How the internet lost its free spirit
RARELY has a manifesto been so wrong. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, written 20 years ago by John Perry Barlow, a digital civil-libertarian, begins thus: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
At the turn of the century, it seemed as though this techno-Utopian vision of the world could indeed be a reality. Entertainment and information, once extravagantly priced or locked away in dusty government offices, became instantly accessible. Brilliant youngsters set out to “organise the world’s information” and “make the world more open and connected”. It was easy online communication that helped Egyptians organise to topple Hosni Mubarak.
It didn’t last. States do not allow new territories to go ungoverned for very long. Europe’s competition commissioner is pursuing Google with antitrust charges. Apple has been locked in a battle with the FBI over whether it should compromise security on its iPhones. Autocratic governments around the world learned from Egypt and have invested in online-surveillance gear. Filtering systems restrict access: to porn in Britain, to Facebook and Google in China, to dissent in Russia.
Competing operating systems and networks offer inducements to keep their users within the fold, consolidating their power. Their algorithms personalise the web so that no two people get the same search results or social media feeds, betraying the idea of a digital commons. Five companies account for nearly two-thirds of revenue from advertising, the dominant business model of the web. Of the million-odd apps available for download, most people use fewer than 30 a month.
The open internet accounts for barely 20% of the entire web. The rest of it is hidden away in unsearchable “walled gardens” such as Facebook, whose algorithms are opaque, or on the “dark web”, a shady parallel world wide web. Data gathered from the activities of internet users are being concentrated in fewer hands (see article). And big hands they are too. BCG, a consultancy, reckons that the internet will account for 5.3% of GDP of the world’s 20 big economies this year, or $4.2 trillion.
How did this come to pass? The simple reply is that the free, open, democratic internet dreamed up by the optimists of Silicon Valley was never more than a brief interlude. The more nuanced answer is that the open internet never really existed.
That should not have come as a surprise. As Scott Malcomson writes in “Splinternet”, an illuminating survey of the past and future of the internet, it was developed “by the US military to serve US military purposes”. In fact, nearly every technology that makes smartphones so delightful started life as a tool of war. The Washington naval treaty, signed soon after the first world war to limit the size of warships, was silent on the matter of weaponry; that provided the impetus to develop machines capable of the complex mathematical calculations required to aim and fire guns accurately. The attack on Pearl Harbour spurred what would become the first computer with an operating system. The computer screen came from the need for radar-tracking screens.
So it is with the internet, argues Mr Malcomson. The Advanced Research Projects Agency, which created the internet’s forebear, ARPANET, was President Eisenhower’s response to the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union, he writes. The decentralised, packet-based system of communication that forms the basis of the internet originated in America’s need to withstand a massive attack on its soil. Even the much-ballyhooed Silicon Valley model of venture capital as a way to place bets on risky new businesses has military origins.
In the 1980s the American military began to lose interest in the internet. Priorities shifted further with the fall of the Soviet Union and end of the cold war. The time had come for the hackers and geeks who had been experimenting with early computers and phone lines.
Today they are the giants. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft—together with some telecoms operators—help set policy in Europe and America on everything from privacy rights and copyright law to child protection and national security. As these companies grow more powerful, the state is pushing back.
There are two potential drawbacks to this reassertion of established power over the internet, both serious. The first is the threat from surveillance and its potential chilling effects on free speech. The disclosures made by Edward Snowden in 2013 about the mass collection of data by American and other intelligence agencies showed that the temptation to hoover up digital information can be hard to resist for even the most liberal countries. And the commercial data-gathering by big web companies means they often know us better than we know ourselves. When people know they are being watched, they are likely to self-censor and to change their behaviour in response.
The other big risk is that the tension between states and companies resolves into a symbiotic relationship. A leaked e-mail shows a Google executive communicating with Hillary Clinton’s state department about an online tool that would be “important in encouraging more [Syrians] to defect and giving confidence to the opposition.” If technology firms with global reach quietly promote the foreign-policy interests of one country, that can only increase suspicion and accelerate the fracturing of the web into regional internets.
This does not mean, however, that governments—at least democratic ones—should always keep their hands off the internet. Why should it be free of oversight when every other sphere of human activity is governed by laws and codes of conduct agreed upon by society at large? A well-regulated, well-governed internet is in the best interests of its users. And if that means losing some of the spirit of the early internet, that is a small price to pay, especially for the vast majority of the internet’s 3.3 billion-odd users who lack much technological expertise.
The internet of 1996 and the internet of 2016 have little in common. When Mr Barlow wrote his manifesto, some 50m people, or 0.86% of the world, used the internet. Today well over 40% of humanity is online. No system of this scale can be completely self-governing.
Mr Malcomson describes the internet as a “global private marketplace built on a government platform, not unlike the global airport system”. He does not push his metaphor far enough. Pining for the decadent, freewheeling internet of old is not dissimilar to romantic notions of the golden age of air travel, with its three-course meals and plenty of leg room. But that internet, like that era of air travel, was the domain of a small group of rich, highly educated, largely male users. Air travel today may be less luxurious but it is vastly more affordable and democratic. So too, for all its flaws, is the internet.
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