https://dustycloud.org/blog/what-happened-to-the-fight-for-the-internet/
“At the moment I am writing this, bad internet bills are being proposed across
the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK. They're using the usual tactics: they claim
they're fighting for kids or fighting security risks, but in general, that's
what surveillance and censorship bills have
always claimed.
But something feels different. There's so much happening at once, for one
thing, it feels like there's a massive coordinated attack on internet freedoms.
But it also feels like the wind is out of the sails of these fights, which is
alarming, because the stakes have never been higher. Who's coordinating all
these? What money is pushing it? Palantir? Heritage Foundation types? Large,
centralization-enthused orgs like Meta? All of the above? It's hard to tell.
But there's
certainly a lot of money flowing underfoot.
But it's not just the coordinated attack. The fight itself feels deflated, in
ways the fight for the internet hasn't been before. Sure, we have orgs like the
ACLU, the Open Rights Group, the EFF, Fight for the Future, the usual suspects
all fighting for the rights of the internet. And that's great.
But there's something else.
It feels like people are tired.
And it feels like the PR for locking things down has more acceptance publicly
than before.
This is dramatically different than in my formative days.
Net neutrality, SOPA... these battles for internet freedom had massive buy-in
across the internet. 2012's Wikipedia blackout was especially memorable. It
wasn't just the tech engineers of the world in that fight; family and friends
who had never thought about the technical underpinnings of the internet were
asking me questions, saying they were worried that we were going to lose our
digital rights and asking what could be done.
Now we are facing an
international swell of legal movements to age-gate and
thus surveil the entire internet, lock down operating systems and hardware in
the process, and generally crush the internet into an even more centralized
shape than it's already been going.
And so it's with great irony that I believe it is actually
because the
internet got so centralized that we are facing the greatest amount of
centralization and backdoor threats we've ever faced.
Because there's a difference between now and 2012. The internet feels a lot
less like an "our thing" than it used to.”
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
