By
Shaun Clayton
Arizona Daily Wildcat
The Internet is going to preserve freedom - some day.
Right now, the Internet is one big ad - one that caters to porn Web sites, porn magazines and porn videos. But there are some things being sold, too, such as - um, stuff and things.
Anyway, capitalism, sponsored by your local corporation - which, by the time this column is published, will have merged into AOL Time Warner Disney Exxon GM Boeing Microsoft Circle K - has got its grubby little hands all over the Internet, and has lost a huge amount of money as a result.
The reason is that corporate America doesn't understand that the Internet - which allows the free exchange of ideas and information quickly and easily - is a forum where everyone gets a voice. Corporations are all about making money. When they got into the Internet, they saw the words exchange, ideas, information, quickly and easily but realized one word was missing - free.
So, corporations have gotten into the Internet business. They've marketed and created a spin, getting everyone hyped up about its potential. A huge amount of money was thrown at companies with ".com" in the title, and then the free part kicked in.
Corporations found that people were not going to buy things like dog biscuits, paper clips and Albanian polka socks online, despite all the advertising and brainwashing efforts.
Further, items that might have been sellable on the regular market - such as DIVX, a recording format for movies, such as DVD - were killed largely due to people on the Internet informing the public of the downsides of DIVX.
So, then, of course the whole ".com" craze came to an end, with a whole lot of money lost in the process. However, there were a few survivors who made a profit - AOL and Yahoo to name a couple. So, corporate America might still hold a favorable attitude toward the Internet.
Then came Napster.
Napster, with its ability to deliver free music to anyone with an Internet connection and the proper software, suddenly helped corporate America realize the free part of the Internet. It attacked the sacred and holy bottom line and thus, Napster - as it was - had to be destroyed.
There's just this wacky, silly, cuckoo thing about freedom in which people who have it, and then get it taken away from them, want it even more. The public will fight for its freedom, and the Internet will be its tool.
Recently, it has been shown that a 20-year old college student with a knowledge of computers can cripple e-mail systems worldwide in his spare time.
Think of what five, six or even 20 college students could do - especially if they put down their Sony PlayStation controllers for a few minutes and really worked at it. Multinational corporations could be brought to their knees, and a rebellion - like a college student cramming for a test - would gather speed and fight on until free expression was restored.
Further, the memory of how freedom was almost lost would stick in people's minds and make free expression and information a cherished ideal, forcing those seeking to oppose such things to have a much harder time doing it.
Ah, yes - the Internet. It's not just porn anymore.
