The Proper Use of the Internet: Digital Private Property

One of the articles is a panel discussion in turn inspired by Andrew Keen's book The Internet Is Not the Answer. The discussion was titled " Can We Save the Internet? " Your first question, and mine, in response to the discussion title might be " from what? " The answer to our question isn't clear, because the Internet seems to be doing fine, thank you very much, despite many efforts to somehow control it. Fortunately, these efforts are made largely by bureaucrats who fail to understand the extremely distributed grassroots nature of basic Internet governance. 1 The panel discussion seemed to have concerns that varied with the panelists. This lack of clarity isn't surprising, because Keen's book seems a non-sequitur in itself. For example, Keen decries the loss of jobs by Kodak in Roch-ester, and attributes that economic loss to the robotic takeover of the film industry by a few privileged guys in Silicon Valley with good algorithms and exit strategies. Not only does he fail to consider the bad decisions by Kodak management, such as choosing to ignore the invention of the digital camera by one of their own engineers, but he fails to offer any constructive advice. I found the panel to mirror these deficiencies, alternatively lamenting this or that adverse effect on society while largely wrongly attributing the effect to Internet technologies and failing to offer a constructive solution. I'm not going to reference either the book or this panel discussion because I think my readers are smarter than that. However, another article in this same journal gave me a clue about the real problem and one possible solution — and maybe it will you, as well. To belabor a tired analogy, the Internet is a revolutionary tool similar to the invention of the printing press. To be slightly more precise, the invention of easy ways for everyone to publish on the Web combined with apps on smartphones created the problems and fortunes we associate with " the Internet. " Often it's said that we now have problems concentrating because of all of the multimedia we can access, but it's precisely the success of all this independent publishing that creates the so-called attention economy, in which many sites compete for our interest. The excesses of this success aren't such a huge problem. The central problem of at least this decade's application of the Internet concerns ownership …