Henry Jenkins has a two-part interview with Heather Chaplin on these topics (both professors). Chaplin is an advocate for a National Public Lightpath. An excerpt:
[J] Your white paper opens with the provocative question, "what part of the Internet is going to be devoted to the public interest?" How would you answer that question?
[C] It's actually a really hard question to answer, based on what your notion of "in the public interest" is. I mean, NPR and PBS have presences on the Internet. And I suppose you could argue that there are probably millions of sites out there that serve the general public good. So, if I were to play devil's advocate against myself, I suppose I would argue that the very nature of the Internet - the anyone-can-publish idea - is in itself a public good. ¶ But here's the thing, I'm not really the libertarian type. I don't believe that things will necessarily just sort themselves out if left alone. When I talk about creating a piece of the Internet in the public interest, I'm really talking about both public ownership of the infrastructure and content created specifically to educate, enlighten and enrich in the interests of genuine literacy and civic engagement. …
Link: Confessions of an Aca-Fan. Part One. Part Two. --Dennis
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