"The legal scholar James Boyle describes this as the division between those who are culturally agoraphobic and those who are not. In a couple of recent lectures (available online at http://bit.ly/tYEFj and http://bit.ly/1KVUr4) he has suggested two intriguing thought experiments to illustrate the gap.
Imagine, he says, you're back in the early 1990s. The potential of electronic networking is dawning on the world, and there are two possible paths of development. The first is a version of the French Minitel system - government-provided terminals in every home on which appear information and services from a small number of approved providers (the BBC and Guardian for news, the Met Office for weather information, Reuters for stockmarket information, and so on). Everything is controlled and reliable. The other option is a publishing system in which anybody can publish anything - including lies, propaganda and pornography - with no prior approval.
Question: which system would you have chosen?"
Control freaks don't get it: the web works best in a free-for-all by John Naughton
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/03/digital-media-john-naughton
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