Off Forum: Trillian

[Puke]

sorry kids, we live in a socialist empire. capitalism is all well and good, but as with all idealist societies, it has its limits. it just isnt practical to let capitalism to play out to all of its amoral ends, and this is one of the places where its going to stop.

maybe IM services will stay private for a while, but inside 5 years they will all be wide open. sure, everyone has the right to run their own service. but the only reason that anyone wants to run an IM service is (1) for the advertisement money and (2) to collect demographic information from which to send you better advertisements.

the public, however, has proven far too stupid to simply pick the best service and run with it. this is where capitalism is breaking down. the presence of numerous closed networks is creating an impedance to public communications, and is generally a pain in the *** for anyone trying to use it. is that the network owners fault? maybe, but thats insignificant by now. whither they caused it or not, they have demonstrated that they dont want to fix it, so its going to leave their hands.

The PSTN was socialized (or nationalized, if you like the stronger rhetoric) because it was vital to communications. before that, railroads were co-opted by the government because the railroad barons were assing-up the transporation system and it had to be brought back under control.

now, while it may be going out on a limb to say that its vital for the nations (sorry if this message is excluding all you other blokes in the other parts of the world) communications for a bunch of closet homosexuals to get on the instant messanger service and pretend to be 13 year old girls in order to seduce 16 year old boys, its one of those issues that is currently popular for the media and pop culture to represent as significant. so you can bet that the corporations are going to loose control of who gets to use instant messenger services.

knowing the internet though, someone somewhere will create their own IM servers to host a free network that everyone will eventually use, or someone will develop some kind of peer-to-peer distributed alternative. of course, the pay off for developing or hosting it will be to silently log everyones sex-talk and collect demographic info to sell you better porn and low-interest-home-loans, but most people will probably be happily oblivious to that.

i guess the bottom line is that SURE, AOL has their legal rights. but common sense dictates that the nature of the service will be changeing, because the only common consensus is that its unuseable as it stands. if AOL does not make it change, they will lose out when someone else changes it for them. and if it does not happen in the private sector, the government will eventually get around to doing it themselves.