Re: No shit, Sherlock...
@Cipher,
When I start suggesting that anyone be given control of the internet, go ahead and call me whatever kind of authoritarian seems appropriate to you. But I made no such suggestion in the above comment, and it seems a bit previous to take that shot on that basis.
"Democracy and liberty are messy things sometimes, but they beat the shit out of totalitarian control." - does that mean we shouldn't draw or pay attention to the messiness, and seek for ways to maybe tidy it up a bit? Is any - not even 'attempt', but mere 'wish' - to improve the status quo automatically, in your mind, tantamount to "totaliarian control"?
The closest I've ever seen to "liberty" on the internet was Usenet in the 90s, and I loved it, but you know what? Here I am (and you, for that matter) posting on a proprietary, moderated site. I believe vestiges of Usenet still exist, but I don't even know how to use them any more.
From your comment and examples I gather you're an American. If so, you can rest secure in the knowledge that the first amendment makes it illegal for Congress to attempt to define what a "journalist" is, or to restrict any moron from being a publisher. I don't know what, if anything, Hilary Clinton had in mind, but 'providing a proper "gateway" for information on the net' has been an avowed goal of dozens of internet companies for decades (in the 90s, it was AOL, Yahoo!, AltaVista and others; now it's mostly Google, but dozens of smaller companies - including most media companies - vie for their own market segments in just the same way).
None of which helps in the slightest with the problem I'm talking about, because all these "gateways" have one thing in common - they're not paid (because nobody has come up with a business model for doing that), which means they have no incentive to exercise editorial judgement in the interests of their readers, rather than their advertisers or sponsors or the random personal biases of their editors. The closest is paywalled news sites, but in practice they're competing with 'free' news sites, with the inevitable result that they sink to, pretty much, the same level.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
