[cap-talk] Virtues and Vices of Open Source

[Peter Amstutz]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 09:29:59AM +0100, Toby Murray wrote:

> While there may never-again be another Microsoft -- a company with a
> software monopoly; Google is emerging as a second monopoly, but of
> information itself, not software. Google has become the primary
> gatekeeper to the information that exists "freely" on the inernet.
> Information might have become free to exchange, as Moglen says, but when
> the majority of information access occurs through a single portal,
> Google, that gives Google great power, since the information is largely
> useless if noone can easily /find/ it out there.
> 
> just a thought.

When I read this, I thought wouldn't it be nice if we could have some 
kind of democratic, peer-to-peer search service that could do what 
Google does.  Indeed, Google works by spreading computation out among 
huge clusters of commodity machines, rather than a few huge mainframes.  
It occurred to me that the reason why we can't have a public version of 
such a system of this has more to do with the inevitable bad actors, 
abuse and bureaucracy than it does with solving the actual computer 
science problems.  Google, as a unified organization, is able to enforce 
individual accountability and control over their networks; on the public 
Internet we have neither.

I don't know if capability security provides any answers to this 
problem, but it's worth considering that this *is* a computer security 
problem.  I don't mean just the privacy implications of the Googlopoly, 
but that security is at the heart of the difficulty/impossibility of 
replacing centralized search services with open distributed systems.

The tragedy of the commons is alive and well.

-- 
[   Peter Amstutz  ][ tetron at interreality.org ][ peter.amstutz at gdit.com ]
[Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet]
[ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ]
[ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey:  pgpkeys.mit.edu  18C21DF7 ]

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