Can The Internet Be Governed?
On a cold night in February 1996, John Perry Barlow found himself at a party in Davos. It was the final event of the World Economic Forum and the ballroom was packed with robed universe experts and students from the University of Geneva. Slightly drunk, he dances with them. But this idea haunted him.
Earlier that day in Washington, President Clinton signed a bill bringing the Internet under government control for the first time. The Communications Decency Act (CDA), part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, contains provisions that criminalize "indecent" or "indecent" content on the Internet. Nebraska Senator James Exxon, one of the CDA's sponsors in Congress, issued a dire warning: "The savage pornographers are after us, and they are using the Internet to gain access to America's youth." As evidence, he distributed a blue folder containing pornographic material collected from the Internet, including a photo of a man having sex with a German shepherd.
Barlow, a former Wyoming rancher, former Grateful Dead lyricist and free internet activist, believed that the nascent network should be free from government interference. Angered by what he called an "incredibly stupid law," he set up a makeshift office near the party venue and shuttled between his computer and the ballroom, producing a text of eight hundred and fifty words. revealed. Barlow's "Declaration of Cyber Independence" immediately went viral, and the term spread widely. It is now recognized as an important document in the history of the Internet: the preamble to a constitution that the network never officially had.
“Governments of the industrial world, you have exhausted the giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” he began his manifesto. "In the name of the future, I ask the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no power over our gathering place."
Like many other constitutional provisions today, the Barlow Declaration has come under great pressure recently. Critics denounced it as an example of techno-utopianism, which made today's unregulated, mass-driven internet possible. The years have not been kind to Barlow's idea of a more "humane and just" "civilization of the soul." Amid privacy scandals, misinformation, polarization, threats to youth mental health, and even complicity in genocide, the bright future envisioned by Barlow has given way to what activist and author Corey Doctor calls the “enhitization” of the Internet.
It's true, despite Barlow's outrage, government was largely ignored in the early days of the Internet. Clinton may have signed the CDA, but her true stance is summed up in her statement that regulating the internet is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. Much of the CDA was later overturned by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds, and within the law itself is a provision that symbolizes the long thread of the Internet through the years: Section 230 of the Act protects online platforms. responsible for the content created by its users.
However, over the past decade, governments around the world have grown impatient with the idea of Internet autonomy. A series of half-measures amounts to what lawyer Anu Bradford calls a “regulatory cascade”. In a comprehensive and insightful book on global Internet politics, Digital Empires (Oxford) describes a series of clashes between regulators and companies and regulators themselves, the consequences of which will “shape the spirit of the future and define the spirit of digital society. ". . digital economy”.
Other recent books confirm the feeling that the Internet is at a tipping point. Tom Wheeler, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), talks about Techlash: Who Makes the Rules in the Digital Golden Age? The (Brookings) we live in are "a historic moment for this generation to determine whether and how to develop public interest in the new digital environment." In “Internet Fraud” (version), Doctorow makes an impassioned case for eliminating “manipulation, capricious moderation, surveillance, price gouging, annoying or false algorithmic bidding”; argues that it is time to "relinquish big tech's grip on our digital lives and give control back to society." Venture capitalist Chris Dixon (Random House) says in his book Random House that a network dominated by a few interests "is not the Internet I want to see or the world I want to live in." He wrote: “Think about how much of your life you spend online, how much of your personality is out there. . . . Who do you want to rule this world?"
Surveillance issues have always surrounded the Internet. Its decentralized architecture has long been key to its identity, and is used as an original form of rhetoric against any suggestion of outside intervention. The roots of this architecture are actually quite clear: it is associated with attempts to allocate different types of computing resources more efficiently, with the blend of technocracy and hippie anarchism in the 1960s, and with the search for network designs that could survive under any conditions. nuclear attack. . (This claim is disputed by some Internet veterans.) In his memoir Weaving the Web published in 1999, Tim Berners-Lee, often called the father of the World Wide Web, compared the principles of the Internet with those espoused by his Unitarian Universalist church: individualism, egalitarian relations, "centralized system of philosophy.”
"It's not standard procedure, but yes, I can tell the other candidates that you've leaked all the surfaces in the apartment."
Cartoon by Sarah Lautman
In fact, the idea of a completely decentralized network has always been a myth. Dubbed the "secret government of the Internet," the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ( ICANN ) has long maintained directories that would otherwise be managed by the Internet, the Domain Name System, or DNS. (To Berners-Lee, DNS is a “centralized weakness” that can destroy a network.) Until 2016, ICANN was managed by the US Department of Commerce. Who ruled the internet in 2006? Law professors Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu describe the "death of the dream of an autonomous cyber community" and argue that governments have a number of tools to enforce their laws in cyberspace, however imperfect.
In retrospect, the real problem with the cyber sovereignty argument is simply that it is limited. Early internet activists like Barlow were so focused on the risks of government intervention that they failed to foresee the dangers posed by private sector control. Perhaps this is not surprising. Barlow wrote against the backdrop of the grandeur of the end of history brought about by the fall of communism, and his techno-utopianism was a version of the market utopianism of the time. The atmosphere has changed a lot since then. Today's digital activists are coming of age in the shadow of 2008; they called for government intervention to save the internet from what former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis called "techno-feudalism" in a book.
The dramatic growth of generative AI has only fueled calls for government intervention, and more importantly, those calls often come from within the industry. Sam Altman, the recently reassigned head of OpenAI, appeared before Congress last spring and essentially called for regulation; Elon Musk calls for a federal Department of Artificial Intelligence (Crown) in the next wave, Mustafa Suleiman, co-founder of two leading artificial intelligence companies, DeepMind and Inflection, argues that government intervention is necessary to protect us from technological intrusion. big risk. (“Someday, somehow, something will fail,” he wrote, with a plausible explanation. “And not in Bhopal or even Chernobyl; it will happen globally.”)
Activists have every reason to hope that concerns about artificial intelligence will fuel their efforts to regulate the internet. But they are so relevant to today's problems that their solutions do little to advance the broader values the Internet once promised to promote—freedom, solidarity, equal access to resources. The dangers of the libertarian approach are now clear; Perhaps we will soon learn the value of reflexive statism. More than a thousand AI policy initiatives have recently been documented in sixty-nine countries. In the United States, nearly thirty states are debating (or have passed) digital privacy laws that increase federal oversight by agencies such as the FTC and SEC.
“Look, Dave, I know you're really upset about this,” says Hal , the digital mastermind from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, in a tone reminiscent of today's polite neutrality toward human observers. chatbots. "Honestly, I think you should sit down and take a stress pill and think about it." In the film, Dave truly fears the worst. In the rush to fit in, it's a good idea to follow Hal's advice.
In American Capitalism (1952), the first volume of his economics trilogy, John Kenneth Galbraith outlined his concept of "balancing power." He lived in an era (very similar to ours) characterized by increasing corporate concentration and weakening competition; Galbraith argued that markets cannot be trusted to control the situation at times like these. The solution he advocates is a form of ecological balance: forces such as trade unions and consumer coalitions would act as a barrier. Galbraith wrote: "Private economic power is limited by the conflicting powers of those subject to it." “The first produces the second.”
The last decade has been characterized by a search for countervailing forces to balance the powerful influence of commercial interests. As Galbraith points out, government is not the only or preferred option; Other ideas were also discussed. Ben Tarnoff's Internet for the People (version) calls for a "proprietary" Internet with a new "public and cooperative ownership model"; "Have it!" (The Other Side), R. Trebor Scholz also explores the potential of a “shared platform” shared by employees and users. (He discusses, if not supports, the idea of nationalizing big companies like Amazon and Facebook.) Dixon's book Read, Write returns to a form of technological purism, pinning its hopes on blockchain's potential. The problem is that after more than a decade of efforts to limit big tech, the only opposing force that seems capable of gaining the necessary influence and legitimacy is the nation-state.
