inet doom n gloom

ok, i'm a little worried about where the future of inet is heading...

basically, i completely support the EFF folks and net neutrality, but i am worried that the genie has been out of the bottle on that stuff for a while now, and we're just not accepting the new paradigm.

china has been sending resets and filtering content for a long time. it isn't impossible to subvert. now there's rumbling that russia may be doing something similar.

similarly, the usa govt is all about sniffing around and is also looking to expand and normalize such monitoring, which is surely a step towards active interference of activities deemed to be inappropriate.

the number of attacks coming out of china just pushes the issue further. we know they are monitoring things traversing their network perimeters, and researchers keep reporting wide-spread recon and attacks against a multitude of government and private networks which are traced back to some router in china. i'd imagine that intel ppl and infosec policy makers in the usa are probably saying to themselves: there's no way they don't at a minimum know when attacks occur and where they are coming from. at worst, is it a stretch to assume that there might be official chinese government involvement in the attacks? i can't dig up the link, but right before notacon there was a story running about a woman boarding a plane to china with trade secrets and 30k in cash in her bag.

so anyway, take into account pressures from private companies as well. after helping the us gov't break the law by spying on us citizens, perhaps comcast felt emboldened to start poking around. now we have other companies talking about it too...

we're really going to lose something important and special if we go the route we seem to be heading. but with so much value on the internet, and so much that people and organizations and commerce and governments depend on being ingrained in the internet, can you imagine that there won't be further pushes to regulate and control the internet by the powers that be?

i'm want to be hopeful about this, but people already suck on so many other levels, that i'm not bettin the farm that we'll get this one right...