4 ms·

Sometimes I think of the internet like a new country we've discovered. When we landed there, there was no infrastructure - no roads or telephone networks. How

Sometimes I think of the internet like a new country we've discovered. When we landed there, there was no infrastructure - no roads or telephone networks. How do we govern the internet? For all our bluster about loving democracy, the internet is essentially a feudal system. A few large entities have stepped up to build needed infrastructure. In exchange, they own everything. You don't rent your facebook page, your gmail address or your iCloud account. Renters have rights. If AI enforcers run by the the big tech companies don't like you, they'll just banish you from their land forever. (And delete all your stuff in the process). You have no rights and no representation. Just like in medieval times, this is seen as totally normal. Facebook and Google pay for all of this by tracking us everywhere we go and selling our data to advertisers. Its like if every road outside your house was owned by a company, and when you walk out the front door cameras track your every move so they can show you personalized ads. Apple pays for it all by massively taxing every transaction in their store, banning competition and making it so everything you buy inside their ecosystem won't work anywhere else. I never know quite what to say when people defend the right of companies to shamelessly claim sovereignty over their billions of users. I mean, its not exactly the same as totalitarianism because you can move to a different tech platform if you want. Well sort of - have to leave your data, communities, apps and devices behind when you leave. And anyway, benevolent dictators work great in small companies and communities. My problem with Facebook is that it has nearly 3 billion monthly active users. Thats not a team. Thats bigger than any country. Its an empire. It even has a king! If I don't like how my city is run, I can vote in my local elections. Where is the ballet box for our tech platforms? It took humanity thousands of years to figure out that democratic systems work better than feudal systems. I really hope we can make that leap faster this time. Our civilization might depend on it.

shadowgovt 4y ago
Reasoning from real estate to describe the Internet is a fraught analogy. When "we landed there," the Internet didn't exist; it wasn't built yet. It's not finite carve-able territory like a continent; it's machines, the interconnections between them, and the data accessible on them. And all of those things were always owned by someone (even if the data wasn't under copyright, someone was paying for the electrons to represent and transmit it). Everything about access to the network has grown as a peer-and-guest arrangement between private owners or government entities (starting from the original systems where most people connected via academia or the government and being fired from your government position or exited from your university cut your access to your email account and other online resources). In this modern era, very few are peers and most are guests, and yes, the ownership situation reflects that. Adjusting that ownership situation by fiat or force is a fraught enterprise. Let's imagine someone tries to nationalize Internet infrastructure that is currently privately-owned and establish a democratic structure for managing it. What government do we trust to do that? Part of the allure of the Internet was how hard it was for governments to control it; do we willingly hand them that power? All of that having been said, I agree with you that tension is there between the origins of the Internet and the modern desire for self-actualization and personal data rights in the use of the Internet. I'm somewhat excited about projects like Mastodon that seem to be trying to decrease the complexity of becoming a peer. I can imagine someone starting a democratically-run service provider, perhaps off the credit union model, to provide more direct ownership to their userbase. Of course, it would have to compete in the corporate world alongside other companies, and there is, perhaps, a reason that the corporate world so closely resembles medieval fiefdoms almost uniformly. You noted "It took humanity thousands of years to figure out that democratic systems work better than feudal systems;" I'd offer the counterpoint that the feudal system describes most corporate structures pretty correctly. But maybe that's just accident of history and there's no particular reason that board-owned or single-owned companies dominate the landscape relative to co-ops. It'd be a fun experiment to watch someone try to provide a better alternative as a service provider (in the connection, social networking, data hosting, or cloud infra spaces).

shadowgovt 4y ago

Reasoning from real estate to describe the Internet is a fraught analogy. When "we landed there," the Internet didn't exist; it wasn't built yet. It's not finite carve-able territory like a continent; it's machines, the interconnections between them, and the data accessible on them. And all of those things were always owned by someone (even if the data wasn't under copyright, someone was paying for the electrons to represent and transmit it). Everything about access to the network has grown as a peer-and-guest arrangement between private owners or government entities (starting from the original systems where most people connected via academia or the government and being fired from your government position or exited from your university cut your access to your email account and other online resources). In this modern era, very few are peers and most are guests, and yes, the ownership situation reflects that. Adjusting that ownership situation by fiat or force is a fraught enterprise. Let's imagine someone tries to nationalize Internet infrastructure that is currently privately-owned and establish a democratic structure for managing it. What government do we trust to do that? Part of the allure of the Internet was how hard it was for governments to control it; do we willingly hand them that power? All of that having been said, I agree with you that tension is there between the origins of the Internet and the modern desire for self-actualization and personal data rights in the use of the Internet. I'm somewhat excited about projects like Mastodon that seem to be trying to decrease the complexity of becoming a peer. I can imagine someone starting a democratically-run service provider, perhaps off the credit union model, to provide more direct ownership to their userbase. Of course, it would have to compete in the corporate world alongside other companies, and there is, perhaps, a reason that the corporate world so closely resembles medieval fiefdoms almost uniformly. You noted "It took humanity thousands of years to figure out that democratic systems work better than feudal systems;" I'd offer the counterpoint that the feudal system describes most corporate structures pretty correctly. But maybe that's just accident of history and there's no particular reason that board-owned or single-owned companies dominate the landscape relative to co-ops. It'd be a fun experiment to watch someone try to provide a better alternative as a service provider (in the connection, social networking, data hosting, or cloud infra spaces).