This is dense, but important. Skip to the third section (the “solution”) if you must, but read it. Doc Searls writing about how linguistics are losing us the battle for the future of the internet.

His basic premise is that by speaking of the net in terms of a transport mechanism, rather than a place or a publishing system, it makes it easy to impose regulatory control, and anything resisting it gets labelled with the same words as Communism, which invariably kills support. By framing the debate in terms of a marketplace where things are created/sold/discussed and a publishing system where things are written/published/played/reviewed, we can create activate subliminal support for a lack of regulation and a preservation of the decentralized end-to-end system that made the internet a profitable and viable system in the first place. Good geek stuff.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject, have you donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Creative Commons yet this year? At the very least, download the newly updated Firefox and support open source software. Not only is it more secure and amazingly extensible, version 1.5 is also noticably faster than any other browser out there.