Odyssey Online

…a couple of follow-up’s for a Friday on the travails of the Internet.  In Slate Larry Downs wrote a piece arguing that if the history of the Internet tells us anything about assuring Net Neutrality, it’s to do nothing.  It’s an interesting contemplation on the “the Net” has always taken care of it’s own business.

…and I found this interesting, it’s an explanation of how the Egyptian Government could turn off the Internet as part of its attempt to quell the recent street protests…

…while somewhat outside of the state purpose of Odyssey Online, these article and rebuttal caught my eye.  On January 14th Farhad Majoo argued, with noteworthy verve, that one should abandon the practice of putting two spaces after a period in a sentence.  His argument is based on the notion that A) the practice is ugly, and (more importantly) B) that it is a habit left over from typewriters. Like the qwerty keyboard, putting two spaces after a sentence is a practice that writing with digital appliances renders pointless. If nothing else it does illustrate, nicely, those moments of  interesting cross-generational persistence when analog processes won’t die…

…also interesting is this rebuttal which matches Majoo’s emotional swipe for swipe (and offers an interesting rhetorical parsing of his argument)…

Happy new year and welcome back to Odyssey Online and blogging in 2011.  An update on a topic vital to the future of the Internet…back on December 22nd the FCC created a new set of regulations to “…prohibit broadband providers from interfering with Web traffic and discourage them from giving some Web destinations preferential treatment…” effectively a version of Net Neutrality.  The ruling was widely decried by people on both ends of the political spectrum. Verizon has now challenged the ruling in court, and this piece by Brad Reed in Computerworld is a good summary of the lawsuit, and what the FCC rulings really is and does.    Chloe Albanesius has a useful article in PC Magazine about what is likely to happen in the near future (taking Verizon’s lawsuit into account), and Ars Technica has an interesting piece on the support for network neutrality from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the National Council of Churches…