An Unholy Alliance

This from Doc Searls:

Right now this tide shift isn't a smooth thing. In fact, it's a fight. That fight is between independence and dependence; between liberty and slavery; between free markets and your-choice-of-silo; between what you want to do and what Apple or Microsoft or Intel or Real or Google will let you do.

It's a fight between those who value music, artwork, video and writing, and those who wish to reduce all those goods to the container cargo they call "content".

It's a fight that has the The Net and its founding values on one side. On the other side is an unholy alliance between the "content" industries, Consumer Electronics and the carriers who still think the Internet is about delivering industrial goods in packeted forms to our TVs, desktops and MP3 players.

It's a fight between two overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. The larger circle is The Net: an open noncommercial environment that supports countless commercial markets, including the one for Consumer Electronics goods. The smaller circle is the unholy alliance that thinks its circle is bigger.

The Net will win, because its circle is actually the world on which the smaller circle resides--whether or not the smaller circle likes that fact.

Our job, among many others, is to break up and otherwise thwart that unholy alliance