You're hugely misconstruing the proportions and making a false analogy. Here's a better one for you:

What's better? You have 15,000 literate people but 500 of them can afford to publish a book... or you have 14,500 literate people, and all of them can publish their own pamphlets?

What people fail to understand is that the Internet isn't revolutionary as a means of receiving content, but as a means of generating content. Placing restrictions on who can distribute content through the internet (IE, charging content providers for the people who use the content, instead of the other way around) would take away the Internet's liberating, revolutionary, printing-press-like quality. And I'd rather have a printing press and a million people who can read, than handwriting and two million literate people. And most importantly, how many people currently in the US can afford to have an internet connection? How many can afford broadband? Technology will make the prices drop even further, regardless of what the telcos say or do. Taking away the ability to publish and would make the internet into Just Another Media, just another playground of corporations where you have five or six different options which all look and sound the same.

Cable TV is having 200 channels and nothing to watch. I do not want the Internet to turn into that.

Exactly. The whole reason I use a ton of internet and barely any TV or radio or newspaper is because there's so much more content. Restrict that, and whether or not I can afford it, I won't use it.

Currently, because of certain debates I'm having with people, I'm finding reliance on the internet for information to be quite scary.

I work at a library. 90% of my reference work is easily done via Google and Wikipedia, and done more quickly and just as accurately as it would be by looking up and pulling a book from the stacks.

Be thankfull then that the issues your looking up are being changed by people every 15 minutes.

Yes, I'm sure things like "What's next in this series?" are constantly changing because people just love to lie to complete strangers. Or that the author's official website is always wrong. People need to stop being so damn paranoid about information. If it's vital, no, I won't trust the internet. If it's just someone who's curious about something, it's a good resource.

Well, I was reading this guy's blog, and one of the people made a comment and directed a link to a wiki site, to show that the blog author was wrong.

The blog author and the person making the comment, went back and forthing changing the meaning of "ad absurdem" from being what it really means, to meaning, breaking down an argument into tiny parts.

I wouldn't trust a random wiki, more than likely, unless I confirmed the information elsewhere. Wikipedia is a bit more upscale.

In general, though, people like to be right. If you have good information, people come back, and you get popular, and so on. If it's known your information is crap, you fade away into nothing. There's no incentive to lie, unless you're trying to push an agenda, which is, most times, easy enough to spot.

Wikipedia works because it takes an immensely dumb approach to things: brute force. There's just way too much people moving around it; whenever someone sees something that is obviously vandalism, he'll revert it to a previous version just to see the information himself. Any kind of thing like this just gets erradicated much faster than someone vandalizing Wikipedia can keep up with.

Just always remember the basic rule of wikipedia: the more obscure and less contentious the article, the more accurate it will be. Never look up ESP or the Holocaust on wikipedia. On the other hand, if you need a neat summary of the Esopus Wars, coverage on Norman Sicily short of reading Kingdom in the Sun, or a quick run-through of the life of Chandragupta Maurya, it's excellent.

British parliament is so much cooler than our congress. Whenever they show it on C-SPAN I watch it - they actually have a sense of humour! Not humor! HUMOUR!

EDIT: I saw parliament mentioned on the first page. So, I guess this is on topic?

Well, Senate is boring. But sometimes all the hotheads down in the House of Representatives/Federal Hardliner Reserve get pretty worked up, and it can be fun to watch.

Want real fun? Work as a page for a congressional body. I've yet to meet a legislator who doesn't like popcorn, and lots of them tip good for going to get them food during the days when they're just approving things already hammered in committee. If business is slow, get some popcorn out of your own money, salt it heavily, and pass it around for free. Smile when they ask for drinks a minute later.

Constitutional monarchy ftw.