweat equity, starting up a new social network site called I Power. What the hell... I signed up. Google, Yahoo and Teh Intertubes themselves were created by boob-obsessed dorks just such as these. The .gif protocol was invented so geeks just such as these could look at porn. And OH, the problems that they solved in order to work out how to create mechanisms to transmit kilobytes and kilobytes of grainy porn over 1200 baud modems...

Yep. Stuff Bill Gates and Steve Jobs wanked to back in the day. NEVER underestimate the power of horny net geeks. It took a decade or so to figure out that all this clandestine conversation could be made profitable, and the geeks practically had to jump up and down to get the attention of people with real money.

Like, say, Playboy Magazine, Hustler, etc. Yep. E-Commerce was developed by pornographers in order to bring us all better and more abundant porn.

And now, of course, that time is past, we all have to be adults - and therefore restrict our internet consumption to things that make money for the people that matter telling us the things they want us to know for the sake of their bottom lines and bonus packages.

Now, of course, that all the heavy lifting seems to have been done.

You will find lots of people trying to suggest that it's not even technically possible to usefully proved tiered access. Wrong. It's been done by Rogers Cable in Canada for years - simply by running their access to the unregulated, wild Internet with, if I remember correctly, a shared T1 access from their servers to Mae West. (this may have changed since I unplugged to move south.) This meant they had a captive audience for all their Intense Multimedia Content - All of it both Family Friendly and Intensely Lame, I might add.

It's not a particularly sophisticated solution, and you could literally network around them - if you had some combination of arcane knowledge and money. Or you could just accept that some of a t-one was better than dial-up. But I didn't even bother with their "interface," any more than I bother with Charter's. If I want to know what they have, I can get it at their website. I've never felt the need to even bother - and that, of course, is exactly why your cable provider would love to be able to narrow your range of choices.

Here's the problem. The suits are in this to keep control of "their" markets, their ability to influence your buying decisions and "lifestyle choices." You know, like whether or not to watch "Survivor" or "Something Else." They want to dynamically target advertisments at you based on their server records - and not have to scramble all over and pay money for independently collected data.

The last thing they want is for you to actually communicate to other people on your own and discover that actual duplex communication is empowering, interesting and useful. They would probably loved to have strangled eBay and Amazon at birth, had they even understood what they were looking at.

These are entirely new markets. And the suits are finding out that they are very profitable, and think they can make even more profitable markets if they can "control them."

But neither service would or could work that way. They work because people come to the market voluntarily with things that come from sources no central provider would ever think of providing. And along with the commerce, parallel with it, or utterly entangled with it, is communications, independant trust networks, entire new ideas and products and associations and co-operations, all of it making it possible for me to have fun and or do business with you or anyone else I want without any need for centralized bullshit, permissions, approvals, meetings or much else that is beloved by control freaks and Central Planners.

It's anarchy! Sheer anarchy! People are exchanging information (and of course, music, pictures, video and, God forbid, Ideas) on peer-to-peer networks!

Hell, you might actually discover an issue that matters to you and connect to some other people and cause real problems. You know, like that whole Ron Paul embarrassment.

Oh, yes, if you are reading this, I'm sure you can think of other examples.

Now think back to how things were before you got online. What did you know to be true then that you have come to realize was not exactly true, or even exactly not true? How much have you personally profited by having the internet instead of the means of communication we had before? How many things have you done that no amount of wealth would have made practical?

Oh, yes, life was simpler then. Well, no, not really. We just had the luxury of thinking that it was. Oh, and that Commies were out to kill us in our sleep, blissfully unaware that those so-called commies thought the same about us.

Now the same scam is being run upon us - but this time we can, if we want, actually fact check it, and while most will not, enough will that such schemes just don't work as well. Of course, this is the underlying motive for the whole unholy alliance between the Republicans and the Social Conservatives. Both long for the day when we actually did sit down, shut up, got a haircut and did as we were told.

Well, most of us. Some of us would not, could not do as we were told. Betcha at fifty I have outlived a disturbing number of people who thought that going along was the way to get along, though. Heart attacks, alcoholism, suicide, overwork - just plain stress as every implied promise was repudiated and we all took a decades long plunge into our current near-peonage and debt-slavery.

The people that want to "own" the internet are perfectly sincere in trying to do it, and it would not be an issue being seriously discussed if they thought they could not achieve their goal. It's been tried before. Hell, it's no different than building a castle beside a river so you can charge a "passage fee."

Is it fair? Yeah, if you keep the channels dredged and free of pirates. But if you do it so that you can make sure no competing traders can use the river... not so much.

And when you do that you just started a bull market in camel caravan futures.