The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was
the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a
network - its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or
economic reformation - is in the hands of policymakers and the
corporations funding them - that network loses its power to effect
change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the
future of the net should be enough to turn us
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elsewhere.
Of course the Internet was never truly free, bottom-up,
decentralized, or chaotic. Yes, it may have been designed with many
nodes and redundancies for it to withstand a nuclear attack, but it has
always been absolutely controlled by central authorities. From its
Domain Name Servers to its IP addresses, the Internet depends on highly
centralized mechanisms to send our packets from one place to another.
The ease with which a Senator can make a phone call to have a website
such as Wikileaks yanked from the net mirrors the ease with which an
entire top-level domain, like say .ir, can be excised. And no, even if
some smart people jot down the numeric ip addresses of the websites they
want to see before the names are yanked, offending addresses can still
be blocked by any number of cooperating government and corporate trunks,
relays, and ISPs. That's why ministers in China finally concluded (in
cables released by Wikileaks, no less) that the Internet was "no
threat."
I'm not trying to be a downer here, or knock the possibilities for
networking. I just want to smash the fiction that the Internet is some
sort of uncontrollable, decentralized free-for-all, so that we can get
on with the business of creating something else that is.
That's right. I propose we abandon the Internet, or at least accept
the fact that it has been surrendered to corporate control like pretty
much everything else in Western society. It was bound to happen, and its
flawed, centralized architecture made it ripe for conquest.
Just as the fledgling peer-to-peer economy of the Late Middle Ages
was quashed by a repressive monarchy that still had the power to print
money and write laws, the fledgling Internet of the 21st century is
being quashed by a similarly corporatist government that has its hands
on the switches through which we mean to transact and communicate. It
will never truly level the playing fields of commerce, politics, and
culture. And if it looks like that does stand a chance of happening, the
Internet will be adjusted to prevent it.
The fiberoptic cables running through the streets of San Francisco
and New York are not a commons, they are corporate-owned. The ISPs
through which we connect are no longer public universities but private
media companies who not only sell us access but sell us content, block
the ports through which we share, and limit the applications through
which we create. They are not turning the free, public net into a
shopping mall. It already *is* a shopping mall. Your revolutionary
YouTube video has a Google advertisement running across the bottom. Yes,
that's the price of "free" when you're operating on someone else's
network.
But unlike our medieval forebears, we don't have to defend our
digital commons from corporate encroachment. Fighting and losing that
un-winnable battle will only reinforce our sense of helplessness,
anyway. Instead of pretending that the Internet was ever destined to be
our social and intellectual commons, we can much more easily conspire
together to build a real networked commons, intentionally. And with this
priority embedded into its very architecture and functioning.
It is not rocket science. And I know there's more than a few dozen people reading this right now who could make it happen.
Back in 1984, long before the Internet even existed, many of us who
wanted to network with our computers used something called FidoNet. It
was a super simple way of having a network - albeit an asynchronous one.
One kid (I assume they were all kids like me, but I'm sure there were
real adults doing this, too) would let his computer be used as a
"server." This just meant his parents let him have his own phone line
for the modem. The rest of us would call in from our computers (one at a
time, of course) upload the stuff we wanted to share and download any
email that had arrived for us. Once or twice a night, the server would
call some other servers in the network and see if any email had arrived
for anyone with an account on his machine. Super simple.
Now FidoNet employed a genuinely distributed architecture. (And if
you smart hackers can say why that's wrong, and how FidoNet could have
been more distributed, please continue that line of thought! You are
already on your way to developing the next network.) 25 years of
networking later, lessons learned, and battles fought; can you imagine
how much better we could do?
So let's get on it. Shall we use telephony, ham radio, or some other
part of the spectrum? Do we organize overlapping meshes of WiMax? Do we
ask George Soros for some money? MacArthur Foundation? Do we even need
or want them or money at all? How might the funding of our network by a
central bank issued currency, or a private foundation, or a public
university, bias the very architecture we are trying to build? Who gets
the ability to govern or limit what may spread over our network, if
anyone? Should there be ways for us to transact?
To make the sorts of choices that might actually yield our next and
truly decentralized network, we must take a good look at the highly
centralized real world in which we live - as well as how it got that
way. Only by understanding its principles, reckoning with the forces at
play, and accepting the battles we have already lost, might we begin to
forge ahead to create new forms that exist beyond any authority's
ability to grant them protection.
Teaser image by Glenn Zucman.##
UPDATE: response to this article has been so great that Douglas Rushkoff is convening Contact, an open space event to catalyze projects that support decentralized peer-based communication, commerce, and culture. Read more about Contact in his follow up post, "The Evolution Will Be Socialized" and follow related Twitter conversation with the #nextnet hashtag.
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