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One thing I think worth highlighting is the opening sentence. It is true that the internet and the government have been conflicting in various ways from the get-go. In point 11 he talks about the differences between industry inside knowledge and government's framework for reasoning about tech lacking in several ways. I think there is also an interesting intersection of the public's framework for reasoning about both government and the internet that is finally starting to be a stress point. Only in the last few of years have we seen the general public starting to become aware of how much government (non)action in the internet space is a big deal.

Recent stories on the NSA, Snowden, Manning, etc, and the Arab Spring have really pushed the awareness of government actions in the internet into the general public awareness. I remember previous things like DMCA and ECTRA did not make a real blip on the general public's radar. More recently however, things like SOPA were heavily discussed outside of tech circles.

Public discourse is really a place we should make our industry insider status heard as much as to/within government, and now is the time it matters.

Amusingly, the inverse is also true: more political articles have been finding their way to HN lately, because suddenly general political discourse is extremely intertwined with internet policy and tech issues.



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