US Government moves to block the Internet
Sarah Kessler from Mashable posted an article yesterday on recent activities by the US Senate to create an Internet “kill switch” for the United States (https://mashable.com/2011/02/01/us-kill-switch/). Apparently, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) was busy talking with Wired magazine about reintroducing a bill that would allow the president to shut down the Internet. With the entire buzz about Egypt shutting off the Internet and the outrage this has caused, one would think that Sen. Collins would consider this a bad time for such a discussion. Of course, she is from Washington and they apparently live in their own bubble. As an open source community member, I get concerned when I see such activity from our government because I work in the land of the Internet and require access to people from around the world for communication, software exchange, etc. Without the Internet, the entire open source movement could be crushed. Now, who would want that? It seems to me that Americans are pretty guidable and can easily be convinced to support this law, which can essentially remove competition from the software marketplace. Many large and powerful software companies face direct challenges and competition from open source and would certainly not be upset to see our movement shut down. Of course, large corporations don’t control the US government, so I have been told, but I am not so sure. Finally, perhaps this is worst-case reactionary thinking on my part but I do foresee a day when governments are able to slice and dice the Internet access limiting who can get to what, thus allowing influential corporations to effectively shut down competition. Am I crazy? Is this something to worry about? I think my view is pretty extreme but I hope the open source community takes a unified stand against any laws in the US or rest of the world restricting Internet access.
