Making money isn't evil in itself. The point is large media companies are creating personal profiles of web users, and structuring the web to promote your content and services over others, while hyper-commercializing our web experience. This might not be evil, but it's not something we should put up with. - creating walled gardens is not what I feel the web should be about, particularly by large for-profit corporation.

Us having a conversation is nothing like a huge corporation monitoring and corralling all of my online activities. I'm a person, Google/Facebook/Myspace are huge corporations that have a very dominant position on the web.

I'm not critiquing independent blogs our websites here.

It is more then dedicated hobbyists who are using and building what I call the public benefit web. Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites, and Firefox competes with Microsoft quite well.

nobody is calling for walling off anything - it is the big corporations who are walling off the web. Try to post a video that isn't Youtube on Okurt - you can't because Google owns it.

The problem with hyper-commercialism and privacy invasions is that these big companies are abusing there dominant market positions on the web by doing so. And I don't completely blame them in my article on this I suggest three ways to combat this closing off of the web:

1. Push for public interest policy that limits the new media cartels ability to exploit web users. The Center Digital Democracy, US PIRG and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are fighting these battles on our behalf in Washington.

2. Build public campaigns to limit and roll back exploitation of web users by new media giants. MoveOn’s recent successful campaign to get Facebook to reframe from the worst of its predatory practices is a great example.

3. Support digital public benefit spaces and services that respect user privacy and our right unencumbered online navigation. This last lever is perhaps the most effective and successful but maybe the least acknowledged.

-the rest of the article is here: http://coanews.org/article/2007/our-web-not-theirs

And don't be so simplistic to say users can just go elsewhere if they don't like it. Why don't you say that about Net Neutrality? Because we don't have real choice, because a few companies dominate - big business regulates the market. If a company competes successfully it either needs to adopt the predatory practices of the incumbents, or they are bought by one, or it is a part of the public benefit web. My point is that we should support this public benefit web more and fight these exploititive practices any other way we can.

It's not evil, but it's also not something we should put up with. At the end of the day this is about web services and spaces being centralized. See my article for details: http://coanews.org/article/2007/our-web-not-theirs

I'm the producer/director of this video so let me chime in. On the irony of using youtube - of course we used the very dominant corporate sites, we want to get at average users not preach to the choir. We want to get those using the new media cartel off of it - we can't do this by avoiding them. We did this on purpose. If I had used Internet Archive only, people would ask what's the point, why do this. We do have it hosted elsewhere including BlipTV and IA, and we'll make our lead video source from one of these places shortly.
~use the corporate media to criticize the corporate media

bOingbOing is not the kind of site we are railing against - bOingbOing is Independent, and not nearly as exploitive as Google/Facebook/Myspace/Microsoft

The video is CreativeCommons licensed

Raian, I don't agree with your interpretation of history. The web did not need to be commercialized to the level it has because people were unwilling to pay. You are structuring the options here. We can have a relatively non-commercial web that is free, lots of folks are doing this right now. Nobody ever said it was a conspiracy, it's about commercial interests and the public interest.

Net Neutrality is an issue I'm very much involved with but we need to keep the web open at all levels. I would even go so as to say NN is a more crucial issue right now, but that does not negate the importance of the issues raised in the video.
-I've been involved in producing two videos on NN.
"Death of the Internet" (Director/Producer) "Save The Internet" (Associate Producer)

thanks for the pointed discussion on these important issues

~S