Via BoingBoing, I ran into a shocking quote from a recent speech by Stratton Sclavos, the CEO of Verisign:

We have to move the complexity back into the center of the network and remove it from the edge.

David Isenberg appropriately calls a Straw Poll: Stratton Sclavos: (a) cluelessly megalomaniacal or (b) tragically ignorant?.

Ross Mayfield, aghast, has comments about this as well: Decentralization Under Attack. (Good trackbacks and comments follow Ross' post too.)

(Ross also took these notes during Sclavos' speech, and Mitch Ratcliffe took these notes.)

From another shore, David Weinberger posts about Levy on the Death of the Internet, which is a reference to Steven Levy's Newsweek article, A Net of Control - Unthinkable: How the Internet could become a tool of corporate and government power, based on updates now in the works.

Both Ross and David link to John Walker's The Digital Imprimatur, which is mentioned in Levy's article. (Walker's piece is long—I recommend it based on what I have read so far, but I haven't read the whole thing yet.)

Sclavos and others and the government + media interests who see opportunity in locking-down the Internet, seem determined to re-architect the Internet into a medium compatible with scary broadcast media and/or telecom monopolies. (I know I am not saying much or much new, but I am so totally shocked by this stuff, that I can't seem to find words adequate to communicate the look on my face.)

OK, just sent some $$ to the EFF and I am going to re-read Isenberg's Rise of the Stupid Network and David and Doc Searls World of Ends for some positive inspiration.