It controls what people see.
It creates mechanisms for how people interact.
It's been great, but spying, blocking sites, repurposing people's content, taking you to the wrong websites completely undermines the spirit of helping people create," he said.
Berners-Lee thinks large corporations and governments are to blame.
"The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging." At the Decentralized Web Summit, Berners-Lee met with a group of internet activists to discuss ways of "re-decentralizing" the internet, and giving individuals more control while ensuring more privacy and security.
"The temptation to grab control of the internet by the government or by a company is always going to be there," he said.
"They will wait until we're sleeping, because if you're a government or a company and you can control something, you'll want it.
You want to control your citizens or exploit customers.
The temptation is huge.
Yes, we can have things enshrined in law, but even then it won't necessarily stop people."
***
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
***
Creepy British startup Score Assured has brought the power of "big data" to plumb new depths.
In order to rent from landlords who use their services, potential renters are "...required to grant it full access to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and/or Instagram profiles.
From there, Tenant Assured scrapes your site activity, including entire conversation threads and private messages; runs it through natural language processing and other analytic software; and finally, spits out a report that catalogs everything from your personality to your 'financial stress level.'"
This "stress level" is a deep dive to (allegedly) determine whether the potential renter will pay their bills using vague indicators like "online retail social logins and frequency of social logins used for leisure activities."
To make it worse, the company turns over to the landlords' indicators that the landlords aren't legally allowed to consider (age, race, pregnancy status), counting on the landlords to "do the right thing."
As if this isn't abusive enough, the candidates are not allowed to see nor challenge their report, unlike with credit reports.
Landlords first, employers next...and then?
As the co-founder says, "People will give up their privacy to get something they want" and, evidently, that includes a place to live and a job.
In late May, an apartment building in Salt Lake City told tenants living in the complex to "like" its Facebook page or they will be in breach of their lease.
***
 |
| GMO= God Move Over |
When big corporations want something it is always for profit and not for the public's benefit or well being.
A U.S. agency has lined up broad support for its plan to end the government's oversight of the Internet's domain name system, despite opposition from some Republicans in Congress.
The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on Thursday released statements of support for a plan to end its oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
Among supporters of a plan, developed by the ICANN community, to transition ICANN's domain name coordination functions to a multistakeholder governance model are Amazon.com, Google, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Facebook, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Computer and Communications Industry Association.
NTIA on Thursday announced it had reviewed the community proposal and found it meets the agency's criteria for allowing the ICANN privatization plan to move forward.
The community plan maintains the openness of the Internet and maintains the security and stability of the DNS, said NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling.
It does not replace NTIA's oversight with another government organization, he said, although that's been a fear of some critics of the NTIA plan.
On Wednesday, Ted Cruz proposed a bill, the Protecting Internet Freedom Act, that would prohibit the U.S. government from relinquishing its role with respect to overseeing the web's domain name system (DNS), unless explicitly authorized by Congress.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the Commerce Department, currently oversees control of the DNS, a virtual phonebook of sorts that allows internet users to easily browse the web by allocating domain names to websites the world over.
The NITA has long been expected to give up its oversight role to a global multi-stakeholder community, however, prompting lawmakers to unleashed a proposal this week that would assure the U.S. government maintains control unless Congress votes otherwise.
The bill, the Protecting Internet Freedom Act, "would prevent the Obama administration from giving the Internet away to a global organization that will allow over 160 foreign governments to have increased influence over the management and operation of the Internet," according to a statement issued Wednesday by the office of the bill's co-sponsor, Sen. Ted Cruz.
Specifically, the bill aims to ensure that the NTIA's relationship with the DNS doesn't terminate, lapse, expire or otherwise end up cancelled unless authorized by Congress, while a separate provision would guarantee that the U.S. government's exclusive control over .gov and .mil domains remains intact.
"Monsanto Should Not Have To Vouchsafe The Safety Of Biotech Food.
Our Interest Is In Selling As Much Of It As Possible.
Assuring It's Safety Is The FDA's Job."
* Phil Angell, Monsanto's Director Of Corporate Communications.
Quoted In The New York Times, October 25, 1998
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