A European Union agency has said that mobile network's Three's plans to offer ad-blockers would violate net neutrality, which I think is the perfect example of how laws trying to protect the virtue of the Internet will ultimately play out. I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to have these laws in place, it is more a nod to the dark creativity of capitalism to find a way around the containment powers of laws and regulation.
I am pretty sure that the experiment we know as the web is over as we knew it. Relevant to this story, I am pretty confident the lust for advertising has been one of the main reasons the web is so fucked up. There is just too much money in the game now. The stakes are high, and people are too greedy to go back to the way things were. Sadly, thinking about loopholes in laws, and understanding how to twist and bend good laws for those in power is how some smart people enjoy spending their time.
The social walled gardens we tend like Facebook, and the aggressive nature of the public social gardens we loiter, will continue to drive us to the world where we ask for net neutrality to be broken. We will demand a clean, sanitized, and ultimately the corporate vision of the web because it is safe and more secure than the alternative. While I am fascinated by the dimensions of how net neutrality can be interpreted and put to use, I'm saddened that we couldn't make the web work as it was intended by its creators.
