The article starts with:
"A network that once seemed to effortlessly defy regulation is being relentlessly, and often ruthlessly, domesticated."
And yet concludes with:
"Fifty years after the birth of the internet, it may well be that national governments, wielding enlightened regulation, are the last best hope for maintaining a network that is—at least relatively—open and free."
Am I missing something? How could "regulation" be a possible answer to "digital nationalism"? Are there examples of what the author is referring to as "enlightened regulation" in which regulation has had the desired impacts? Seems to me that far more often we see a mix of intended and unintended consequences.
I would add that web != Internet. Internet is closer to printing press. A world in which there are billions of TCP/IP stacks on personal compute with Internet access is not one which is easily controlled (for good or for bad) by regulation.
It’s an example of Russell conjugation. My country performs enlightened regulation. Your country causes unintended consequences. Their country ruthlessly promotes digital nationalism. Three verb phrases, one meaning.
Perhaps so. That doesn't mean that all control is equivalent, though. There is (at the moment) a significant difference between the Great Firewall and the level of regulation that exists in, say, the EU.
Get rid of the authoritarian state and get authoritarian warlords competing in anarchy (using your body). I mean, give a word a meaning. Surely the difference between North Korea and Canada isn't merely in the stress.
There are many alternatives between "authoritarian state" and "failed state". Any state with laws against victimless crime is authoritarian. Examples of victimless crime include drug use, sex between consenting adults and suicide.
I favor bottom-up political structure. Local governments handle local matters. Broader levels handle relationships among local governments, and enforce human rights.
All corporations should be held to public-interest charters.
TBH, non-regulation is also a mix of intended (free speech! easy money transfers!) and unintended (child porn! murder contract markets!) consequences.
I prefer to think of policy than regulation. Regulations are a collection of policies. Non-regulation is also a policy. And policies should be evaluated honestly on their merits.
> Am I missing something? How could "regulation" be a possible answer to "digital nationalism"? Are there examples of what the author is referring to as "enlightened regulation" in which regulation has had the desired impacts? Seems to me that far more often we see a mix of intended and unintended consequences.
How are net neutrality laws, a form of regulation, a safeguard to keep the internet open and free?
> I would add that web != Internet. Internet is closer to printing press. A world in which there are billions of TCP/IP stacks on personal compute with Internet access is not one which is easily controlled (for good or for bad) by regulation.
This distinction is meaningless. The author may have have conflated the terms, but most people’s primary (and often only) exposure to the internet is via a web browser. They’re clearly not concerned about the spread of nationalism via IP cameras.
> How are net neutrality laws, a form of regulation, a safeguard to keep the internet open and free?
Agreed, great example. The free market approach would be to ease the regulations on access and spectrum which have limited last mile competition in the US. Less regulation - not more - would lead to an enviro in which an ISP who was preferring certain content would be genuinely risking losing customers by doing so (and might gain certain types of customers, opening niches for other ISPs to win other customers, which would be fine too).
> Less regulation - not more - would lead to an enviro in which an ISP who was preferring certain content would be genuinely risking losing customers by doing so (and might gain certain types of customers, opening niches for other ISPs to win other customers, which would be fine too).
Less regulation would allow us to use all of those delicious adjacent bands the television networks bribe politicians into letting them squat on -- as well as the bands they actually use. Remove broadcasting regulations entirely and we'll have a crazy free-for-all of intermittent DDOSing (accidental and otherwise) coupled with legitimate free-market internet access where you can choose any provider whose signal can reach you. I'll take it.
Let's see what happen on the darknet to truly appreciate the absence of regulation :
Free markets and month of barely enough practicable bandwith to buy your pot on a darkmarket because hackers ddos as hell these market in order to blackmail their owner to pay them a huge ransom to stop their attack, and what should have been an easy transaction taking barely more time than to buy shampoo on amazon take more than 4 hours.
And don't get get me started with vaping canabis oil cut with tocopherol which cause an epidemic lipidic pneumonia or pedophile rings operating video sharing websites.
I appreciate the relevance of your username; keep loving Big Brother, brother.
Regarding cut products, it's an immature ecosystem, but thanks to efforts from folks like The LSD Avengers[0] drugs on the old Silk Road were becoming safer than normal street drugs when the government shut it down:
> Silk Road seemed to be a safe place to buy really good drugs, if you knew what you were doing. The prices might be higher than what you’d pay on the street, but dealers on Silk Road were held somewhat accountable by the community. The seller-rating system built into the site, along with efforts by unofficial groups like the Avengers, created a meritocracy that rewarded dealers who sold good stuff (with the exception of the infamous tony76 fraud, in which a well-reputed seller took a bulk of orders and disappeared). And when law enforcement tested the wares on Silk Road, police found they typically had a high purity level of the drug advertised.
If you authoritarians would just stop hunting down and arresting drug users then the ones who cared about purity and health would actually have options they were well informed about. The problem isn't a lack of regulation, it's that you've regulated the product so hard that it's legally dangerous to even review it, and you keep attacking/dispersing communities of buyers and sellers which means that it's difficult to keep organized/informed. That you would blame this on the free market is ridiculous. Let people sell and review products, they'll figure it out if you just stop pointing guns at them and locking them in boxes. This problem is absolutely a result of regulation; if you did not regulate LSD at all, finding a source of actual unadulterated LSD would be trivial. Same with cannabis oil.
> The author may have have conflated the terms, but most people’s primary (and often only) exposure to the internet is via a web browser.
I don't think this is true. Email is probably the most notable exception, but also social apps like Instagram and TikTok that are used primarily or exclusively as native apps. Chat apps (WhatsApp/iMessage/Slack/IRC/etc) are usually accessed outside of a web browser. Dropbox syncs files over the Internet between my computers, but I rarely if ever visit their website.
Obviously most of these things are accessible on the web, and you often have to use the web to set them up. But the day-to-day experiences of using them happen entirely outside of a web browser.
Borders are the biggest problem for centralized power. They create markets of ideas, and having their subjects see that is an extensial threat, hence the language engineering and constant attempts to induce self/country shame.
An optimistic interpretation is this one: an enlightened, mutually agreed regulation is the last best hope against a non-enlightened, nationalistic regulation.
The New Deal is one of these exemples : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal. May be a lot of us need to starve again before those who seems to believe regulation (taxes ?) is the source of all evil start to change their mind.
My WTF moment was when the chinese firewall was compared with laws forbidding to put private citizens data in foreign clouds. Digital nationalism, sure.
Both are "no data beyond our reach" laws. Lets face it such a restriction isn't innocent no matter how much they chant the Jedi mind trick of "National Security" to dodge criticism.
And yet concludes with: "Fifty years after the birth of the internet, it may well be that national governments, wielding enlightened regulation, are the last best hope for maintaining a network that is—at least relatively—open and free."
Am I missing something? How could "regulation" be a possible answer to "digital nationalism"? Are there examples of what the author is referring to as "enlightened regulation" in which regulation has had the desired impacts? Seems to me that far more often we see a mix of intended and unintended consequences.
I would add that web != Internet. Internet is closer to printing press. A world in which there are billions of TCP/IP stacks on personal compute with Internet access is not one which is easily controlled (for good or for bad) by regulation.