I applaud Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin for their principles and their courage in standing up to Wall St. in setting their IPO terms. There will be no feeding of IPO shares to "special friends" who flip them for an instant profit. There will be no games played with analysts in providing guidance about quarterly earnings.

It's too bad it took nothing less than the leverage of these presumptive billionaires to make this happen. This is the only way Wall St. would listen.
I truly hope they are able to continue to manage the company for innovation in the face of inevitably mounting financial and competitive pressures.

What I hope even more is that their bold moves will stimulate a whole series of debates about the ways in which venture capital and Wall St. do and don't work to promote the development of technology, like Google's, which genuinely serves people's needs.

Over a decade ago, I started to call attention to the importance of the Internet as a political force. In the last year, the Internet has begun to show what it can do.

Last week, an extraordinary election was held in Korea. The Uri, or Our party, barely two years old, decisively took over the National Assembly. It was done using the Net. It is no accident that the political coming-of-age of the Net came about in Korea where almost 70% of its households are broadband connected. Starting as a social movement organized through the Net, the new Uri party became a political phenomena.

In December 2002, the Uri party used the Net to go around Korea's traditional political structures and elect Roh Moo-hyun President. Korea's national politics have traditionally been regionally based. However, using the Net, the Uri put together a new political coalition based not on geography, but age, bringing together those under 30. Paradoxically, the Uri also used the Net to involve citizens at local face to face meetings.

The Net was used to begin to break the overwhelming political influence of Korea's giant corporate conglomerates, the chaebols, who funded (both legally and illegitimately) much of Korea's politics. The Uri use the Net to help fund their campaign with tens of thousands of small contributions.

Just as importantly, the Net allowed the Uri to go around Korea's established status quo political media. One Net news organization, Ohmynews, is helping redefine journalism. Founded only four years ago, the online news service can gets as many as 20 million hits a day in a country of 40 million. While Ohmynews has 40 full time employees, it uses over 23,000 "citizen reporters," and editorial policy is voted on by their readership.

Thursday's election showed the new politics of the Net are no fluke. A month ago Korea's old political establishment still controlled the national legislature and impeached President Roh. Advancing the new Net politics, the Uri party tripled their seats in the legislature, giving the Uri a 150 to 50 seat advantage, which will most likely lead to the overturn of Roh's impeachment.

It is not just in Korea that the Net has begun to test its political legs. Here in the United States we have also seen the Net tentatively begin to walk.

In the last several years, the most influential new political organization has been Moveon.org, totally organized through the Net. Last year, we witnessed the accomplishments of the Dean presidential campaign. Though unsuccessful in electing its candidate, the campaign revolutionized election financing and began creating and leveraging new political associations and tools, for example their use of Meetup.com.

We have begun to see the promise of the Net many of us hoped for in the early 1990's. In that time important lessons have been learned. Most critically, we now understand technology alone determines no outcomes. It is a function of how people use and shape it. The Net has begun to be used for democratic revitalization because the decentralized architecture created by its founders favorably enables a democratic peer to peer politics.
Yet, we are all well aware that large forces, particularly in the corporate sector, are trying to change and reconfigure the Net's architecture. For the latest on this, see Larry Lessig's excellent Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and control Creativity.

We also see there were important issues that drove the success of Net politics. The Dean campaign ignited a widespread concern about the failure of many of our political and government processes leading into the Iraq war. In Korea, younger generations were in part moved by the unfair advantages in both politics and the economy gained by entrenched interests. They felt threatened by an archaic foreign policy that dwells in the past and seems overly reliant on the threat of military force and violence. Neither issues is foreign to the American public.

For someone who looked ahead with optimism over a decade ago on the Net's role in revitalizing our democracy and helping create a more peaceful global community, the Net's first political steps are a very hopeful contrast in a world in which those prospects seem obscured in deepening shadows. The question is where do we go next?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an Internet civil liberties nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, is seeking a fulltime technical director to start immediately and work out of EFF's San Francisco (Mission District) office. This person will be responsible for managing four members of EFF's technical staff and their various projects... Details on their web site.

At the recent PyCon , I was asked the following question. If you had a time machine and could change any one thing about Python what would it be? I didn't feel I had the expertise to answer, but I promised I'd ask the OSAF developers and post in my blog.

There were a number of suggestions having to do with improving the performance and having a better development environment, but having a secure sandbox as a fundamental part of the language seemed to be the favorite.

Ted Leung of OSAF conducted a programming sprint at PyCon which brought us face-to-face with some developers for four days. Very valuable. See Ted’s entries on PyCon and the sprint here.

SubEthaEdit notes (real-time collaborative editing) on my keynote are here.