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There's a line of logic -- rural wisdom, I suppose -- I've heard though most of my life that goes kind of like this (in this case regarding deciminalization of certain recreational drugs): The drug trade is run by criminals who get all their ill gotten gains tax free and outside the bounds of any kind of regulation [ed. which, I suppose sort of defines the "criminal" portion of the description]. Instead of using good money to fight the war on drugs against an enemy that has a lot of money and power, legalize their business. Then it can be regulated, they'll have to submit to taxation (and an immediate decrease in their wealth by some 50%), and the fun will be gone. Mostly this conversation would centre on the taxation aspects and the regulation. Force compliance with quality levels, advertising forms, etc. brings the whole thing into the open where it can be fought in an area where civilized society's assets and strengths are more potent. Similar lines of thought would underlie discussions about prostitution and other social challenges.
So what? Well, I see this announcement (Microsoft Aims Avalanche At BitTorrent) that Microsoft is "enhancing" the peer-to-peer process of BitTorrent with its own "Avalanche" system as a step in that direction. A snip from the piece:
. . . developers in the UK have been working on Microsoft's version of the fast file sharing system known as BitTorrent. Those R&D people say they can make it easier to share large data files, such as movies, television programs, and software packages like the forthcoming Longhorn operating system.Posted by Grayson at June 20, 2005 07:42 AM