Charbax.com

Where can I post comments to Hillary Clinton’s remarks on Internet Freedom?

These issues are very fascinating. And I would like to thank Google for providing a platform such as Sidewiki where I am posting this comment, where anyone can comment on any website even if the webmaster has disabled user comments.

I have not yet seen Hillary Clinton’s remarks and Q&A but I would like to comment on the issues just briefly:

- US Technology companies control a very large share of the worldwide technology industry. Could anyone provide % of actual capital in tech industry controlled by few US corporations?

- Sure I don’t like it at all that the Chinese government imprisons that many people and has probably one of the worse death penalty policies in the world. But do consider that for example the USA also does have huge amounts of prisoners, does also have the death penalty and does also listen in on all Internet conversations, even it is pretty well known that the US government has backdoors everywhere on the web. Does anyone know how much information Google provides to the US government and to other European governments about Google users?

- I would very much like that China improve their policies sooner rather than later. It would be very impressive if Google can the Obama administration can convince the Chinese Government that they all jointly sign a new Internet Freedom treaty that would:

1. Stop the useless Chinese firewall, filtering search results on tiananmen/falung gong just does not make any sense. Comon, be a bit progressive on this guys. It is actually ridiculous to block that.

2. Filtering adult material to hide it from Children is absolutely a good and worthy project which I think all countries should collaborate on. And Google DNS and Safe search type technologies should be used by all ISPs by default. Though very important fact should be it should be easy for any registered adult to unlock their connection and get unfiltered access. The filter should only be a default on all main DNS to protect children from adult contents. Very important not to confuse adult filtering with censorship.

3. Piracy should be legalized globally. Sure artists and content creators must be compensated appropriately. There should be new international author rights regulation that should compensate content creators directly without anymore of the same intermediaries of old media. For example, musicians, film makers, journalists, writers, photographers should get paid and find funds directly from a central global license for all contents that everyone should pay towards. This can be done using clever online statistics of popularity of all contents, by creating a registry of content creators and their works, and by letting users opt-in to provide accurate statistics on their content consumption and use ratings to provide better recommendations and filters to find the best contents. Leaving copyright laws of the past dictate this future of Internet content distribution would just be wrong. China and the USA must agree on a solution that improves content, finances much better creation and gives all users free access to all of it.

4. Sure the US technology companies are doing a pretty good job building the Internet and making all kinds of technologies. But they may also be slowing progress in terms of not yet making technology available to the 5 billion poorest people in the world. A new agreement on Technology goals such as power consumption of devices, price of devices, free access to spectrum and broadband, those things need to be taken care of globally. For example, 700mhz TV spectrum needs to be used globally for free unlimited wireless broadband for all. $100 Laptops with 200 hour battery life need to be manufactured as soon as possible and to be made available everywhere in the world. Honestly, capitalistic corporations might not be able to profit when laptops are sold below $100 and when wireless broadband is free for all. But those are very important decisions that politicians need to agree upon.

If Google can reach all this I would thank them so much.

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• China Paints Google Issue as Not Political (nytimes.com)

The EU should force all Laptop and Desktop OEMs to provide the consumer the option to save instantly the cost of the OS at the counter and not have it pre-installed on their machine.

And any consumer purchasing a laptop or desktop with an OS pre-installed should be able to get an INSTANT rebate at the counter equivalent to the cost of the OS even if the OS is pre-installed on the computer. The reseller must provide a special software on a USB key that uninstalls automatically that OS on first bootup.

Then all Resellers must provide free or paid alternative OS choices. Chrome, Ubuntu or Linpus Linux could be available right there on a USB key available for free with any new computer purchase.

What this proposition means, is that if you enter a store and it only has Windows computer for sale, you must be able to demand Windows removed and they should give you an instant rebate between $40 and $100 depending on the actual price that they are paying to Microsoft. Many consumers will prefer to buy the computer without the Windows option either without it even being pre-installed or with a USB key function that erases Windows on first bootup. Erasing Windows can be done in the store while you wait, or if they don’t have time, you can get the “Delete Windows” USB key and delete it yourself at home the first time you boot it up.

Thanks to OLPC, we have soon 50 million netbooks in rich countries. Intel and Microsoft’s profit margins per laptop are shrinking rapidly.

Thanks to OLPC, children have soon millions of cheap lower power laptops in poor countries.

Thanks to OLPC, the PC/Laptop industry’s interpretation of Moore’s law has totally been reshaped, every 18month now PC/laptops will be half the price instead of 2x more powerful and with 2x more bloatware.

Sure, I would have been happier, and so would most other Linux geeks if OLPC had shipped 100 million laptops to poor children by now, and not just 1 million units. Reason for that not happening yet in multi-hundred million scales though are several:

1. Intel will do anything it can not to be killed off by a non-profit laptop technology revolution. Including abusing of monopolistic situations and corrupting politicians.

2. AMD is not much interested in helping OLPC succeed in lowering the cost of laptops and PCs. Lower cost also means less profits and margins for AMD, and AMD has enough problems with profits and margins as it is.

Looking forward, to reach those 100 million poor children sooner rather than later:

1. OLPC needs to find an alternative to AMD as soon as possible. VIA is planned for XO-1.5 which could hopefully ship a few millions of units in a few months time, if VIA supports this move of OLPC creating a cheaper and lower power market using their processor. XO-1.5 could reach the $150 pricepoint soon and enable dozens of commercial netbooks using the VIA processor and also copying on the way OLPC is using the VIA processor.

2. OLPC needs to implement the worlds best ARM processor based laptops for XO-2 working with Google to implement the so called Chrome OS on those. Cloud computing can work also for places without stable internet access, HTML5 supports offline web apps and offline databases. OLPC needs to push Google to make it work on WiFi Mesh networks as well. XO-2 can start at $100 when released and reach the $50 price point, when manufactured using any of half a dozen ARM processor companies chips. All of TI, Qualcomm, Marvell, Freescale, Nvidia and Samsung, all those ARM processors should fit in the XO-2 design. Competition will bring the prices down faster.

Also, to reach those 100 million children, OLPC needs to have more than just a couple dozen engineers working on the whole optimizations of hardware and software for the project.

What OLPC managed to build in XO1 and XO-1.5 with 30 employees and the little budget that they could get is absolutely amazing.

But what OLPC probably needs for XO-2 to absolutely work and sell laptops soon at $50 to revolutionize education worldwide, is thousands of engineers and the support from Barack Obama and the European Union.

So OLPC’s political agenda definitely needs to be more targeted towards the politics of education and aid of the USA and Europe and with much more ambition to make things happen in huge scale as quickly as possible.

What I am proposing is an extra layer of p2p distribution. Why can’t you for example volunteer to store a bunch of products in your garage which people can come and pick up 24 hours a day. For that you get paid, or you can limit the “opening hours” to any amount of time any time you want.

What then happens, if when people buy stuff online, they instantly can go and pick it up 24 hours a day at p2p storage facilities. For a 2AM pickup, it’d obviously cost extra for the nightly service.

Everything would be secure, you don’t get name adress information of people that can provide you the goods until you paid for it, and there is no information if that person has more or less than 1 item in stock. Not even the need to disturb that person ringing on his door bell, the Android application would ring as soon as the customer is approaching the door, thus to be a p2p storage and delivery person, you don’t need to stop everything else that you do at home to be part of that, just store a bunch of things close to your door.

No transaction of money is done ever, the money is spent online, the commission is paid online. What people would do is eventually be able to rate the p2p kiosk experience as well as the buyer. Like ebay ratings but much more relevant and real.

Now add to that a layer of actual transportation of goods. The higher quality goods need to be transported in the absolute most efficient way, to both save on costs and save on pollution. There would be large storage facilities for goods where trains, trucks, airplanes drop the goods, from there the goods are spread out to the thousands of “p2p kiosks” at totally regular people’s homes or any participating consumer storage facility.

P2p delivery can also happen by any person volunteering to pickup goods and deliver them at specific places, could be on your bicycle, in your car, using your little transport truck. Basically you just tell your in-car Android GPS device where you are going, and it will tell you if you can make a few bucks by picking something up and dropping it off on your way.

Same thing as p2p taxi where if you want to carry other people on your backseat, simply tell the Android system, and you are transformed into a p2p taxi. Which will greatly save on pollution as well, since most cars are only driven by 1 person. Putting more people on the backseats of cars is a very easy way to save 50% car pollution and improve traffic conditions greatly. And it would cost about the same as taking public transportation, thus much cheaper than real taxis.

Now Google could organize all this if you want. Or some other huge private corporation. I think though it makes much more sense that the state is regulating all this, in terms of making sure there is interoperability across the whole infrastructure, especially when you start involving normal citizen in the making of this new type of optimized p2p infrastructure. You want safety, quality, trust systems, compatibility. If you leave this new type of organisation of the infrastructure only up to private corporations, there may be collusion of interests, monopolies, illegal trade, all sorts of other things that corrupts the system.

I would link to the Masterful John C Dvorak for some very clever guessing: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-googles-new-os-more-than-just-a-bluff?siteid=

I do not believe John C Dvorak is 100% right in his funny column, though I do believe he is right when he says that this is all a super clever public relations trick put on by Google and that all of it is just the Google OS coming up. John C Dvorak is mostly right about most things that he says.

I believe it will be released open sourced in a couple of months, with the first ARM Cortex A8 and Tegra based laptops.

Android 2.0 and Chrome OS is the same thing. It doesn’t matter what Google says and what bloggers think. There is only one way Google is working towards:

- Making full Chrome browser work on ARM embedded laptops even better than on x86 based laptops.

Now, you might know me as the contiunous x86 basher, I kind of am. But what I believe Google wants is more competition in both hardware and software space for PCs and laptops. This is what Google OS is all about.

The reasons Google might caution Google OS on ARM fans to wait for are a few technological breakthroughs which Google might need before the worldwide availability of perfect $100 Google laptops can happen:

1. ARM Cortex A8 needs to be fast enough for a full browser. If it’s not, then Google needs to wait for broad availability of ARM Cortex A9 starting early next year.

2. Google and the whole ARM community needs to optimize browsers, flash, HTML5 features on DSP and GPU cores of laptops, especially ARM laptops, so that $100 laptops can run a FULL browser and cloud computing experience. Nvidia, Qualcomm, Freescale, Texas Instruments were promising hardware acceleration for the browser, Flash and HTML5 at Computex, but they didn’t really show it yet. I believe they can make it work as a 2003 X86 based browser (something like a 512MB RAM or less system), though that may not be enough for the full mass market to adopt the first version, thus Google might prefer to wait for full launch for it to work better than 2009 x86 browsers.

3. Google wants better connectivity. Google is strongly hoping to start implementing White Spaces worldwide as soon as possible, this will enable free unlimited wireless Internet for all (and destroy all ISPs and telcos in the process). Optimized Connected standby features for ARM devices might only really start working perfectly early next year. First generation ARM Google OS laptops might not have LED lights that turn on instantly on incoming emails, feeds, pings, IMs, VOIP calls and other such crucial presence and social networking web apps which Google needs on the Google laptops for it to really feel like revolutionary products compared to the established systems.

4. Political aspects of this might start being put into places early next year as well such as real competition on HSDPA connectivity, maximum prices of $20 per month pre-paid data-only plans for most of the world and no more contract-plans and other voice and SMS plans forced onto consumers by monopolistic telcos. Also political decision on net neutrality, white spaces, sustainable energy consumption of consumer electronics and servers and crucial for Google to succeed on this global cloud computing plan.

I see it as inevitable, that Google will create Google OS, a super tiny embedded Linux open source OS less than 50 Megabytes for the whole highly optimized OS, and that in a couple of months we will start seeing it ship on $150 ARM based laptops with all types of screen sizes (large screens and keyboards aren’t much more expensive than small ones, consider $50 upgrade for 15″ and full keyboard instead of 10″ and tiny netbook keyboard).

Those $150 Google laptops will be running ARM chips by half a dozen competing ARM processor manufacturers and manufactured by all the major laptop manufacturers in the world. Effectively putting out of business all of Microsoft, Intel and Apple. Together with most of Silicon Valley. That is for the better. For the first time billions more people will have access to this technology very quickly and we will all for the first time really find amazing new ways to use the technology.

As for technical details on Native versus Cloud apps. I believe natively you will have everything needed for a full computing experience. Basically it’s not just the browser, it’s not just flash support, it’s not just HTML5 including native code plugins for the browser and 3D in the browser, it’s like providing you the hypervisors, user interface APIs, clever caching and seamless interface optimizations, which will enable you to not only have a full 2009 x86 style computing experience, it will plug you into the full cloud, in fact giving you infinately more computing power for all the most processor intensive tasks that the biggest professionals would want to use. You can definitely encode videos using grid server encoding, I have been doing that for over 2 years for all my HD video encoding needs, just have a fast enough upload to upload your source files from your camcorders. Google Gears type database and web application caching not only lets you do things while offline, it can turn all web applications into feeling exactly like native applications, they respond instantly without having to wait for any online service to stream the user interfaces back at you. The user interfaces will be locally cached on the machine, only processed data is streamed from the cloud, and clever pre-loading algorithms mostly will not make you feel any difference than processing everything using a local X86 processor. In fact, things will feel much faster cause you will be able to have the power of an unlimited amount of cloud servers to render, process and encode any of your media intensive tasks.

Without the permission from Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, I hope he wouldn’t mind, I am here posting the email conversation that I had with him back in September 2007 over email:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet)
Date: Sun, Sep 16, 2007 at 4:14 PM
Subject: Re:(Case 7134) Concerts are not enough income for artists
To: Charbax

Hi,

sorry for the delay in responding.

Yes, I know about flatrate propositions. I think they are terrible.

The reason is that copyrights rest on three things being static:
1) what is PUBLIC (commercial) vs. PRIVATE (noncommercial) distribution;
2) what is AN CREATOR vs. what is A LISTENER; and
3) what is A MANIFESTATION vs. what is AN IDEA.

The first assumption has been evaporated, so some are trying to lick the wounds of the broken system by proposing that the culture-producing elite be compensated by what amounts to a tax.

The problems with this are many. First, nobody has managed to explained the obvious - WHO shall be compensated FOR WHAT, and WHY. No losses have been proven to artists, only to distributors which aren’t needed anymore.

Second, if you assume that there is damage, how the collected tax shall be distributed. I strongly disagree that there is any fair way of measuring this: when blank media (cassette) levies were introduced in the 70s, the measuring came from what was being played on radio. This does not work any more. Any measuring system that involves money WILL be gamed, and any institutionalized measuring system will quickly be technically obsoleted by new p2p technologies.

Third, even if there is loss to the existing system, and there is a fair way of distributing money, why would it be in society’s interest to do so? Everybody wants more money for less work; artists are by no means alone in this aspiration, but it’s usually against society’s interest to grant that wish. This proposal would amount to taxing and hindering a new and more efficient technology in order to subsidize and institutionalize a much less efficient one. It makes absolutely no sense from a macroeconomic point of view.

Fourth and most importantly, the proposal assumes the model of small culture-producing elite that distributes culture top-down to the masses. This is no longer true; in the words of Larry Lessig, we have gone from a “read-only culture” to a “read-write culture” where everybody partakes, shares, remixes, shares again, and where somebody’s work becomes the next person’s idea. This total shift collapses the next two fundaments of copyright. There is no division of creator vs. fan anymore; everybody is a creator. There is no division of manifestation vs. idea anymore; a manifestation becomes an idea as soon it is released.

None of the three assumptions that make copyright possible are true anymore.

Cheers,
Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet)

—–Original Message—–
From: Charbax
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2007 04:52:47 +0200
To: Rick Falkvinge
Subject: Concerts are not enough income for artists

>I just saw your cool video presentation at Google.
>
>Have you seen the french Global Licence proposition. It’d be a 10€ tax that
>would fund all artists based on popularity and quality of their creations
>and performances. (15 million french Internet users x 10€ per month =
>1.8billion euros per year for artists if this tax was limited to only
>people
>using the Internet, or if it’s a global free culture tax on all citizen then
>it would be 60 million french people x average of 10€ from taxes per month
>would be = 7.2 billion euros per year, much more money than what artists are
>paid today in France)
>
>I think a lot of artists want to earn money for their creations and the
>industry of arranging concerts is so archaic, maybe even more archaic than
>the copyright industry (I’m not saying meeting people in real life is not
>cool, the way it’s currently managed is a mess, we’d need last.fm google
>maps blogs forums to make it better). As for selling band t-shirts is also
>kind of archaic since people want to download the PDF and print the T-shirts
>themselves.
>
>Monitoring popularity and quality of all music, movies, pictures, software
>even text I think is possible by simply using the computers and the Internet
>for what they are for, counting usage, monitoring use, rating and more Web
>2.0 usage without ever having to remove people rights to privacy as the
>usage monitoring can simply happen on a voluntary percentage of all users
>which provide good enough popularity and qualitative statistics.
>
>–
>Charbax,
>Nicolas Charbonnier
>

To which I replied:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Charbax
Date: Sun, Sep 16, 2007 at 7:30 PM
Subject: Re: (Case 7134) Concerts are not enough income for artists
To: “Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet)”

Thanks a lot for your reply!

> No losses have been proven to artists, only to distributors which aren’t needed anymore.

Well I think the loss to artists has been the culture and copyright industry until today. It has never worked for artists. I want a system that works much better for artists, and I don’t think telling them they can earn money from concerts and selling T-shirts is going to improve the artists situation.

> how the collected tax shall be distributed. I strongly disagree that there is any fair way of measuring this (…) Any measuring system that involves money WILL be gamed

I believe the Internet and computers provide the perfect tool for measuring this. We just need a good software and a neutral government doing the measurments. It’s like saying neutral website statistics aren’t possible, well I do think it would be possible, just install toolbars such as the Google Toolbar, but instead have it be something like the Last.fm audioscrobbler (which people will install voluntarilly) and have a neutral entity such as the government or the European Union check every users identity and control each users statistics against automation and unusual behaviour, so I think people who will try to game the system can easilly be detected like this.

And also add to that something like Razorback to measure activity on p2p networks, have the state host the Trackers and have every user connecting to the Tracker be identifiable through this same voluntary Last.fm/google Toolbar kind of approach. Where users are checked for their identity only in the purpose of measuring popularity of files and never to be used for any other purpose (such as invading peoples privacy, or using the collected data in a court against the user)

> This proposal would amount to taxing and hindering a new and more efficient technology in order to subsidize and institutionalize a much less efficient one.

I am not exactly following you on that point. Is there anything new and more efficient then p2p filesharing and legalized HTTP  streaming and downloads?

Today people are taxed so the government can maintain museums and pay artists in art schools and artists that do exhibitions, public performances, movies, music, everything already somewhat is partially paid for through taxes. I just suggest there should be more weight on the tax-supported art then to leave it at being a commercial activity paid for by centralised investors that take away the rights and the freedom from the artists so that they can make more money.

> There is no division of creator vs. fan anymore; everybody is a creator. There is no division of manifestation vs. idea anymore; a manifestation becomes an idea as soon it is released.

So are you saying there is no need to pay the talented artists so that they can make a living spending their whole time making this art?

I am suggesting many more artists should be able to make a living then today where only a few top artists can make a living and where most of the cultural industries revenue is never even touched by artists.

I’m just suggesting a reorganisation of that revenue and a large expansion of that cultural revenue. I think the artists deserve a much larger revenue than they have today. So to me 5€ per month average per citizen is just a start amount to show how huge this tax would actually mean, 5€ per citizen would expand the global artists revenue by many times compared to what it is today, but that amount could easilly grow when people will realise how much good it brings to be able to support so many new artists, many more then have ever been able to make a living out of their work, ideas and performances.

Also, I think it is certainly possible now much more then ever to find out which person was the initial creator, the artist that initially got an original idea. With digital and analog fingerprinting technology, much more then ever, now we can have a fair means of letting everyone be creative and share their ideas not being afraid of their ideas being robbed and having the knowledge that they could get paid if their idea turns out to be original, useful to the society and appreciated by many people.

Just as with the patent system, the copyright system needs to be brought into the 21st century, and we need to use the computers and the internet to administrate intellectual propriety much better and allow for a free flowing sharing of ideas without forgetting who is the originator of ideas and who have the most talents, thus enabling and integrating many more creators then ever.

I still have the very same opinion on this flatrate culture tax proposition, the same opinion I have had probably back since 2005 or before that. We need an EU wide flatrate for all culture on the Internet. That tax should be levied at the ISP level or even better, it should simply be implemented on all EU citizen (based on each EU citizen’s income levels).

I certainly hope that Rick Falkvinge in Sweden has changed his opinion on this proposition since he replied my email in September 2007 with such dissapointing quote “I know about flatrate propositions. I think they are terrible.”

He then goes on to argue that there are no more artists, that there shouldn’t be a “culture-producing elite be compensated by what amounts to a tax.”

I think he is wrong on thinking that this tax would only have to go to any kind of elite. The whole point of the flatrate culture tax would be to monetize all cultural outputs on the Internet by all Internet users in a totally transparent and equal way!

An example of this might be, if you write a blog post and 500 people read it, you might earn somewhere between 50 cents and 50€ in culture tax based on how much readers liked your text and how much a share it constitutes of those readers usage of culture on the Internet. If you upload a video from your mobile phone to Youtube and 50 thousand people watch it, the culture tax might pay you somewhere around 500€ on top of whatever income you might get from Youtube displaying advertising. Again all based on how much culture is consumed overall by all users, based on how much people like your video (registered by user ratings), based on how original your video is (measured through usage statistics), based on how long time people spend on your video, based on how many people remixed your video and more stuff like that.

Without the implementation of a culture tax on a European level or on a Country level, I don’t think that any of the Pirate Party’s political agenda points will be considered by any other large amount of parlamentarians.

Copying is now free, uncontrollable and unlimited.

Copyright should be replaced by the author and artists basic right to get paid for their work.

The payment should happen through a collective licence fee that all households should pay. Approximately £5 per month will bring us a large way there.

The Government needs to then guarantee all authors and artists that the collected money is distributed fairly and directly to artists and authors. This will be based on very precise statistics on file sharing, on independent statistics made at file download and streaming portals (independent statistics at Youtube, Flickr, Google Books, Last.fm and at more such sites). Those statistics will also be made by hundreds of thousands of volunteer Internet users who will have installed Last.fm type of scrobling software which monitors the number of playbacks of music, video, even of text in the browser and reports that to the central statistics systems.

The Government will have responsabillity to make sure that all works of art, all articles, all texts, photos everything is catalogued and even backed up by the state as a means to safeguard a copy of everything as it being the national cultural heritage. Based on this database, digital and analog fingerprints are generated on all works. And thus every single use of these works of art can be identified and the artist or author can be compensated.

We need to admit that the issue here is to remove the established music labels, movie studios and publishor’s grip on the cultural industry revenues. We need to think about the artists and the authors and not about the intermediaries. We need to admit that these last 10 years have been a struggle by the old established majors to hold on to their multi billion pound yearly revenues. We need to recognize that the Internet is here to remove all intermediaries in the cultural industries. The faster we as a society admit it, the sooner cultural expansion will flourish on the Internet leading to much better arts and much better culture in general.

I have been saying this since 2006 and before: http://charbax.com/2007/12/19/studios-know-they-are-going-to-be-toast-on-the-internet/

I posted this as a comment at http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/311/CommentKey:287082

- Obama should call Google up and they arrange for a basic subscription fee that gives access to all digitized books, in and out of copyright. With opt-out option for all rights holders. That basic subscription fee may be around $5 per month. Access to all the books would be without DRM, the rights holders can if they insist opt to use DRM, but by default all books should be without.

- Later Obama and Google should figure out to pay writers though taxes. If everyone pays an average of $5 per month, we would have enough mone not only to pay all writers, bloggers, journalists, there would be enough money right there for paing for all music, movies and TV productions. This would set a whole new opening of the art creation process, removing all the commercial aspects of it. Giving control back to the artist.

- Artists should get paid by popularity and quality of their works. Measures quite simply using server statistics, file playback logs (voluntary last.fm scrobbler like plugins installed everywhere) and using a ratings system (Love/Block, just like Last.fm).

What needs to happen as soon as possible. Google needs to release a kind of Android platform for E-Ink devices. We need a $100 pocketable E-Ink ebook reader hardware available worldwide as soon as possible. With built-in HSDPA, WiFi, 700mhz free wireless broadband. With wacom or other touchscreen technology for easy navigation and for note taking. Including collaborative note taking and commenting for all texts.

Although the number of registered users of http://barackobama.com is impressive, their multi-user blogging portal at http://my.barackobama.com is cool. I wonder how many of those hundreds of thousands of blog posts that were actually read or how much those user-generated blog posts actually mattered.

As far as I understand it, the way Barack Obama’s campaign had the worlds best usage so far of the Internet in a campaign (second best could be Ségolène Royal’s lost french presidential campaign), has been especially to collect money in the form of millions of small donations. And to do the online organizing of getting out the vote efforts in the form of getting millions of supporters to personally call voters (which is better then robocalls), knock on their doors, do meet-ups, know about local events and stuff like that. Also the usual most effective way to communicate with supporters has been newsletters.

Putting some wiki, chat or user-generated blogging type blog comments on http://change.gov I think may be more of a gimmick then really useful and powerful. Live webcasts from the White House would probably be an awesome highlight and a worlds first. Already right there, they could provide hundreds of interesting hours from those meetings, those deliberations, commities, speeches, diplomatic meetings and all that.

I think they need to create an online congress where every citizen is a representative, can vote on all ideas, can suggest ideas, can amend ideas, express themselves in meaningful ways. Then all this needs to be done using clever algorithms to promote the good ideas automatically using clever new wisdom of the crowds algorithms. On the Internet, one vote shouldn’t count as one vote, votes should count proportionally with the influence and activity each verified user has on the rest of the community. This way, an algorithm can automatically filter out the experts and the representatives.

Here is what I think we should do:

1. Nationalize all banks progressively. Start with taking major equity, and move progressively towards all major banks being controlled by the state.

2. Introduce a new worldwide currency. This currency should be digital only, it should have a bunch of guidelines and should be managed in total transparancy. No financial speculation should be allowed. It should be the currency to serve humanity, to serve society. There should be very specific rules for people to be able to exchange their old currencies to this new worldwide currency. Eventually, all developped and emerging countries should all use that same currency.

3. Amend the worldwide human rights to include the right for food, the right for global healthcare and the right for global education. Those problems can be fixed and should be fixed very quickly using basic computerised models to effecively target all the food, healthcare and education to the places in the whole world that need it.

4. All countries should agree immediately to stop all pollution. Access to the new worldwide currency also requires full protection of the environment.