The Internet - drowning in its own waste?

[kandrathe]

Well, yes, I think my straw man is a bit draconian and no I don't think many would agree with me. Some, such as yourself, will see this as overly restrictive. I arrived at my position by living through the past, where in fact content providers were limited to a select group of industries, and universities involved with the US DOD. There was no "anonymous" content, and things were very organized and in fact seemingly bright people quibbled incessantly over minutia and the most minor of changes.

I feel your fears are based on what your government would do to you based on your ability to have free unfettered speech. Perhaps then you are willing to put up with the cesspool the Internet is becoming to continue communicating with your fellow humanity without fear of retribution. The baseline for Internet speech cannot be to accommodate the lowest common denominator of government repression, but rather the peoples under these yokes of tyranny must either struggle to free themselves from these bonds or suffer what they are given by their masters.

But as you say, my opinions are those of an individual with nothing to fear from accountability in what I'm saying, as long as it is not treasonous or a threat to the national security of my nation. So, yes, I want to have the ability to restrict certain address ranges or domain suffixes from coming into my home. The only other choice is to rip the wire from the wall, and disconnect completely.

As you rightly point out "who is to be the arbiter of trash vs good content"? I don't know, but I know that someone needs to at least better categorize stuff to help out Pete when he's looking for armor, or to help you wade through the "professional" commercial sites and focus on more "amateur" content if you so desire.

I think the jury is still out on copyrights; I know that illegal knockoffs of books, software, movies and music are robbing billions of dollars from the content publishers. So I see no reason for these "professional" media companies to move their content to electronic form to exacerbate their hemorrhaging.

From my experience, much of the net's quality content is offered by 'amateurs', while 'professionals' tend to be responsible for most of the crap.

Maybe that was a bad choice of words on my part, but I was trying to differentiate between content providers with credentials from just any old person with an opinion, or an axe to grind.