Dear Phillip,
I agree with you on much, but disagree on 2 statements.
1) Your reference to Putin and Trump has nothing to do with what we call
the Internet.
2) Your last paragraph is contradictory.
"Today it is not the 'centralization' of the Web that is the real issue,
it is the fact that a handful of individuals control the voting shares
in the companies that set the agenda through curation of the dominant
social media feeds. That is the power that must be challenged if the
Internet is going to fulfill its promise as a technology of freedom."
Centralization always rests on private interests that need
centralization to dominate.
Earlier you write:
"And the first and most important of those was local autonomy. So local
autonomy was not a gift, it was a necessary condition for success."
And this as part of the only proposal?
True to the laws of logic, this contradiction cannot be resolved,
because we are moving in different areas.
The "local autonomy" was postulated only by the few and had no influence
on the many, nor on those who determined its progress.
Today we are in a situation where we have to reconnect to this desired
"local autonomy" if we want a peaceful and free future. The language we
use to connect globally, here the IP protocol, is global. The
realization of transport and processing of data is local.
with thanks and kind regards, willi
Asuncion, Paraguay
Am 20.03.2022 um 16:15 schrieb Phillip Hallam-Baker:
The OP gets a lot of the history wrong. But I don't think the established
history is entirely correct either. It is a history given from a particular
point of view which is not the only relevant point of view.
The view from outside was never quite the same as the view from inside. And
the US version of how the Internet was won tends to sound rather too much
like white men bringing their benevolent gifts. The implication being that
if the Internet is a gift of the US of A, it is only right and proper that
the vision of the founders determine its future in perpetuity.
My view of what happened is rather different. Basically, the Internet
succeeded because it was the only technical proposal on the table that met
the necessary conditions for becoming a global network. And the first and
most important of those was local autonomy. So local autonomy was not a
gift, it was a necessary condition for success.
If we were to explore the counterfactual in which (D)ARPA did not fund
Internet development, that might have affected the timing but
AOL/CompuServe/MSN would have still faced the same fact that an open
communication system will grow faster than closed and no government was
going to allow a foreign company to establish a monopoly of email.
We are currently engaged in what some are starting to call 'The Great
Information War'. Had Putin's crew managed to succeed in their attempted
coup on 2021/6/1, Trump would have disbanded NATO before the invasion of
Ukraine. Fascism would have returned to Europe and likely have arrived in
the US as well.
The Internet was always at the center of the Great Information War. But it
wasn't Trump's tweets that reached a national audience, it was the
willingness of the establishment media to repeat them. And not just Fox
News, but CNN, the NYT and Washington Post.
Some people are asking how the Internet can be used to win the Great
Information War. But that is to miss the real point which is how we stop
the next fighting war breaking out.
How we got to where we are is relevant only insofar as it informs our
efforts to get to where we need to be.
Telling falsehoods is a limited technique for controlling public opinion.
In the 1920s the press barons discovered that they could control public
opinion by setting the agenda, by choosing what issues were news. The civil
rights movement finally succeeded 40 years later because it was able to
successfully challenge the ability of the press to set the agenda.
Today it is not the 'centralization' of the Web that is the real issue, it
is the fact that a handful of individuals control the voting shares in the
companies that set the agenda through curation of the dominant social media
feeds. That is the power that must be challenged if the Internet is going
to fulfill its promise as a technology of freedom.
