HOME The Freedom Of The Web

There are some people (like a certain politician in my own country) who say of the Web, "Oh, I've dabbled in it. It's not as great as its supposed to be." This is like a man who has spent all his life in a house, occasionally looking out the window, and saying, "Oh, I've dabbled in the world. It's not as great as it's supposed to be." What can such a person know what the outside world is really like? How can he know about the lives of trees and shrubs, how can he know the feel of wind and rain and sun, the sloping of hills and the soaring of mountains, the power of the sea? The Web is something entirely new in human experience and it matters much more than that politician realises. It is something to be nourished and safeguarded from that which has blighted some of the finest achievements of mankind - Commercial Interests. On the day that the World Wide Web is seen only as a way of making money, that will be the day on which it dies for most of the ordinary people. Commercialism is like the Snake in Eden. Where it sees profit for itself, it creeps in and spoils it for everyone else. Commercialism is, of course, an offshoot of greed. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but it is greed that makes people love it. I want to comment on only one aspect of greed here, a web-inspired version of it: the registration of Domain Names. Certain people trawl through the Web for the sole purpose of finding names of web sites that appear to have commercial or cultural value. They next check to see if the name is already registered. If it is not, they then register it themselves. In cases where it is attracting interest from the public, the original owners will have to pay an obscene ransom to get it back. I checked recently on a literature orientated name that I use on e-mail, to see if it was registered in a registration company that advertises on my Web Server. Both the .com and .net versions were already registered, only the .org remained available at a price of $70.00. Of course, other writers could easily have come up with that name, so I checked the identity of the owners. Both ran companies that had no connection whatever with writing, or even books. I could not see what use the name could be to them, unless it was to sell it to someone else who wanted it, at a later date. And so we have these law-backed pirates plundering the web, stealing the inventions of others and hijacking their imagination. As it stands at the moment, the "owners" of a registered Domain name can forbid other people to use it. All just-minded people will see that this is wrong. If you realise that justice and law are two entirely different things, you will see that a thing is not necessarily right, just because it is a law. The World Wide Web is so vast that a lot of similar names can co-exist, without infringing on each others territory, or can even overlap without doing each other any harm. But in the mind of the greedy, a cent can seem as important as a million dollars. To take a famous name (and lightly desguise it) as an example, if MacBugers have a Web Site (They probably have; it's just that I've never been around that way), and they come upon a Web bookstore of the same name, run by someone whose happens to be called Alfie MacBurger, then they will send their legal bureau into gear to suppress the site name of the unfortunate Alfie. Now, as everyone knows, MacBurgers do not deal in books, so what they gain by this is absolutely nothing. In their sort of minds, though, what they will have done is set a precedent, gained the right to do the same thing in future. It's a triumph of the rights of the corporate over the rights of the individual. Nobody should be given that right. At the moment, the Web is a place where a person can stand up and say to the world, Here I am. It matters little how much of the world is listening. Will the Web prove resilient enough to maintain a place for the ordinary person, for the relatively poor in society, or will it eventually cave in before commercial pressures? I'm afraid I've become cynical in latter years. I feel that if the commercial sector want it, they will take it. They have the money and money buys power. I can only hope that they will not see sufficient profit there to take it over completely, and that the Web will remain, in my time, anyway, the last bastion of true democracy, a platform for everyone.