They do what they have always done, gain control and shape it in their own interests, regardless of the cost to others. This is endemic to businesses itself. Business the the root cause of all market enshitification.
Corporations like Meta, Apple and Alphabet are closing off the internet. Governments are just woefully underpowered against these companies who make internet addiction their business.
See you guys in I2P.
Kind of interesting to read something that so clearly isn’t critical of the system but is advocating for something that would fundamentally require systemic change. Liberal movements to further police the internet at a state level is constructed here as the selfish acts of self-interested politicians who are simply using the system wrong, not the inevitable consequence of a system that relies on the subordination of different groups of people and therefore must control the means by which people communicate. The internet is a problem for colonialism and capitalism, full stop. They aren’t citing youth wellbeing and ignoring them in legislative decisions because they forget or they are particularly inconsiderate, it’s because they know the child represents the continuation of this system and they are evoking an ideal innocence associated with children to construct the internet as a corrupting force on society. They know they don’t have to actually think about the kids because that would mean anything else is valued over capital.
It talks about addressing the root causes for the disingenuously cited problems that unregulated internet access poses, but then ignores the fundamental role that corporations have played in facilitating those issues exactly because the internet was inevitably commodified under this system. The fact that there is one video platform controlled by one of the largest corporations in the world that reliably kneecaps any competition was what, not an issue? That these corporate entities are beholden to the interests of almost exclusively Americand and European imperialistic interests is not a coincidence, and until quite recently their transnational operation allowed for a significant amount of informal influence on colonized spaces. The only reason they’re doing this is because they know that people within the empire have effectively used it to organize resistance, and that this is avoided in this mission statement speaks to the dissonance between “democratic” internet movements and the reality that the internet exists in.
I think this greatly undermines the weaponization of the internet from other governments. Society is currently so plugged in and we’ve known that subliminal messaging is a real psychological problem for close to ~100 years now. Free and Open internet is cool, but not for the masses who cannot combat this kind of psychological warfare.
We have to reign in both Corporations and external entities trying to influence a Nations populace. Some how, some way.
I literally just referenced that. When I say, that Europeans and Americans have been afforded, “a significant amount of informal influence on colonized spaces,” I’m talking about how they weaponize their domination of the internet to promote their shared interest with the corporations they are partnered with. Yes, they have been applying similar tactics for over a century, but you seem to be more concerned about how it effects them than their targets.
I didn’t call it “external entities” or “psychological warfare,” against these imperialists because, quite frankly, I don’t care about how empires attack each other as much as I do how they attack colonized peoples. With this in mind, when I’m talking about the systemic causes of these issues, I am directly referring to EuroAmerican settler-colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. Their attempt to control access to the internet within the metropole is in fact their way of interrupting communication between the imperial peripheries (colonized spaces and peoples) and that population in the metropole; their concern over “foreign actors” is more about their people developing empathy for the victims of their way of life than it is what you seem to think; which I am guessing is something along the lines of “Russian bots?” You think it’s a coincidence this crackdown comes within years of popular resistance against EuroAmerican facilitation of Palestinian genocide?
A little too corporate friendly here.
Not that I oppose the idea, but also, Big Tech wants a kind of narrower censorship… so they can be the defacto gatekeepers, and no one else.
Government has to be the wall between corporations and the general mass populace. The general population just does not have the media literacy or means to effectively combat corporations influence on everything in society. Something needs to be that barrier.
I mean, I think there should be a medium. Governments don’t need that power either.
In other words, I think this movement should be placing more blame on corporate lobbying and monopolies, too. But not let up on the censorship efforts from govts.
I can’t think a non-bias medium guardrail system hasn’t eventually fallen under Government control. Government has just as much of a need to protect their interests from external sources as anyone else. It really is a National Security Issue for every Nation, not just EuroAmericana.
And then we barrel towards regulatory capture, as the very biggest corporations can just lobby to their benefit.
The page touches on this:
When the YouTuber who exposed predators on Roblox brought them to light, the response was not to go after the predators, but to go after him.
We know these problems. If a YouTuber can find them, why can’t a company with billions of dollars, armies of engineers, and full control over their platform?
So I think govt should go after the most manipulative corporate offenders, but not create a situation where they can have so much control over individuals. In other words, no one should have that kind of manipulative power, and its the govt’s role to break it up wherever it pops up, not take control of it.
I mean, some entity has to control it.
Even if we reign in Corporations, there’s still external governments trying to stir trouble and influence the popular opinion. We can’t realistically stop them from doing this, but have to defend against it. So some entity has to be in charge of that.
I think you’re right though, we have to reign in Corporations first. If each Nation cannot do that, then there’s not much difference between Government and Corporate Interests. This is a problem that isn’t going to go away even after we fix it either - something we’ll have to figure out as a society how to handle.
my new hobby post-internet will be flock camera vandalism, perhaps a little data centre arson… the great outdoors
Walling in an already dead zombi
I’m sorry but we had to support the 23 year old content creator who makes Garfield comics and earns $10/month. That was more important then anticipating the threat of artificial Data scarcity threat that everyone warned about 20 years ago.
It’s cool though, that artisanal comic is going to really make me laugh as the authoritarians go door to door looking for undesirables
turns out china was just a little bit ahead of everyone huh
I’m starting to be a fan of countries walling off vs the alternative. To be clear, I’m not for it. I would prefer open internet. But what’s worse is countries trying to project their jurisdiction across the globe.
If you don’t like that I don’t comply with the laws of places where I don’t live, block my site. I don’t block you. You block me. I shouldn’t even have a responsibility to know what your laws are to know if I should block you. It’s your laws, your job.
And if a country finds it easier to block off the whole external internet, fine. That’s still better than someone who I didn’t elect thinking they can tell me how I must do my job. Certainly better than 152 different governments and municipalities trying to do it at the same time.
So we should make it clear. When someone in a foreign country visits your site, you are not operating in that country. The user is visiting yours.
It’s more like some people saw an opportunity in selling China-style online censorship to other governments. They just needed convincing stories to sell.
Stories of children being groomed with internet porn and calling for mass censorship. Stories of the stars of internet porn regretting it and calling for mass censorship. Stories of terror attacks being organized on the internet. Stories of awful chatrooms.
So now anyone wanting to oppose your censorship is a nazi islamist pedophile jerking off to CSAM in their mother’s basement.
And it won’t end with banning the most disgusting and gory lolicon hentai. It won’t even stop with banning porn. It will end with things being banned because some Trump, Orbán, Putin-class dictator didn’t like it, and the chatbot spat out some reasonable sounding argument that supported it beyond “the glorious leader didn’t like this”.
Imagine being so stupid you fall for that astroturf nonsense.
Europe has been working this protecting children from predators angle for at least two decades, to weaken any sort of encryption or anonymity and allow more state surveillance.
This isn’t something new, it’s just that now they think they can get away with doing their worst, knowing just how fucked our voters are in the head as their political parties are all captured by oligarchs.
Yeah, absolutely. Every Nation should have something like this unfortunately.
I think it makes sense for techies to be able to breach the walls and reach the open internet, tunnel into other countries nets, but the general populace just cannot unfortunately.
You know, every country has a blacklist of websites it doesn’t allow access to. Has been that way since the 90s. It’s also part of law enforcement.
What’s more there are things organisation like the IEEE don’t allow. So there’s a central authority involved.
All in all what we call the Internet isn’t the most free protocol we have. It’s just the one that got popular.
“And it’s not a Democracy it’s a Democratic Republic!” /s
Dumb.
Nothing is new here guys!
