I wish this article had been submitted under the original headline, as it much better describes the argument.
That said, I was surprised at the contents of the article. When the author described the "Internet Dissent Tax," I don't think he's describing anything new. Controversial materials have always been more costly and challenging to publish--witness Lolita, which didn't find an American publisher for years.
Rather, the dissent tax I find more interesting is the one brought about by 4chan and company--where loosely organized groups of internet users show their general disagreement with the actions of a company by attacking their servers.
It seems like companies doing business on the internet who take some action that could be unpopular with some of the internet's "defenders" must now take into account the "tax" they will pay for that decision, by having to deal with the attacks that could arise. One has to think that Paypal and MasterCard will be taking this risk into consideration in the future.
That itself is an interesting new social dynamic that I don't think we've really seen before, since it goes well beyond boycotts or sit-ins by affecting thousands of "regular" users, not just the companies.
(seconding your claim that this is an interesting new social dynamic)
In the quasi-whimsical view of Anonymous as a legitimate internet-dwelling mentality, it's these definedly group actions act actually constitute the speech (a vector of communication) for that entity. Every textual or video message signed "Anonymous" is quickly interpreted as the speech of an individual or small group of collaborating authors, relatable on human terms. The attacks, despite their sit-in level overall effectiveness, are inherently aggregate, as opposed to that-13-year-old or that-15-year-old-and-his-botnet.
Good point about how Anonymous and the boycotts are attempting to introduce a tax in the other direction.
As to how new this is ... on the one hand I don't think anything about Wikileaks is fundamentally new; we've been talking about it in the civil liberties community since the early 90s. On the other hand it certainly highlights the realities dramatically. The Internet lets anybody speak ... if you can survive DDOS attacks and afford the network infrastructure, and if the services that you rely on don't decide to boot you off. I don't think it had really sunk in to a lot of people.
That said, I was surprised at the contents of the article. When the author described the "Internet Dissent Tax," I don't think he's describing anything new. Controversial materials have always been more costly and challenging to publish--witness Lolita, which didn't find an American publisher for years.
Rather, the dissent tax I find more interesting is the one brought about by 4chan and company--where loosely organized groups of internet users show their general disagreement with the actions of a company by attacking their servers.
It seems like companies doing business on the internet who take some action that could be unpopular with some of the internet's "defenders" must now take into account the "tax" they will pay for that decision, by having to deal with the attacks that could arise. One has to think that Paypal and MasterCard will be taking this risk into consideration in the future.
That itself is an interesting new social dynamic that I don't think we've really seen before, since it goes well beyond boycotts or sit-ins by affecting thousands of "regular" users, not just the companies.