I am old enough to have used NCSA Navigator and read the Manifesto for Cyberspace and all that net-hippy stuff (and believed it). Cyberspace in the 90s was wid

I am old enough to have used NCSA Navigator and read the Manifesto for Cyberspace and all that net-hippy stuff (and believed it). Cyberspace in the 90s was wide open prairie, a place to settle and built new cultures and civilizations. I was too young to realize that nothing starts from scratch; just like the pioneers that fled poverty and persecution to colonize the prairie, we built cyberspace on the culture we believed in: free market, free speech, growth above all. American libertarian in other words. The descendants of the French or Russian revolutions will happily tell you that that shit don't work. After you've settled that wide open prairie, you need to lay down rules and regulations, a polity. And what we (collectively) have found out that this ends up meaning well-regulated markets and well-regulated speech, enforced by democratically elected (and audited) authorities. Liberal democracies in other words, with bureaucracies and police and courts, not John Galt. So, 'no' to the TFA, we shouldn't restart Tech. We should evolve it, past the Pioneer stage into a proper polity and civilization. Regulate Big Tech, control it. We already have paradigms of what we consider appropriate: we can tell our friends whatever we want (free speech in private communication) but we cannot go on TV or on a newspaper and libel because those media have liability. Why should a tweet that 20 people read have the same restrictions as a tweet to 20M? why can't we pick reasonable rules that police the latter? escalated liability based on reach that Twitter (for example) would be liable for? Will that kill the margins of Twitter and YouTube and Facebook? absolutely, but so what? They are monopolies at a massive scale that our society is already dependent on, like we are on TV, or newspapers or the power grid. They can be fat and rich, just not more powerful than all news publishers in the history of humanity. Combined.