Cyberutopians in the days of dialup Internet, way back in the mid 1990s, told us that "the Internet belongs to nobody", "cannot be controlled by governments or censors", "will enable us ordinary people to challenge government and the big corporations" and so forth but today, many content creators are whining and moaning about their content hosted for free on social media sites being either denied advertising, hence advertising revenue or booted off entirely, their sites being listed way down in searches and so forth.
On 8 February 1996, John Perry Barlow published A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, whilst hobnobbing with the capitalist world's elites at a World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in response to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in the United States.
Below, highlighted in blue, is his declaration, telling government to butt out of the "realm of minds" - i.e. Cyberspace, as is published on the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:-
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow
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.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
So Cyber-libertarians like Barlow appear to regard Cyberspace as some kind of "new wild west" - a realm where the rule of law is unenforceable or non-existent, and where the one who draws his revolver and shoots first wins, like in those once-popular films called "westerns".
Fast forward to 2017, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the U.S. communications industry regulator and a counterpart to our Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), attempted to repeal net neutrality rules, which prevented Internet service providers and telecommunication network operators to provide equal treatment to all their customers, and the repeal of net neutrality, allows Internet service providers and telecommunication network operators to provide preferential treatments to some over others.
For example, without net neutrality rules, an Internet service provider or a telecommunication network operator can limit the speed of streaming video content, such as a You Tube video, over their network, unless customers pay a premium to upgrade to full speed.
Former U.S. President Obama opposed the FCC's decision to repeal net neutrality but more recently, a Federal Appeals Court in the U.S. backed the FCC's decision to end net neutrality and current U.S. President Donald Trump applauded the court's decision, as Russia Today of 7 October 2019 reports.
Trump celebrates ‘win’ against net neutrality – and it’s anything but a victory for open internet
7 Oct, 2019 18:30
A federal appeals court has backed the decision to ditch net neutrality, and President Donald Trump is touting the victory; others warn net neutrality is key to an open internet. Now, does anyone remember what net neutrality was?
President Donald Trump hailed the DC appeals court’s decision to uphold the Federal Communications Commission’s 2017 move to axe net neutrality as “a great win for the future and speed of the internet” that will “lead to many big things, including 5G” in a tweet on Monday. But what is net neutrality, exactly, and why does anyone care?
The FCC, led by a former Verizon lawyer, dropped Obama-era net neutrality rules in 2017, deregulating companies like Verizon and Comcast that provide broadband internet service. Net neutrality rules barred these companies from speeding up access for sites and customers they liked and throttling or even blocking access to sites and customers they didn’t. Providers were legally blocked from manipulating internet traffic based on whether a customer or site had paid for ‘better’ service. Internet providers were held to the same rules as telephone service providers.
Net neutrality’s backers worried that without the rules, providers would create a two-tiered system that gave those who could pay quick and unrestricted access, while those who couldn’t would be limited to sluggish internet ghettos. The rules force carriers to treat all internet traffic equally – a crucial safeguard in an industry in which many broadband providers have a monopoly or near-monopoly on customers in a certain region. Opponents of net neutrality insist that providers that act badly will merely drive their customers to competitors – forgetting that in many areas, there are no competitors.
The process of repealing net neutrality rules in 2017 was tainted by malfeasance. A New York state probe found that nearly half of the public comments submitted to the FCC while they were considering rolling back net neutrality were fake – and a Stanford University study found the vast majority of the real comments were in favor of keeping net neutrality. Even the House, despite hefty donations from telecom companies, has come out in favor of net neutrality, passing a bill in April to restore the Obama-era rules.
There is a bright spot in last week’s ruling, however. It allows states to pass their own net neutrality laws and prevents the FCC from interfering. California has already passed its own net neutrality law, which the Justice Department immediately pounced on and which it will be allowed to keep if the appeals court ruling remains in effect.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
https://www.rt.com/usa/470391-net-neutrality-repeal-upheld-what/
So Cyberspace belongs to someone after all, and they usually are a handful of very large corporations.
If Cyberspace "belongs to nobody", as these deluded Cyberutopians claim, we would not have to pay our broadband service provider for broadband access.
This goes to show that Barlow's A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace was a load of IT scheiss all along.
These Ayn Rand, Chicago School, von Hayekist, von Misesist Cyber-libertarians (right wing anarchists) never learn or must have been smoking something besides tobacco to be able to come up with such nonsense.
Netizens have gotten to used to being able to get most items and services for free on the Internet from capitalist content hosting providers, until they have developed an entitlement mentality, whereby they expect it's their right to get everything for free on the Internet.
However, what these idealistic idiots don't realise is that such sites may initially host content creators for free in order to build up traffic to their sites and attract sufficient advertising revenue revenue, after which they can dump those content creators who are not bringing them enough advertising revenue, much like a sales and marketing company dismisses sales representatives who do not meet their monthly quota.
Also, online advertisers want to have a say in which websites or videos their advertisements appear on, since they don't want their products and services advertised to be associated with websites and videos which their potential customers may regard as controversial or offensive.
For instance, You Tube, owned by Google, used to place advertisements on any video and shared the advertising revenue with the respective content creators.
However, some major advertisers were not happy that their advertisements were appearing on videos featuring controversial political opinions, including expressions of prejudice, racism, sexism, radical politics to the far right or far left, generally objectionable content such as pornography and so forth, so You Tube redesigned its algorithm's to be more selective of videos and creators' video channels where advertisements appeared and many of the more radical or objectionable video creators saw a huge reduction in their earnings from their their You Tube videos, which they have termed as "demonetisation".
All this happened even whilst net-neutrality was in force, since the rule did not cover content hosting sites such as You Tube, which retained the right to decide on what content they wanted to host, just as landlords have the right to decide on which tenants they want to rent to, or hotels may reserve the right to deny accepting certain troublesome guests, even though that rarely happens.
Way back in 2007, Kuching, Sarawak-based blogger Kenny Sia, whose blog was signed up with blog advertising placement company Nuffnang, told me that he avoids overtly political content on his blog posts, since it would drive away advertisers, and back then, he was earning around RM15,000 per month from advertising on his blog.
This is why, you hardly find advertisements on politically-inclined alternative news portals, since advertisers don't want their especially mass-market products or services to be associated with a particularly politically inclined view, since they could alienate a major portion of customers who object to those views.
Similarly, advertisers are very selective about which print newspapers their advertisements appear on, so they generally avoid placing their advertisements on political party publications.
So look Cyberutopians! Only within a socialist society, where the means of production, distribution and exchange are owned by workers, not capitalists, will it be possible to provide free broadband access and net neutrality to all, though most likely, anti-socialist, pro-capitalist, anti-worker, anti-social, racist, sexist and bourgeois-decadent content such as pornography would be banned online under socialism.
Also, we also very likely won't have annoying advertisements popping up online under socialism.
Yours truly
IT.Scheiss
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