Quotes from John Naughton

It is too early to tell whether the Internet's effect on media will be as radical as that of the printing press. It is not too early to tell that there is nothing that happened between 1450 and now that comes close.'49

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in a speech to Cambridge students in March 2011, it is also the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen. It is not a technology that favours freedom of speech. It is not a technology that favours human rights. It is not a technology that favours civil life. Rather it is a technology that can be used to set up a totalitarian spying regime, the likes of which we have never seen.

Now, a decade and a half later, after re-reading Orwell and Huxley, we need to ask ourselves a tough question: is the Internet really unique in being immune to censorship or control?

Internet is special because it's a powerful enabler of disruptive innovation – defined as 'a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves 'up market', eventually displacing established competitors'.

if you allow central control of a network, then innovation will proceed at the speed deemed suitable by the controller, rather than by the inventiveness of outsiders.

Nostalgia isn't a business model

Computer programmers tend, by and large, to be quirky and highly individualistic. Trying to organize or manage such awkward characters is normally as thankless as herding cats