Back to Blog - Who Controls the Internet?
Most happy to be here. Mostly, but not entirely, I'll talk this week about Who Controls the Internet. If you've already read the book, I'd love to hear any comments or feedback. The book can be purchased here or at most online or physical bookstores.
Let me introduce the book first. The book is mostly a history of the last ten years of nation-states & the internet. It is an effort to tell the story of the struggle of governments to control the net, and to understand the role played by geography, culture, and physical force in shaping what the network is becoming.
The book chronicles a rise in the use of state power to try to control network conduct. That's bookended by the Elred v. Reno case on one side, and ends with Yahoo & Google' capitulation to Chinese demands over the last few years. Along the way, it chronicles slow changes in the architecture of the network driven by local culture and government obsessions, with chapters on Copyright, ICANN, eBay, China, Int'l Law and others.
We have worked hard to make this a story accessible to many readers. Of course many of the readers of this blog are experts in one or another of the topics in the book. But even then, what we've tried to do is putting the last 10 years together, and put them in some perspective.
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Comments (3)
That sounds like a very interesting story, and it brings me to a very interesting point. Google and Yahoo are actively collaborating with the autocratic government of China to suppress free speech, doing such things as cooking search results to steer people toward government-friendly web sites on Tienanmen Square, democracy, and the like.
Here in the USA, these companies and their buddies at Microsoft are lobbying the government hard to suppress innovation in the basic design of the Internet's plumbing in order to maintain their monopoly positions. Just last week they paid a Congressman - Ed Markey of Massachusetts - to introduce an amendment to the COPE Act that would have prevented ISPs from filtering spam, stopping Denial of Service attacks, or offering high-quality voice services.
They've cleverly packaged their pro-monopoly anti-innovation campaign as "net neutrality" and paid several slick-talking shills to push it. They've succeeded in winning support from a large number of not-too-bright people and are close to winning, which means an end to innovation on the Internet.
Isn't that a shame? It's as if the Amish had lobbied Congress in 1910 to keep horseless carriages off the roads. We'd certainly have some cool carriages if they'd done that, but they wouldn't be any match for the Lexus.
One of Google's most persuasive speakers claims that we have a more robust newspaper market today than we did in 1920, when New York City had 50 daily papers. That's the funniest thing I've heard, and I wonder, Professor Wu, if you'd like to comment on it.
As I have said many times:
Can the Net be censored? There's a famous phrase
"The Net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.
-- John Gilmore"
And when I've heard it, I've thought in reply,
"But what if censorship is in the router?
-- Seth Finkelstein"
They've cleverly packaged their pro-monopoly anti-innovation campaign as "net neutrality" and paid several slick-talking shills to push it. They've succeeded in winning support from a large number of not-too-bright people and are close to winning, which means an end to innovation on the Internet.