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Obama’s Team Must Fight “Cultural Agoraphobia”

James Boyle

Almost precisely 17 years ago, a young British researcher from Cern, the European organization for nuclear research, gave a presentation in Texas on a technology that was to change society dramatically. That same month, the Cern newsletter announced it to the world: It was called the World Wide Web. My daughter doesn’t graduate from college until 2011 and even she is older than the Web, which is something I find hard to believe. A life without the Web is easy to remember and yet hard to recapture. It seems like such a natural part of our world, too “fixed” to have been such a recent arrival. But would we build it again today?

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This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."

We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.

The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.

That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.

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