Help me, I can't find "freedom of information" in either RFC 791 or RFC 793.
Come on, don't be that guy. You know when someone says "freedom of information is at the core of the Internet's values" they're really saying that freedom of information is at the core of the values of the people who worked hard to build and promote it (see Vint Cerf's recent statements about the ITU conference: http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/04/vint-cerf-save-the-interne...), not that the RFCs defining the Internet Protocol include those exact words.
To those of us who grew up with the Internet as our hometown and BBSes as our place of birth, it sure seems to have an inherent ideology just by its very structure.
Values aren't always codified in formal documents. If they were, Aaron Swartz would still be alive, since a key fact that lawyers have been hammering home to us for the past few days is that federal prosecutors are only capable of following the rules as they are written.
In other fields of human endeavor there's plenty of other sources of knowledge. For example, folklore.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
-- John Gilmore
"History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to ‘protect’ their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression. We must make sure, collectively, that the internet avoids a similar fate."
-- Vint Cerf
C'mon. Since when are technical people so whimsical? Believe in folklore, have your politics, but don't make the ridiculous assertion that a technology for moving bits around comes with a particular set of politics baked in. What, praytell, are the politics of the transistor? The internal combustion engine?
Defining the Internet as "a technology for moving bits around" is incredibly reductive and sterile, and does nothing to capture the reality of it. You may as well say that a brain is a "collection of cells that transmit electrical potentials". What are the politics of a neuron?
The Internet encompasses more than its hardware and algorithms. It was created and is operated by tens of thousands of people with real values, is used by many more, and freedom of information is a very important principle for many of them.
What are the politics of a neuron? There aren't any. It's mechanism. You're free to give your neurons whatever policy you wish.
There are people who created the internet who believe in freedom of information. There are people who were just working on a defense contract at a major defense contractor. There are people who operate it now who believes lots of different things, and even those that believe in "freedom of information" in some sense have all sorts of definitions for what they think it means.
Creators of technology don't get to decide what politics will be attached to that technology. RMS doesn't like Android, which contains GPL-ed software. Does it matter? Of course not.
Maybe it's late, maybe I'm just slow, but it feels like your argument is jumping around, so I'll just ask: What are "Internet values"? Are you saying the phrase is meaningless because the Internet can't have values because it's just some hardware and algorithms; or are you saying that "Internet values" can theoretically be anything, but what they happen to be are the current laws regarding Internet use in the United States, which means that "Freedom of Information" is not an "Internet value"; or are you arguing something else?
I'm saying "internet values" is meaningless, fluffy terminology. Some of the people who created the internet might have had certain values, but that doesn't make them "internet values" any more than whatever believes the inventors of the transistor held makes them "transistor values."
That is not to say that we as a society don't have values about the use and function of the internet. But we get to decide what those values are, not the people who happened to create the hardware and the protocols.
I feel like this whole conversation could have been averted if you had just given "Internet Values" a charitable interpretation. Why couldn't "Internet Values" have meant "the values we as a society have about the use and function of the Internet"? I'd argue that if you look at how people actually use the Internet, it's closer to how the founders wanted it to work than how the CFAA stipulates that we should use it.
The ironic thing is that rayiner is displaying exactly the same problematic rhetorical behaviours that we're all so upset with Ortiz for. Wilfully over-narrowing/widening an interpretation in order to win an argument at any cost.
America's slavish veneration of their constitutional text is largely responsible for this poisonous legalistic mode that has infected their discourse at all levels. Discuss.
Precision keeps you from falling into the trap of assuming the universality of your assumptions. Def was doing it with "information freedom" just now, but that's just the flip side of the coin from statements like "of course we need stronger laws against hacking." Your friends all agree with you, so you assume everyone shares your premise, then get surprised when people don't reach the same conclusions.
Are we talking about the values Vint Cerf has re: the Internet, or the values society as a whole has re: the Internet? Those are two different sets or values, and I'd argue that the latter doesn't include "freedom of information" in anything but the most diluted sense.
That's why I'm being pedantic about the distinction. Vint Cerf can't imbue the Internet with his politics. Society at large has adopted a different set of politics regarding the Internet. My mom doesn't care about free information. She just doesn't want anyone to steal her credit card numbers while she's shopping on Gilt.
