Law in the Internet Society

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HumzaDFirstEssay 4 - 14 Feb 2016 - Main.EbenMoglen
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 This advertisement’s susceptibility to abuse and some users’ opposition to relinquishing their data necessitates the second requirement that all advertising be optional. Websites should always give users a realistic choice (beyond “don’t use this service”) to opt out of selling their information for otherwise free content. These users, on the other hand, should be willing to pay a couple of dollars to bypass ads to preserve their privacy.

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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
 
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I don't understand the point of the piece as revised. Whether one agrees with your arguments about the nature of writing for the Net or not (and I don't, I think they are completely meretricious), digital media are filterable, and people who want to remove advertisements from their information stream are perfectly capable of doing so, using whatever technology is most useful to them. (It would in this context have been useful if you had included some facts, as I suggested in the last round, rather than a product review of AdblockPlus. There are lots of ways of filtering ads before they ever reach the browser, so a description of how blocking works would have been productive for the reader.) So the actual outcome of the process isn't based on your personal opinion, and you haven't shown here why, whether we agree with you or not, it makes a difference. You may be entirely wrong about how the order of culture works in the Net, and I think you are, in which case all the pro-advertising arguments are junk. Or it may be that as people choose individually to remove the tracking bugs, the ads, the platform hooks and so on from what they read and watch, that the order of culture will collapse because only this constant stream of poison directed at the human mind made the culture "economically viable" to produce. Either way, however, your normative speculations, right or wrong, are merely predictions about the results of the changes under way. Is the point of the piece that these speculations are yours, and therefore important, or that there is something about the nature of your speculations that makes them important without regard to who is holding them? Either's fine, but the genre is surely different.
 
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I think I may need to split this into two essays. The targeting lives section feels incomplete without a discussion of how an assumption of monitoring plays out in a free society where public opinion may lead to censure and self-censorship, and whether this self-censorship (a result of utter transparency) is a loss of freedom. Not sure whether I should trim down the consumer section and try and squeeze this in or try to split these three topics ((1)consumer monitoring, (2) opinion monitoring in an unfree society, (3) opinion monitoring in a free society) into two essays.

(Apologies for the delay. My cat showed my machine the same contempt it shows me and knocked a glass of water onto it yesterday, forcing me to start from scratch on a new machine.)

-- HumzaD - 03 Nov 2015


Revision 4r4 - 14 Feb 2016 - 16:26:20 - EbenMoglen
Revision 3r3 - 02 Feb 2016 - 03:50:13 - HumzaD
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