Will the the Future of the Internet Be Free?

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Will the the Future of the Internet Be Free?
With the release of the Google Flight Simulater as an 'Easter Egg' inside Google Earth last week, you can be forgiven for thinking, as Bill St. Arnauld suggests, that the future of the internet lies in free, not commercial, applications. In his email newsletter, St. Arnauld points to a couple other items that reinforce this point, Andrew Odlyzko writing Digital rights management: Desirable, inevitable, and almost irrelevant, and Paul Budde on meeting John Ralston Saul. "The inclusion of Intellectual Property into the WTO is severely hampering the flow of new ideas and information; it is attempting to control the dissemination of ideas, thus making the spread and sharing of them increasingly difficult. This is damaging the new economy!" Well, not just that. More...