HOW TO TACKLE NETARCHICAL DOMINATION OF THE NETWORKS .. I've sent the below to a brazilian contact who asked me what I thought of the Indie Phone strategy of arial balkan, you may find the answer on the strategy of the p2p-foundation of interest here it is: "in my vision, there are 3 main ways to tackle this domination, and they should all be tried, as we don't really know what will work: * the first is what Balkan is doing, to create independent technologies, combined with a movement ... the problem is: it has been tried for at least a decade, but even if the tech works, adoption is a huge problem , and finds it hard to compete with the established platform monopolies and their network effects .. we are following these attempts here: http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Infrastructure * the second is to fight the beast from within as it where, I am thinking here of the facebook user union and other attempts .. think of it as 'digital consumers unions' .. it is akin to workers having to work for companies to survive and forming unions to fight for their interests .. here also, success has been very very limited, and the reason is indeed that free is very seductive, and most users actually agree with the bargain .. at the most, it will some day have the success of the consumers associations, just part of the overall system of checks and balances, but not a major transforming power so this is why I think we need more structural solutions and this is what the p2p-f is aligned with, and that is: create a integrated counter-economy, so not just alt.tech, but really an alt.economy for example, see http://p2pfoundation.net/Why_We_Need_a_New_Kind_of_Open_Cooperativism_for_th... and http://p2pfoundation.net/From_the_Communism_of_Capital_to_a_Capital_for_the_... this is also the background of our cooperation with the catalan integral cooperative, see http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/towards-a-first-stateless-commons-transition-p... (will be published later today on our blog) we are working for convergence between the already existing alternative economic forms, and the open forms of peer production, owned by the peer producers themselves and it is only on top of that, that we will create services like the ones proposed by Balkan, so the strategies are related, but they are socio-centric rather than techno-centric," -- *Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..* P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/