EvilEyeFleegle
Dogpatch USA
An interesting article on the erosion of the idea of an internet free of govt. regulation:
The End of Cyberspace
"This is what it looks like to watch a paradigm fall apart. Cyberspace was a way of thinking about the radical changes brought about by the internet. It gave internet companies, regular people, odd collectives, weird technologies, and other entities space to create something transnational, individualistic, largely unregulated, and free (as in speech and sometimes as in beer).
But over time, cyberspace became dominated by a few large companies. Governments realized their laws were being contravened every day. The model of a globally interconnected society that did not need regulation or the interference of bureaucrats simply did not work.
Servers are located in a place. Internet tubes run places. There is no absolute firewall between the corporations in a place and the government in a place—as Edward Snowden demonstrated, and as China shows. The radical shift toward individual liberty that seemed like such a sure thing to Google’s Schmidt or during Hillary Clinton’s “internet freedom” agenda did not materialize. The internet turned out to be the perfect place from which to launch attacks on democratic elections and electorates, whether the culprits were foreign governments or simply scammers. The supposed “home of Mind” was run through by trolls and bots. People were railroaded into a few platforms of enormous power, fed into enormous surveillance machines, mined for attention, guided by algorithms, all while they contributed to the radical inequality of the broader society."
The End of Cyberspace
"This is what it looks like to watch a paradigm fall apart. Cyberspace was a way of thinking about the radical changes brought about by the internet. It gave internet companies, regular people, odd collectives, weird technologies, and other entities space to create something transnational, individualistic, largely unregulated, and free (as in speech and sometimes as in beer).
But over time, cyberspace became dominated by a few large companies. Governments realized their laws were being contravened every day. The model of a globally interconnected society that did not need regulation or the interference of bureaucrats simply did not work.
Servers are located in a place. Internet tubes run places. There is no absolute firewall between the corporations in a place and the government in a place—as Edward Snowden demonstrated, and as China shows. The radical shift toward individual liberty that seemed like such a sure thing to Google’s Schmidt or during Hillary Clinton’s “internet freedom” agenda did not materialize. The internet turned out to be the perfect place from which to launch attacks on democratic elections and electorates, whether the culprits were foreign governments or simply scammers. The supposed “home of Mind” was run through by trolls and bots. People were railroaded into a few platforms of enormous power, fed into enormous surveillance machines, mined for attention, guided by algorithms, all while they contributed to the radical inequality of the broader society."
