The Unchecked World of the Internet

The Unchecked World of the Internet: “Ten years ago Congress passed a law requiring blog operators to protect the public by self-regulation.”

Let’s see…. Ten years ago, we did have “a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun”.

Ten years ago, Dave Winer had not started to post his thoughts to his web site.

Ten years ago, Cameron Barrett was had not yet launched his own web site.

Ten years ago, Evan Williams, Meg Hourihan, and their coworkers were several years away from realizing that the random writing on their web sites wasn’t a distraction from their work – it was their work.

Ten years ago, Brad Fitzpatrick was entering his junior year of high school.

Ten years ago, Ben Trott was five years away from being unemployed enough to have time to write some software so Mena Trott could have an easier time updating her web site.

Ten years ago, Joshua Schachter and a number of friends had not yet had the conversations that would lead to the creation of a shared site for interesting links.

Ten years ago, I had not yet hacked up some software for news sites to post notes about current events to my web page (only to lose them in a disk failure, post to a couple other sites for a while, and then resurrect the idea a couple years later).

Ten years ago, no one had come up with a name for this thing so Peter Merholz could mangle it.

Ten years ago, legislators were all about laws restricting speech on the internet, but I don’t believe they had that much foresight.