15 ms·

Steve Wozniak: Internet should not have gatekeepers or regulators

156 points by MrBlue 14y ago

majani 14y ago
I've found in my experience that gatekeepers to any system will always bubble up. It's almost evolutionary that someone controls the flow of things. The most you can hope for is that the gatekeeper be good-hearted and neutral.
samstave 14y ago
If you have no safety in your sharing of information, you have no freedom.
rayiner 14y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_pk0lW3oJ8#t=01m01s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_pk0lW3oJ8#t=01m01s
- jonathanyc 14y ago
  Relevant how, exactly?
  - rayiner 14y ago
    I've always liked the quote from that movie: "men must be governed." Any system as big and as important as the internet needs to be regulated. It's intellectually lazy to pin opposition to particular regulations not on rational cost benefit analysis, but on the knee-jerk ideological position that regulation is bad and undermines freedom.
  - aspensmonster 14y ago
    From the youtube link: "Men must be governed. Often not wisely I will grant you but they must be governed nonetheless." "That's the excuse of every tyrant in history. From Nero to Bonaparte. And I for one am opposed to authority. It is the egg of misery and oppression." "You've come to the wrong shop for anarchy, brother." And from the RT interview: "The trouble is, a lot of it [network neutrality] has to be enforced by the government, and conservative types and libertarian types say 'government shouldn't have any say and control over that; that takes away our freedom.' Wrong. It takes away the freedom of the companies that are taking away the freedom from us." I'd assume the clip from youtube is meant to reinforce the inherent necessity of an authority to enforce order. The "conservative types and libertarian types" would likely consider authority the "egg of misery and oppression." But Wozniak argues that "men must be governed. Often not wisely... but they must be governed nonetheless." Wozniak is addressing the oft-repeated mantra amongst conservative and libertarian types that government is inherently inefficient and should be limited in order to maximize freedom; his argument is to highlight the paradoxical observation that from a lack of authority grows the very oppression -- non-neutral networking -- that these types claim to deplore.
    - thinkingisfun 14y ago
      > "I for one am opposed to authority. It is the egg of misery and oppression." I agree with that, but with the distinction of natural and force authority, as e.g. Erich Fried or Noam Chomsky make it. If a little kid runs on the street, and the parent (or even a random stranger for that matter!) grabs it by the arm to save it from harm, the kid has NO vote, and that is fine. Everybody knows and understands that. In that sense I agree with some regulation being needed to stop people infringing each other's freedom; but I strongly have to disagree with governance for the sake of governance. CHILDREN must be governed, not free men. Free men govern themselves. That is an important distinction, and anyone who shrugs it off is certainly my enemy. Governance is NOT the end, and actually, all authority which is justifiable should also always seek, or at least hope, to be obsolete some day. E.g. the child grows up, or people are too busy prospering in peace to deceive and oppress each other, and have inherited the values and methods you teached them. But as long as you have to "be the parent", you haven't solved the problem, you just made it possible for all parties to survive until it is solved. And always watch out for secretly not wanting the other to grow up, your own authority becoming obsolete. Kafka said this about parents and their children, how parents tend to use them just based on petty ego - how much more is it true for structures of huge power, and insane profits. Sure, Apple ain't the firm I associate with grown up stuff and equals considering others equals; but even broken clocks get it right twice a day. Still, the devil is in the details. I'd rather have eternal vigilance and freedom than rounding a corner here and there.
      - rayiner 14y ago
        > n that sense I agree with some regulation being needed to stop people infringing each other's freedom; but I strongly have to disagree with governance for the sake of governance. CHILDREN must be governed, not free men. Free men govern themselves. That is an important distinction, and anyone who shrugs it off is certainly my enemy. This is silly non-sense rhetoric. Complex systems need organization. The more complex, the more organization is required. It's something you see throughout nature, at all scales. "Natural rights" and whatnot is just mumbo-jumbo with no empirical basis.
        14y ago
rickmb 14y ago
The title is completely misleading, given that Wozniak concedes: “Every freedom we have in the United States, every one of them, was given to us by congressional regulation. It’s called the Bill of Rights. That is what gives us our freedom and yet it was from the government. It was government regulation.” Bottom line is that there will be regulators. The choice is between regulation by those that own the infrastructure or by a democratically elected government.
- wissler 14y ago
  Government is merely a set of people. These people don't give you your rights any more than some random person on the street gives you your rights. Both merely either respect them or not. America, in spite of its contradictions, was to a significant extent based on the idea of "inalienable rights", and is why it was so successful. The verbiage in The Bill of Rights was intended to recognize, not confer rights, and it was intended to restrain government from violating them.
  - kijin 14y ago
    Exactly. Political theorists routinely distinguish between natural rights and legal rights. Legal rights are conferred by law, and would not exist if not for law. The right to run for President is a legal right, because the office of the President would not have existed if not for the U.S. Constitution. Natural rights, on the other hand, exist regardless of law. Nobody is supposed to rape you, not only because the law says so, but also because you have a right to decide who you have sex with. If the law does not prosecute rapists, the law is wrong, and you still have the right. The U.S. Constitution is remarkable not only because it created (legal) rights that didn't exist before, but also because it finally recognized so many (natural) rights that used to be blatantly ignored by despots. Of course, whether "freedom of information" is a natural right or a legal right is a contentious matter. Most likely, it has components of both.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    40 states have positive right-to-speech laws: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Ro...
wseymour 14y ago
Oh Woz, you're so confused. You want the Internet to stay unregulated, yet are in favour of Net Neutrality?
- guelo 14y ago
  The pipes themselves must not be regulated based on the content. In other words, freedom for users, not necessarily for ISPs.
  - wseymour 14y ago
    What difference between end-users and ISPs means that one party may have freedom but the other may not?
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      What difference between government and individuals?
      - spindritf 14y ago
        Monopoly on violence.
    - k-mcgrady 14y ago
      The difference is that we give ISP's the use of our countries spectrum. Without that, they wouldn't have a business. So it's fair that we can prevent them from screwing us through regulation.
      - danielweber 14y ago
        If we are talking wireless, then you might have a point, but you can always lay more wire.
        k-mcgrady 14y ago
lubos 14y ago
3 months ago Steve Wozniak said he is going to buy Facebook shares at "no matter what price" I mean this guy just happened to be co-founder of Apple. He hasn't been with Apple for like 20+ years and hasn't done anything noteworthy for decades. Does it really matter what he says?
- pan69 14y ago
  To be fair. He didn't just happen to be in the room when other people at Apple where inventing great things. He invented it. Yes. It matters a lot what this guys says because every self proclaimed journalist want to talk to this guy and he happens to speak for what a lot of people are thinking but not get the exposure he does.
- bookwormAT 14y ago
  Steve Wozniak's Apple II was a huge milestone in personal computing. It was the foundation of an age of open computing, where everyone could make and distribute software directly to people, without any private regulation/censorship/quality control. This open market enabled many other great achievements, like the world wide web, endless scientific discoveries, Wikipedia, Minecraft or mobile computing. Nobody at Apple created anything similar revolutionary and magical after Woz made the Apple II.
- muyuu 14y ago
  It does. It should matter even if some random guy would say it because he's speaking out on very important matters that stand on their own.
- nopassrecover 14y ago
  I have to agree. Woz has done some cool stuff, and seems like a straight-up cool guy, but I'm not sure that confers special status to his opinions on anything and everything tech. Now having said that, I think it's mostly the media's fault for covering anything he says (e.g. http://www.news.com.au/technology/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-has-predicted-horrible-problems-with-cloud-computing/story-e6frfro0-1226443447897 http://www.news.com.au/technology/apple-co-founder-steve-woz...).
gdi2290 14y ago
you gotta love that confirmation nod at the end of the interview
maeon3 14y ago
Freedom is won with the barrel of a gun. You do not ask for rights, you get a weapon, and you point it at your oppressor and say: Leave me alone Or I will shoot you. That is how freedom works, not with words. With actions.
- anthonyb 14y ago
  Non-violent action is far more effective than civil war.
- citricsquid 14y ago
  because if there's one thing keeping the average American citizens "freedom" safe, it's their right to keep a couple of handguns in their closet.
- vacri 14y ago
  Really? England banned slavery without having guns pointed at the government. Women have achieved right to equal pay and privilege without threatening to shoot men. Canada became fully independent from the UK by simply asking for it. Stop being so macho.
flustered 14y ago
I totally agree with what Woz is saying. I do wish that there were tools more readibly available built into our browsers filter content, but I think that is just an opportunity for tools like NetNanny, etc. if Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft (except for Bing), Google (except for Google search), and Opera aren't doing it. I wish we had the same freedom here in HN, but we don't, and I'm not sure why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4385454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4385454

156 points by MrBlue 14y ago

I've found in my experience that gatekeepers to any system will always bubble up. It's almost evolutionary that someone controls the flow of things. The most you can hope for is that the gatekeeper be good-hearted and neutral.

samstave 14y ago

If you have no safety in your sharing of information, you have no freedom.

rayiner 14y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_pk0lW3oJ8#t=01m01s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_pk0lW3oJ8#t=01m01s

jonathanyc 14y ago
Relevant how, exactly?
- rayiner 14y ago
  I've always liked the quote from that movie: "men must be governed." Any system as big and as important as the internet needs to be regulated. It's intellectually lazy to pin opposition to particular regulations not on rational cost benefit analysis, but on the knee-jerk ideological position that regulation is bad and undermines freedom.
- aspensmonster 14y ago
  From the youtube link: "Men must be governed. Often not wisely I will grant you but they must be governed nonetheless." "That's the excuse of every tyrant in history. From Nero to Bonaparte. And I for one am opposed to authority. It is the egg of misery and oppression." "You've come to the wrong shop for anarchy, brother." And from the RT interview: "The trouble is, a lot of it [network neutrality] has to be enforced by the government, and conservative types and libertarian types say 'government shouldn't have any say and control over that; that takes away our freedom.' Wrong. It takes away the freedom of the companies that are taking away the freedom from us." I'd assume the clip from youtube is meant to reinforce the inherent necessity of an authority to enforce order. The "conservative types and libertarian types" would likely consider authority the "egg of misery and oppression." But Wozniak argues that "men must be governed. Often not wisely... but they must be governed nonetheless." Wozniak is addressing the oft-repeated mantra amongst conservative and libertarian types that government is inherently inefficient and should be limited in order to maximize freedom; his argument is to highlight the paradoxical observation that from a lack of authority grows the very oppression -- non-neutral networking -- that these types claim to deplore.
  - thinkingisfun 14y ago
    > "I for one am opposed to authority. It is the egg of misery and oppression." I agree with that, but with the distinction of natural and force authority, as e.g. Erich Fried or Noam Chomsky make it. If a little kid runs on the street, and the parent (or even a random stranger for that matter!) grabs it by the arm to save it from harm, the kid has NO vote, and that is fine. Everybody knows and understands that. In that sense I agree with some regulation being needed to stop people infringing each other's freedom; but I strongly have to disagree with governance for the sake of governance. CHILDREN must be governed, not free men. Free men govern themselves. That is an important distinction, and anyone who shrugs it off is certainly my enemy. Governance is NOT the end, and actually, all authority which is justifiable should also always seek, or at least hope, to be obsolete some day. E.g. the child grows up, or people are too busy prospering in peace to deceive and oppress each other, and have inherited the values and methods you teached them. But as long as you have to "be the parent", you haven't solved the problem, you just made it possible for all parties to survive until it is solved. And always watch out for secretly not wanting the other to grow up, your own authority becoming obsolete. Kafka said this about parents and their children, how parents tend to use them just based on petty ego - how much more is it true for structures of huge power, and insane profits. Sure, Apple ain't the firm I associate with grown up stuff and equals considering others equals; but even broken clocks get it right twice a day. Still, the devil is in the details. I'd rather have eternal vigilance and freedom than rounding a corner here and there.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      > n that sense I agree with some regulation being needed to stop people infringing each other's freedom; but I strongly have to disagree with governance for the sake of governance. CHILDREN must be governed, not free men. Free men govern themselves. That is an important distinction, and anyone who shrugs it off is certainly my enemy. This is silly non-sense rhetoric. Complex systems need organization. The more complex, the more organization is required. It's something you see throughout nature, at all scales. "Natural rights" and whatnot is just mumbo-jumbo with no empirical basis.
      - 14y ago

rickmb 14y ago

The title is completely misleading, given that Wozniak concedes: “Every freedom we have in the United States, every one of them, was given to us by congressional regulation. It’s called the Bill of Rights. That is what gives us our freedom and yet it was from the government. It was government regulation.” Bottom line is that there will be regulators. The choice is between regulation by those that own the infrastructure or by a democratically elected government.

wissler 14y ago
Government is merely a set of people. These people don't give you your rights any more than some random person on the street gives you your rights. Both merely either respect them or not. America, in spite of its contradictions, was to a significant extent based on the idea of "inalienable rights", and is why it was so successful. The verbiage in The Bill of Rights was intended to recognize, not confer rights, and it was intended to restrain government from violating them.
- kijin 14y ago
  Exactly. Political theorists routinely distinguish between natural rights and legal rights. Legal rights are conferred by law, and would not exist if not for law. The right to run for President is a legal right, because the office of the President would not have existed if not for the U.S. Constitution. Natural rights, on the other hand, exist regardless of law. Nobody is supposed to rape you, not only because the law says so, but also because you have a right to decide who you have sex with. If the law does not prosecute rapists, the law is wrong, and you still have the right. The U.S. Constitution is remarkable not only because it created (legal) rights that didn't exist before, but also because it finally recognized so many (natural) rights that used to be blatantly ignored by despots. Of course, whether "freedom of information" is a natural right or a legal right is a contentious matter. Most likely, it has components of both.
- rhizome 14y ago
  40 states have positive right-to-speech laws: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Ro...

wseymour 14y ago

Oh Woz, you're so confused. You want the Internet to stay unregulated, yet are in favour of Net Neutrality?

guelo 14y ago
The pipes themselves must not be regulated based on the content. In other words, freedom for users, not necessarily for ISPs.
- wseymour 14y ago
  What difference between end-users and ISPs means that one party may have freedom but the other may not?
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    What difference between government and individuals?
    - spindritf 14y ago
      Monopoly on violence.
  - k-mcgrady 14y ago
    The difference is that we give ISP's the use of our countries spectrum. Without that, they wouldn't have a business. So it's fair that we can prevent them from screwing us through regulation.
    - danielweber 14y ago
      If we are talking wireless, then you might have a point, but you can always lay more wire.
      - k-mcgrady 14y ago

lubos 14y ago

3 months ago Steve Wozniak said he is going to buy Facebook shares at "no matter what price" I mean this guy just happened to be co-founder of Apple. He hasn't been with Apple for like 20+ years and hasn't done anything noteworthy for decades. Does it really matter what he says?

pan69 14y ago
To be fair. He didn't just happen to be in the room when other people at Apple where inventing great things. He invented it. Yes. It matters a lot what this guys says because every self proclaimed journalist want to talk to this guy and he happens to speak for what a lot of people are thinking but not get the exposure he does.
bookwormAT 14y ago
Steve Wozniak's Apple II was a huge milestone in personal computing. It was the foundation of an age of open computing, where everyone could make and distribute software directly to people, without any private regulation/censorship/quality control. This open market enabled many other great achievements, like the world wide web, endless scientific discoveries, Wikipedia, Minecraft or mobile computing. Nobody at Apple created anything similar revolutionary and magical after Woz made the Apple II.
muyuu 14y ago
It does. It should matter even if some random guy would say it because he's speaking out on very important matters that stand on their own.
nopassrecover 14y ago
I have to agree. Woz has done some cool stuff, and seems like a straight-up cool guy, but I'm not sure that confers special status to his opinions on anything and everything tech. Now having said that, I think it's mostly the media's fault for covering anything he says (e.g. http://www.news.com.au/technology/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-has-predicted-horrible-problems-with-cloud-computing/story-e6frfro0-1226443447897 http://www.news.com.au/technology/apple-co-founder-steve-woz...).

gdi2290 14y ago

you gotta love that confirmation nod at the end of the interview

maeon3 14y ago

Freedom is won with the barrel of a gun. You do not ask for rights, you get a weapon, and you point it at your oppressor and say: Leave me alone Or I will shoot you. That is how freedom works, not with words. With actions.

anthonyb 14y ago
Non-violent action is far more effective than civil war.
citricsquid 14y ago
because if there's one thing keeping the average American citizens "freedom" safe, it's their right to keep a couple of handguns in their closet.
vacri 14y ago
Really? England banned slavery without having guns pointed at the government. Women have achieved right to equal pay and privilege without threatening to shoot men. Canada became fully independent from the UK by simply asking for it. Stop being so macho.

flustered 14y ago

I totally agree with what Woz is saying. I do wish that there were tools more readibly available built into our browsers filter content, but I think that is just an opportunity for tools like NetNanny, etc. if Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft (except for Bing), Google (except for Google search), and Opera aren't doing it. I wish we had the same freedom here in HN, but we don't, and I'm not sure why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4385454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4385454