Huxleyed into the full Orwell

I usually blog about what I am doing, writing books, designing role-playing games, illustrating spaceships and what have you, but sometimes something big comes up, and I feel I have to add my voice. I was prompted to write this after reading the latest bunch of warnings from Cory Doctorow (in the Guardian).

The Internet has been a power for good. It is the Great Equalizer, according to the HuffPost. It is also a place where people providing idiosyncratic content can find enough interested consumers, the long tail, to pay their bills. For this to be true, however, the Internet needs to be open.

Unfortunately, there are forces who want to chop up the web, and give big entertainment the power to shut people it doesn't like out.

According to the article by Cory Doctorow...

Since 2013, web browser vendors and the World Wide Web Consortium have been working with Netflix, the cable industry, and the MPAA to create a standard to limit which browsers can display W3C-standardised data. It could mean goodbye to “just works” and hello again to “best viewed with”.

This is not a good thing.

To accompany my musings on this futuristic subject, I'm using a picture I painted of a flying car with a befuddled-looking driver at the joystick. It comes from a game I wrote called Cyber Fate, available from RPGDriveThru. Oops, it looks like I couldn't get through a single blog post without including a plug for one of my products.

It does have a connection though, because if a huge player like iTunes forces out the likes of RPGDriveThru, then small self-publishers are going to lose access to the market.