Transcript here: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2014-03-12/future-world-wide-web/transcript
A choice section:
DAVE (11:25:04)
All right. I just wanted to know what you guys thought about the end of net neutrality and do you keep on comparing the internet to electricity? I was wondering if you were thinking that maybe it should be considered a utility?
PAGE (11:25:16)
Interesting. Dave, thanks for your call. Jaron Lanier, what do you think?
LANIER(11:25:21)
Yeah, net neutrality is a critical issue. What we're learning is that whoever can control the flow of information controls power and wealth, I mean, just to put it as bluntly as possible. There's a funny thing about big networks which is that you can control people statistically. So in other words, if you can control what the immediate options are in front of people and if you can optimize those to influence people, even though no individual person at any particular time is obliged to accept your influence, overall statistically you can still guide the population.
LANIER (11:25:57)
And that kind of ability to statistically micromanage people is the new kind of power. And it's the new kind of power that has to be controlled. So the net neutrality issue is in a way the most basic in raw form of that struggle for control. It's a term that was invented by our colleague Tim Wu. And the basic notion is that whoever controls the physical wire that gets the information to you might seek to control what flows over that wire. And letting them do that is probably a pretty bad idea.
LANIER (11:26:25)
I should point out though that it's only the first front in what we should consider as an ongoing series of struggles for that kind of control. It's just as true that somebody who controls your device, maybe a wearable or something, might also have too much influence and too much power. We have to be alert to this kind of unintended granting of excess power to anybody in the system. But for the moment, yes, we do have to worry about the people who own the wires getting too much control.