The article is a bit vague on the actual arguments. This quote deserves special consideration:
> "A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few"
Giving control to the government is rather explicitly giving control to the few - the government is busy responding to issues voters see as key (eg, inflation, war, environmental concerns, skirmishes between different political groups, etc). Unless a voter is willing (and stupid enough) to prioritise cheap internet access above the important issues then public internet is just asking for regulatory capture.
The government doesn't have the bandwidth to do what this quote implies they can. It will just result in an incompetent, politically connected few in control. We know there is a group who are willing to get involved in corrupting the regulations - it is the people currently profiting off poor internet regulation. How many people are going to use voting as a signal for their displeasure in corruption of a Board of the Internet?
"The government" is tiered. A move towards local (e.g. county or city level) control of things like broadband has so far on average been very successful. Maybe even stuff like social networks should be locally run. I'd love to see some city or county level fediverse instances pop up to tie in with locally run broadband. Maybe some craigslist-like personals ad boards and other services would be good, too.
In that case, if it sucks, you can stand a chance at politically influencing the state of things, or move somewhere where it doesn't suck.
Over-consolidation is bad. Things that don't strictly require nation-sized central authorities to do should not be controlled by nation-sized central authorities.
Throwing up our hands and accepting the status quo because government is corrupt is not something anyone should be advocating for. The government is still the battleground whether it's corrupt or not. Corrupt officials need to be named and shamed. People who claim not to see a problem or who think it's not worth addressing need to be moved out of the way or convinced otherwise.
> "The government" is tiered. A move towards local (e.g. county or city level) control of things like broadband has so far on average been very successful. Maybe even stuff like social networks should be locally run. I'd love to see some city or county level fediverse instances pop up to tie in with locally run broadband. Maybe some craigslist-like personals ad boards and other services would be good, too.
This is the concept of Subsidiarity [9537] - "the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level". In practice this would mean things like the last mile broadband should be handled by the town or neighborhood, the links to the main city in the area by the county, the links to the biggest cities by the state, and the international links by the federal government (roughly).
Same can be applied to many things, and it does add inefficiency to the world, but not much, and prevents giant centralization and the issues that come with it. It also becomes much easier to fix things as the issue is most likely at a lower level. If everyone in the town wants faster Internet, they can just do it without having to negotiate with a massive company or government.
Essentially get a representative sample of the population, pay them and train them up (through neutral 3rd parties), and have the make the ultimate calls.
Just chiming in to say that I concur with your reply here; this article seems to be missing the fundamental point which is, "when/where do experts capable of avid citizenship come from?"
It's worth noting that this can be reduced to, "how can you make the public more well informed and capable of mediating and governing itself?"
My 2cents: Last mile is most expensive and isn't conductive for competition. So there is some sense for it to be publicly owned.
That said, giving government power over it must me done in a way that can't be used to discriminate. I.e. if you are Republican in a blue state, state can't just arbitrarily decide to prevent from connecting, or vice versa.
Yes but I think what the person you're responding to was pointing out was the high risk of regulatory capture.
We tend to have this false dichotomy of the government vs private companies. When in reality most regulation that's passed is most heavily influenced by lobbyists and special (corporate) interests that don't represent the majority. OP is pointing out that government regulation will only work as long as the public stays engaged. In the long term it would actually lead to even more power concentrated to "the few whose only incentive is to make more money."
It feels really unfair that all anti-gov / taxation arguments are just fatalistic "this will fail" and we're okay with that as if entropy isn't the default state of the universe.
No use building this bridge it'll just rust.
Why eat! you're gonna die anyways.
Why bother with a wealth tax, they'll out smart you anyways.
This has nothing to do with defeatism, OP points out the flaw with idealising regulations willy nilly without having a mechanism to make sure it doesn't get exploited (that mechanism often being the people understanding the issue and thus having a stake in it).
A good example is direct democracy in Switzerland, the key reason to why it works is that people are 2 things, Switzerland big focus on education and the vast information of the for, against, status quo option the citizens are presented with.
Without these things the Swiss would be very vulnerable to demagoguery.
I would make that argument, but I didn't today. There is a real chance in the next decade that the public will be voting on how to respond to Russia with consequences that may doom us all. That may not even be the biggest issue, depending on how these famines and supply issues resolve.
That same election will also be deciding how to handle potential corruption in some Board of the Internet.
Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war for another day and vote with the #1 issue being whether you feel your internet is too expensive and/or suitably available? Do you want to encourage others to do the same? That would be beyond reckless in my humble opinion. Internet regulation isn't going to make top 5 for me personally for a long while yet.
It isn't reasonable to talk about a public internet putting control into the hands of the Many. The Many don't have that many hands, their hands are already full. They cannot grapple with this issue as well. This will just result in some random committee of people, probably paid off by corporate interests, who will be even fewer than the theoretical few that the article complains of. They will not listen to you either.
And that isn't defeatism, it is pointing out that this solution takes a reasonably good thing and makes it worse by applying woolly thinking to a real situation. The complaint is that power is too centralised, then it is proposing to centralise power further.
> Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war for another day and vote with the #1 issue being whether you feel your internet is too expensive and/or suitably available?
You could make this same argument with literally anything though, as if the only priority of the government is nuclear war.
Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war and vote on food and drug regulation? Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war and vote on voting rights? Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war and vote on tax reform? This argument reduces the government to a worst-case scenario committee.
Enumerating the implications is a bit different from a counterargument. I do argue that food & drug regulation has done a lot of damage by centralising power into the hands of the few. You can't really look at the healthcare system after government gets involved and argue that power has been pushed into the hands of the many, it is very centralised and best-case controlled by a small number of technocrats, worst case blatant corruption by big corporations.
The lesson in COVID times was that individuals have basically no control over their health choices when the technocrats make a decision. That was hardly "the many" in action.
I think voting & taxes are ultimately inseparable from government, but yeah - I would prioritise foreign policy above those two issues right now and encourage others to do the same. If a big war breaks out there may not be much left to tax.
culi was not engaging in vague doom-and-gloom, he was referring to the specific phenomenon where highly committed minority interests tend to win out over apathetic majorities. If you want to avoid this outcome, you need to come up with a solution specifically designed to combat this tendency.
I'm decidedly not interested in choosing between control by a handful of bureaucrats vs a handful of profiteers. Neither is an acceptable lesser evil. If Paris Marx or any other leftist intellectual du jour wants a greater public role in Internet governance, they need to first admit that there's a permanent bureaucracy in Washington which is largely immune to elections and unaccountable to the people, then get rid of it.
We already know what the outcome in the US will be if they don't. You can introduce as many rules as you want. They'll still be written by Eric Schmidt, he'll just have a different job title.
Not just “Disinformation Bureau”, but also “Rumor Control Program”. It’s all in the released documents — though, shockingly, missing from the DHS Secretary testimony to the Congress. She must have just forgotten to mention it, surely nothing sinister going on in there.
I suggest to look up the other definition of the word. Because you may meet people who see privatization as handing control over to members of the public.
Interestingly this is exactly the line of reasoning arch-privatiser Margaret Thatcher gave in her speeches on the subject, she claimed privatisation put nationalised industries in the hands of the public because anyone could buy shares in these industries which were hitherto limited to an out-of-touch government elite, while her ideological opponents (retroactively known as 'Old Labour') made the argument that nationalisation was putting those industries in the hands of the people because they were run by the democratically elected state rather than an out-of-touch corporate elite.
Personally I lean towards Thatcher having done more harm than good, while the British government absolutely did have nationalised industries that were inefficient and needed to be wound down or at least heavily reformed (coal mining and the nationalised car company British Leyland being the prime examples) the way her government just cut down whole communities at the knees was wanton and unreasonable. Rail privatisation in the UK has been a failure too, our system is much more expensive and less reliable than nationalised Continental equivalents to the point it's cheaper to fly from London to Newcastle via Barcelona than it is to take the train, which is fairly likely to be cancelled without reason five minutes before it's due anyway. Even without the economics, the negative environmental effects of this situation are too obvious to mention!
I don't know why so many people insist on absolutism for either position though, the position that natural monopolies and strategic national assets (like nuclear power stations for example) should be nationalised and other industries should be privatised isn't unreasonable.
The useful distinction being "members of" vs "elected representatives."
I live in an European country. I cannot for the life of me figure out in which way would (a consortium of) private companies come up with something like the GDPR law and the enforcement structures around it. What would be their incentive, as private entities?
> > A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few
> Giving control to the government is rather explicitly giving control to the few
There's no clear distinction between the government and corporations.
It's an open secret in politics that government jobs are a revolving door to/from industry.
Corporate executives frequently go in to politics, and when politicians retire they often get cushy, high paying jobs at the very corporations they benefited while in office.
They don't have to be outright bribed while in office (though it's not unknown for that to happen), but they know they'll be handsomely rewarded once they leave.
That's not to mention them or their family members investing in companies they know will benefit from their actions while in office.
So if you're against concentration of power in the hands of government then you should also be against concentration of power in the hands of corporations, and vice-versa.
> Corporate executives frequently go in to politics, and when politicians retire they often get cushy, high paying jobs
This can explained by some benign reasons: both political and management jobs require similar skillsets, like leadership, charisma, speaking publicly and so on. So it makes sense that same people could do both. Furthermore, if a political position involves regulating a certain industry, a person taking it has to have expertise in that industry, which further makes it more approachable for people from the industry.
Not enough people realize this. I was reading Obama's memoir recently and he mentioned this exact concept during the financial crisis, where everyone wanted him to publicly skewer the big banks and talk trash on their CEOs. The problem is, those same big banks are (1) the ones he's trying to convince to re-invest back into the market and stimulate the economy and (2) probably the ones most knowledgable on how to rebuild and fix the financial sector. It's not corruption any more than the NFL hiring Peyton Manning as commissioner would be "corruption"
It becomes corruption when government regulators do things favorable to an industry and then shortly after take cushy positions in said industry. Regulatory capture is a very real thing and, IMO, a much bigger reason for modern problems of governance than "government bad" or "corporations bad".
> (2) probably the ones most knowledgable on how to rebuild and fix the financial sector
They're only knowledgeable about how to "fix" the financial sector back to business as usual, essentially doubling down on the problematic paradigm that will blow up at a later date. That's a large chunk of the corruption - highly biased policies normalized as unquestionable objective advice.
But that's only because the government as it exists now is the puppet of private interests. But don't worry. Once the glorious revolution comes and the reactionaries are all imprisoned or shot, the government that emerges will act strictly in the interests of the people.
Fun history lesson: look up who the Jacobins were and what they did.
This argument is completely harpooned by the fact that the number one threat to the internet in recent memory was the repeal of net neutrality which was pushed for and funded by big ISP corporations. If the pushback for net neutrality is any indicator, a huge number of people would use, if not their vote, then their voice to defend the public internet.
History has shown time and time again that corporations have perverse incentives for public utilities, electricity for example. Privatizing the electrical grid was a complete disaster for Texas. Yet we seem to keep having to relearn this lesson because people think “government bad, corporation good.”
ISPs are boiling the frog slowly on net neutrality because they don't want a backlash. But behind the scenes business deals are being made between content providers and ISPs. Thanks to Ajit Pai we also don't get to see any details about those business deals. Your ISP is throttling content and you have no idea.
>The government doesn't have the bandwidth to do what this quote implies they can.
Oh right, they can organize world wars, figure out how to build Manhattan Projects, send people to the moon, invent the internet... But oh no, they don't have the bandwidth?
Where did this ridiculous idea come from, and why is it parroted so often? The internet is a joke compared to what the government can do.
It's part of a long term trend for people to actively work against successful government projects, then use the resulting failure to try to privatize that which should be public.
In 1990, the federal government released a new version of GOSIP, which required that vendors demonstrate compliance with the OSI suite of protocols. These would really have been the "public internet" with standards agreed upon by international bodies, and voting by country. The large telephone companies, in many countries government-regulated monopolies, expected to run it, as they did telephone service.
I actually kicked off a lengthy thread on the internet-history mailing list about this, and the conclusion was that by 1990, the war was already over and TCP had won.
Network operators said, in effect, "OK, we support OSI. But GOSIP doesn't say we actually have to run it on our network."
One guy from The Wollongong Group said that his company offered a package to assist in converting from TCP to OSI, since obviously everyone would have to do it. They found that in Europe, supposedly the hotbed of international standards, there was only demand for a package to convert the other way: OSI --> TCP.
Note that this is not an object lesson proving either that "government works" OR "government always screws things up."
The reason TCP worked and OSI didn't was that regular engineers and grad students and postdocs, not politicians and big telecoms, built it. One reason they had such success is that the Defense Department applied time pressure: "give us something that works now, not in the glorious future." So that's also the government -- just a different part of it.
The weird side effect of all this is that almost all networking classes and books explain TCP using ... the OSI [OSI] model, even though it doesn't really apply and can itself be confusing trying to make everything fit [1122].
"Take the protocols that allow these various networks to communicate with one another and eventually produced TCP/IP. “Under private ownership, such a language could never have been created,” writes Tarnoff."
Um, networks communicating with each other was commonplace in those days, they were called "gateways".
Also, there were many privately developed networks, like the bulletin board system, that were global.
The internet also runs on Ethernet - all those internet cables you've got laying around are Ethernet, developed by Xerox.
There’s a difference in private and profit-motivated. The author is referring to the latter while you’re referring strictly to the former. The "private" actors of the early internet were not motivated by profit and conducted a lot of research with no clear product goal. Xerox in particular had a hugely influential research division but directly profited from none of their contributions. In fact the only reason we still use Ethernet is because its inventor pushed Xerox towards giving up its trademark and creating an open standard.
100% the internet was a diverse mix of public and private technologies. BBSes were run privately (group or individual), Fidonet was by private individuals, and Usenet was run by universities, just on the social side. DARPA may have funded TCP/IP but computer networks were thriving before then.
That's right. The idea that a global network wouldn't have existed with DARPA is not credible. Everybody with two computers wanted to connect them, and various schemes of doing it flourished. Heck, even I came up with an outline of how a global system could work before I'd heard of DARPA. (I never did anything about it because I was stupid.)
I was going through another box of my dad's papers today, and found a DECWriter listing of probably my first non-trivial program circa 1976, an expansion of the old BASIC HAMMURABI game. I had thought that was long lost.
I lost nearly all of my early code because I put it on a magtape which turned out to be unreadable.
> all those internet cables you've got laying around are Ethernet, developed by Xerox.
Anything you're using today is probably not the version invented by Xerox. If one were to name any single inventor it would probably have been someone at SynOptics. Eventually it all became standardized, but by that point the only similarity to the original Xerox technology was the name. You probably knew all that, at some level, but it's important for us to teach the young 'uns a correct version of history that gives credit where due.
The privatized internet has failed us...compared to what?
There's two prime examples of a publicly owned internet in the world today. One is run by the CCP and is sardonically known as the Great Firewall of China. The other is the state-run intranet of North Korea.
Do we really think that these are desirable alternatives to a privately run and distributed internet where unfortunately some people say and do crazy things, and some internet providers happen to have geographical monopolies that really have nothing to do with the internet in the first place but local protectionism?
> On the infrastructural side, Tarnoff shows a clear preference for the community-owned networks that have been proliferating across the United States, even as they’ve faced opposition from the telecom oligopoly. These networks tend to deliver better service at lower cost, while prioritizing community needs over those of major corporations’ shareholders.
>
> Meanwhile, on the services side, Tarnoff takes aim at the “bigness” incentivized by the need to produce returns for the difficulties they create for self-governance and the negative social interactions they promote. Instead, he presents a model of a “protocolized” social media with a proliferation of small communities that can interact with one another and where public funding is available for media.
The article says nothing about a state-owned restricted internet. The CCP doesn't even "own" the internet in China. Don't Red Scare like this, all it serves is to muddy the waters.
Don't be so dismissive: it's a legitimate concern. These are the same western governments that are already trying to clamp down on internet content they don't like: e.g. pornography, encryption, etc.
The CCP doesn't run 'the Chinese internet'. In many ways the Chinese digital sphere is even more privatized than its European or American counterparts given that its almost entirely built on the back of the vertically integrated private companies that the article attacks. It's why there's basically no comparable search giant to Google, not even domestic in China, everything is driven by proprietary platforms rather than protocols, as China largely leapfrogged over that phase.
I'll bite on this: we absolutely would be better off with state provided internet infrastructure. I don't care nearly as much about the levels above that, but the fiber in the ground should be a publicly owned utility.
there's lots of info here on a campaign that I am involved in NYC: internetforall.nyc
But the short version is: internet access is crucial to modern life (jobs, housing, civic participation), and access to it is very unequally distributed because we are beholden to a few monopolies. I live in a nice building in gentrified Brooklyn and I have exactly one choice of internet provider. That has been true of every building I have lived in in Brooklyn. Poor neighborhoods and public housing may not even have access to broadband at all. NYC has been sued by homeless advocates because many shelters have no access at all, but when NYC has spent money to try to subsidize internet through private providers they are so immune to competition that they just don't fulfill their contracts, and the city has no choice to but to continue contracting with them: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/report-verizon-nyc-set....
The reality is that providing the infrastructure to poor neighborhoods is not profitable and never will be, and the nature of the physical infrastructure leads to monopoly and corruption. Are some of the problems because of incompetence and corruption in local government? Yes, of course. But if more cities have publicly owned and publicly run networks then at least someone has to answer for the embarrassing state of internet access in the US.
I agree that the real problem is monopolies and not private ownership per se, but I wouldn't call it "local protectionism" so much as a complete lack of anti-trust enforcement allowing a small group of giant corporations to form a de facto cartel that is able to price fix and carve up their own regional monopolies as unspoken gentlemen's agreements.
The monopolies are regional, but the players holding those local monopolies (and doing all sorts of lobbying to force out municipal ISP competition, etc) are a very small set of well known companies.
You don't think Americans have any valid reason to be mistrustful of their government or have reservations about it owning their communications infrastructure?
What is propaganda, exactly? The information brought to you by Mark Felt, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden? Or media corporations assuring you that only dangerous conspiracy theorists would dare to question their government?
Of course they do! I am one, and my level of trust is not pretty.
And it is no more pretty when it comes to private entities handling things.
Both serve profit, not people.
And there is massive corruption.
Those do us no favors.
The answer comes from us, the people. That is what the law says. The propaganda is all about everything but that.
See it now?
There are places in the world where government is effective and it performs the tasks the people need, want and appreciate. Corruption is low.
Ask those people and they will tell you their mistrust is of money, power, and threats to democracy.
Our propaganda talks about our democracy all the time. People who study this can tell you public opinion has almost zero impact on policy. That is not democracy.
Americans know these things, and their trust is low, as it would be for anyone in similar circumstances.
Americans seek answers and there are none to be had amidst the propagandized national discourse.
That's the source of deeply rooted things as discussed above.
There's two prime examples of a publicly owned internet in the world today. One is run by the CCP and is sardonically known as the Great Firewall of China. The other is the state-run intranet of North Korea.
Nothing about the Chinese government is "publicly owned". China is state capitalism at its finest--or worst, depending on whom you ask. North Korea is also not meaningfully communist and has since changed its ideology to juche, a strange mishmash of old-style imperialism, personality cult, and frank absurdity.
OK. This is a good article. But the title of the blog post is misleading. The author is talking about the privatized internet as in the infrastructure of the internet that is privatized. Not individual business privatization.
Jacobin is a very well established, multi-author publication. The author of this piece is, as far as I understand it, not actually able to control the presentation. Even in a traditional newspaper, a subeditor would have laid out the piece.
At one point, I had exactly the same browser add-on running under both Firefox and Chrome. Then Google wanted changes. I dropped Chrome support, because nobody runs add-ons under Chrome much anyway.
Beg to differ. Every non-developer where I work has at least one add-on for Chrome, usually Grammarly or a screenshot/screen capture tool (because there's really no default tool in Chrome to do this).
Nah, it’s about Tarnoff’s brand of internet Marxism and how commercialization has driven a subsumption of “labor” (basically internet users) at all levels, shaping the internet we use today. At the application layer, he’s talking about how user-generated content arose as an internet-native thing to be profited from—in the early days, storefronts weren’t as profitable as eBay. Website authors compete for placement in Google’s search results, feeding Google’s ad empire. At the infra layer, he’s talking about how backbones are designed around delivering commercial content ubiquitously rather than connecting communities.
Tarnoff thinks there’s an alternative where you connect to your local library’s social network through your local ISP coop to see what your neighbors are up to.
>Tarnoff thinks there’s an alternative where you connect to your local library’s social network through your local ISP coop to see what your neighbors are up to.
You’re being sarcastic but actually libraries being the public alternative to ISPs is a great fit; they are the providers of free knowledge and information after all. I don’t see why using a local library would mean you could no longer communicate with the larger internet any more than using your ISP’s local gateway would. Local networks communicating with other networks is literally what the internet means.
Personally, I find this article ridiculous, even without the irony mentioned in the comments.
I think there should be regulation of ISPs coupled with more community broadband efforts. I also like protocol-based social media. I also think there should be scrutiny of larger companies for anti-competitive behavior. But you can do these things, and other efforts, without banning private investment in the Internet entirely.
Also, this article's assertion that the Internet's golden age ended in 1995 is rather laughable. I know Usenet pre-Eternal September was nice, but I'd hardly call it the "golden age" of the internet, especially since it was barely accessible to the public at that time.
The article discusses two main points (apparently from a book, but I am not going to read that one before commenting):
* Infrastructure
* Services
On the infrastructure side it proposes community owned access to the internet as an alternative to few, often a single, commercial provider for access. These partially already exist (as discussed in the article) but not as widespread as people would want and, worse, got hampered by local laws forbidding these local organizations in many US cities (as far as I remember at least).
This seems relatively straight forward and with removal of those laws this could be practices fairly easily for the last-mile problem. For the backbone this is not a solution though. If that was to be "community owned" it would be equivalent to the government running it on the national scale and unclear on how to run the international connections and who shouold own and operate them. As far as I can tell, the privat sector doesn't do a too shabby job at running those (besides major security problems with BGP...).
On the services side, the article seems to take a "protocols over platforms" stance, that seems to be popular on HN, too. It leaves open some questions for me, though: What if people do not switch? How to handle existing platforms with severe vendor lock-in or network effects?
I think those open questions are not easy or straight forward to answer and that's why the article only goes for the anyways-popular approaches. Although, I don't think the north-korea and china examples are good "deprivatized internet" examples. I have no idea of the north korean internet, but for chinas great firewall my imperssion is it is an enforcement tool for locality and local laws, the internet itself is as privatized as it is outside of it - centralized platforms, some p2p things, ads, tracking and run by mostly private companies.
Maybe something like minitel and other original competitors are more of an example for state managed internet. I am by no means educated well on minitel, but afair companies had to register with a central authority to host a service, which cuased severe friction and protectionism problems.
Governments can barely manage a website, so we may want to exercise some collective discernment before giving them the whole internet to manage. I'm skeptical of the intentions of authors at Jacobin though, as the only power they ever want to decentralize and redistribute always seems to be someone else's.
I know, right? I mean, let's just compare them with leading edge telecoms/internet companies like Verizon, or T-Mobile, who for sure can demonstrate to all of us how to manage a basic internet task like "manage a website". Right?
Hmm, wait. What's that I'm hearing from the crowd? Verizon can't even make their login process work reliably? Their website is full of dead links and quite a few circular link chains? T-Mobile, surely they must be better? Well, less problems logging in, but the chat feature is often present and non-functional, information is out of date, and they can't ship anything to any address not directly served by the USPS (even though they do not use the USPS).
There's more. I've observed the basic, almost unbelievable website incompetence from cell/mobile companies in the UK, Germany and Spain.
By contrast, paying my taxes to the state government of New Mexico has become a remarkably efficient and actually pleasant experience, and across the Atlantic, the wonder that is gov.uk continues to improve.
So yeah, happy enough to give government a chance, just like we apparently have to keep giving chances to private corporations to figure this stuff out.
Have you considered government incompetence is an intentional goal, at least in the US? One of the major political parties often works to hamstring government to hurt the other party in power. Both parties do it. It's a feature of first past the post politics, that negative sum tactics hurt your opponents more.
Could you provide a couple of examples that demonstrate what you consider to be the Democrats "hamstring[ing] government to hurt [the Republicans]" ? Thanks.
I could see interpreting the occasional government shut down as both parties "cooperating" in an attempt to spite each other, with the useful bits of government caught in the crossfire.
I believe Trump declared by fiat that we should leave Afghanistan twice-- once at the beginning of his term, and again in an explicit written directive to the Pentagon after he lost the election in November. (That written directive was essentially ignored by the Pentagon.)
Where was Democratic support on those two occasions?
And if they didn't offer overwhelming unconditional support for Trump's position of complete withdrawal (which I believe they didn't), what possible reason could there be other than hurting Republicans?
Keep in mind that Dems still strongly support Biden's withdrawal, even given how botched the execution of it was.
The claim that the afghanistan withdrawal was botched has been subject to some criticism. It's certainly true that the (presumably) intelligence based assessment of what the Taliban would try and be able to do and how quickly was disastrously wrong. But compared to other large scale troop pullouts, it was actually remarkably smooth, especially for it's size and scale. The morality of leaving behind so many US collaborators is appalling, but the idea that the Biden administration had some total fuck up over there really isn't correct from everything I've read about. It's a POV widely held by Republicans, I suspect in part because a Republican president failed to even initiate the withdrawal, despite talking about it.
Anyway, I think that's largely orthogonal to the original point, which was more about what happens when you have one party whose political philosophy more or less dictates a smaller, less functional state and another that actively seeks to use the power of the state to accomplish things. "Lack of Democratic support" for Trump's spoken intent is real, but not really the same thing as, for example, the idea that public education is a mistake (widely held view among Republican primary voters).
> Governments can barely manage a website, so we may want to exercise some collective discernment before giving them the whole internet to manage.
Can't they or can't yours? UK's government websites are genuinely good, with amazing recommendations from their central IT about accessibility and what not. France's government websites are also pretty good, with SSO and digital services for lots of stuff. Estonia practically invented eGovernement.
And yet the majority of research around modern technology was tax funded: semiconductors, optical networks, early computers, GSM, GPS, spread spectrum, satellites, aeronautics, weather research, CDs, LCDs, touch screens...
So, you would not be skeptical of the authors at Jacobin if they spent their days advocating for the decentralization and redistribution of their own power?
Every time someone starts talking in grand terms about how the entire status quo of some major facet of civilization "should be" a certain way with zero reflection on the systemic incentives that have led it to be the way it is I die a little inside.
Could you be a bit more specific? This whole point of this article is to point out how systemic incentives haven't lived up to what they promised the internet would be like...
I think the entire point of the article was a discussion of the systemic incentives of capitalism and especially private ownership of what turned into a public service, so I don't see how you can say there was zero reflection.
> On the infrastructural side, Tarnoff shows a clear preference for the community-owned networks that have been proliferating across the United States
> Meanwhile, on the services side, Tarnoff takes aim at the “bigness” incentivized by the need to produce returns for the difficulties they create for self-governance and the negative social interactions they promote. Instead, he presents a model of a “protocolized” social media with a proliferation of small communities that can interact with one another and where public funding is available for media.
> Instead, he presents a model of a “protocolized” social media with a proliferation of small communities that can interact with one another and where public funding is available for media.
Kinda like Mastodon, except you get to fight over who controls the government funds that everyone's supposed to depend on.
Great article. I like that it gets to the real meat-and-potatoes of what determines, "tech policy" in the United States. Moving forward it doesn't seem like a movement back to a, "science and research-first" communication architecture is really feasible but I think, considering that the real, "Internet" is just, "computers talking to each other" that there are going to be parallelized cultures existing on-top of the extent TCP/IP infrastructure that might be worthwhile.
Bit of a weird mix of complaining about the results of last-mile shenanigans (hey, let's get municipal broadband banned!) and how centralized services like Facebook and Twitter have managed to out-compete most alternatives.
Blaming it all on the presence of business being inherently corruptive of what would have otherwise been a utopia is also a bit sketchy.
“'A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few,' writes Tarnoff, and since that tendency is hardwired into capitalism itself — not just a certain iteration of capitalism — fixing the internet requires a different strategy: deprivatization."
The problem here is that network effects and economies of scale generally make centralization more practical. Capitalism's competition between multiple centrally managed models, although not perfect, is tough to beat.
"Rather than lay out a concrete plan for a deprivatized internet, Tarnoff explains that experimentation will be key."
It's tough to clap your hands and summon a decentralized system, but Jacobin maintains typical faith something never tried will work well, as long as it's anti-capitalist.
Seems like regulation within capitalism is a much more dependable way of addressing flaws in the free market.
To those criticizing the (mostly) absurd arguments of this website that so un-ironically crams in all the same commercial incentives it criticizes of the supposedly terrible private internet, remember that Jacobin is a very markedly left socialist magazine with a long history of throwing shit on anything market oriented. Some of their arguments are valid and decent, others are just ridiculous and not to mention hypocritical considering that the magazine itself is owned by a corporate entity and very much dedicated to its own bottom line of revenues and earnings.
edit: I mean, what would you expect of a magazine that named itself after a bunch of "heroes" of the French Revolution whose own extreme, fanatical leftism was a pioneer for mass murder of civilians in the name of ideological purity.
>I mean, what would you expect of a magazine that named itself after a bunch of "heroes" of the French Revolution whose own extreme, fanatical leftism was a pioneer for mass murder of civilians in the name of ideological purity.
>The name of the magazine derives from the 1938 book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James in which James ascribes the Haitian revolutionists a greater purity in regards to their attachment to the ideals of the French Revolution than the French Jacobins
Fair point about the naming origin, but I think it's worth elaborating again:
The ideals of the French Revolution were themselves very problematic. The French Jacobins adapted these "ideals" of the French Revolution in their most extreme, taken to its conclusion form, and the result was a blood bath. Ergo, those very ideals, applied to messy human beings, created a murderously greater mess. It's tiresome to see an endless stream of justifications for extreme socialist leftism with the notion that it only went wrong because "people didn't live up to it". People shouldn't have to live up to an ideology. The ideology should realistically adapt itself to fundamental aspects of the human condition, especially if not doing so means killing innocent human beings and destroying much of their peaceful social organization.
If someone were to say that Nazism would be great "if only all people were blood and soil aryans", it would rightfully be considered grotesque. With extreme socialism, the expectation of people to act completely at odds with our non-collectivist nature (because we're not ants) is taken as a defect os us instead of this woefully, deeply wrong line of thinking. Again, it's grotesque and hypocritical.
>The ideals of the French Revolution were themselves very problematic.
The ideals of the French Revolution were liberty, equality, and fraternity. Largely mimicking the American ideals, and the ones that most of Europe eventually claim to have adapted.
Jacobin: private capital is BAD. Why? Because it's part of evil for-profit capitalism! Seriously, that actually appears to be the thesis.
> Instead of waiting to see what Google or Amazon hand us, technology is produced by communities and collectives to serve very different needs and ends.
You can already do that - right now. But it's easier to write a whiny diatribe than it is to learn how to program though, isn't it?
No, privatized interests have brought us whatever is good about the internet today. They have also brought about a lot of the bad stuff, true. In government hands there would have been just incompetemt stagnation and wastage of taxpayer funds.
As a person who lives in a post communist country, I'm certainly sure we don't want the state to manage internet or any other technology for that matter.
Look at what's going on right now in Russia, North Korea or China (and these are only firsts that come to my mind). It's really hard for people there to get any information beyond the state propaganda.
Good times create dumb people -> dumb people make communism -> communism creates bad times -> bad times creates smart people -> smart people create capitalism -> capitalism creates good times -> good times create dumb people...
What has failed us is putting people like Ajit Pai in charge of the FCC and the federal government trying to remove net neutrality.
The economics textbook version of the term "regulatory capture" is what has failed us in the large telecom and large ISP industry.
The private internet has failed us? No shit, maybe we shouldn't allow entities like the combined Centurylink/Level3 to acquire various mid sized players and reduce the market competition. Maybe we shouldn't allow Rogers and Shaw to merge in Canada. Things like that.
Maybe when the US federal government hands out subsidy money to companies like Frontier and Verizon to build suburban and rural FTTH they should be held accountable when they just take the money and don't actually build the service promised.
Maybe people in their ordinary homes in ordinary neighborhoods should have better options than degraded DSL from the local "phone" company on 30 year old copper POTS lines or the near monopoly local Comcast DOCSIS3 coax cable service, squeezing every last dollar of ROI out of that legacy coax plant.
bias/point of view: I do network engineering for a small/mid-size ISP that directly competes with the telecom dinosaurs.
It's gotten really bad, and still seems to be accelerating in that direction. When government stops responding to voters, it's no longer a democracy (or democratically elected republic if you want to go there).
Call it corporatism, techno-/neo-feudalism.... Call it a mess.
Make no mistake: these dominating and coercive structures and the natures of their functions are built with intention. In each example you will find expressions of capitalist ideology, namely, control and exploitation at the behest of the profit motive, as fundaments of their construction.
This is not how government ought to be, and I really hesitated before using that word because I don't like to assert it lightly. Government is for governance -- in democracies and even democratic republics, it is by definition a service for the people. The cost of those services, inasmuch as you can quantify a cost borne by a sovereignty that manages its own fiat currency, cannot use the same language nor apparatuses as are applied "at the kitchen table" so to speak. That is ridiculous in the most spiritedly literal interpretation.
Additionally, we know by now that optimizing for wealth re: quarterly profits does not mean optimizing for cultural/societal/civilizational longevity and sustainability. I have not yet seen a significant apologia regarding this basic fact. So clearly the incentives are wrong vs the stated justifications for the existence of governmental bodies. The fact that corporatists infiltrate sovereign governments to install or convert allies who manipulate public opinion and policy to produce such a narrative should be considered a political crisis second to none.
Do you not live in the USA? It's not as bad as is portrayed. I have lived in other countries with superior quality of life but every place has its tradeoffs.
Transport is quite safe -- federal regulation of road construction, air traffic control etc is quite good. Food and drug safety (though I could write a book full of complaints) is quite high -- you can't imagine what it looked like before the pure food and drug act and all the work that's happened. Food stamps and welfare get paid out, and despite rhetoric otherwise, will continue to be indefinitely. Yes, farm subsidies are a rat's nest of petty corruption but that's a thermodynamic loss in exchange for which there hasn't been a famine in the US in almost a century; and widespread malnutrition, which was true when I was born was solved before I came to the States. NASA has made some amazing satellites; NASA, NOAA USGS, NIST etc generate and publish enormous amounts of earth and other data. DOE means the military doesn't control the nuke tech, and is why we were able to stop doing physical nuke tests; despite visible homelessness HUD has ensured a roof over the heads of people who in living memory would have not had access to one. The court system is generally non-corrupt and by international standards quite fast and effective. OSHA saves lives. The fed is probably the best central bank in the world. I remember what the US looked like before the EPA was formed (by a republican government no less) and all the consumer product safety rules the dept of commerce has promulgated mean you can take much for granted when you go to the shops. Financial regulation means nobody remembers a run on the banks or all the "widows and orphans" fraud that was rampant a year ago. I believe it was just discussed on HN in the past couple of days how the US process for insuring and rolling up bad banks is unique in the world.
I could go on. People form governments for a reason and the fact is most of what we "hire" the government to is stuff we don't have expertise for ourselves (nukes? radio interference? Bank controls? road safety standards?) or for which it's simply easier to have a convention defined (speed limits). But since it works who bothers to pay attention?
There isn't a single functioning agency of the federal government. The entire thing has been turned against the American people in order to serve these large corporations.
> What has failed us is putting people like Ajit Pai in charge of the FCC and the federal government trying to remove net neutrality.
Net neutrality is good, but so far it hasn't fucked with us so I don't know what you are saying... What really messed up the internet/world is the centralization... Google, Facebook, etc... which allows them to control speech on a major scale.
My semi-ranty post is more on the topic of actual large carriers/telcos/cable company/ILECs/last mile and middle mile ISPs. Although google has some last mile stuff through their acquisition of webpass they are not in the same market segment.
There are definitely a whole lot of screwed up things going with walled garden social media platforms and centralization there as well.
As this article very aptly points out, "centralization" and it's counterpart, "decentralization" have very little to do with how, "free" a system is. Consider that when Standard Oil was broken up it became more powerful and as many small companies than one large megalith. I'm no fan of Google, Facebook, the like (..._) but it wasn't these institutions that failed us necessarily-- it was an uneducated and tasteless public which had demand for, "dopamine-rich" social experiences and a lack of insight into what the real causes of innovation have historically been that created the many-headed tech Hydra of the day. The present crisis is an educational and cultural crisis. The structural characteristics of institutions isn't the only determining factor in terms of how the public comes to participate in technology. It's actual marginal in the grand-scheme.
tl;dr-- Freedom of Speech is stifled in the United States not because of tech companies but because of its toxic, unrectified post-Civil War culture where-in huge swaths (100 millions) of people are systemically kept in cycles of social stagnancy as a result of the real realities of human life in post-industrial societies. We've chosen the Machine for ourselves and the desperation of Americans (you see it in the Trump people) is the manifest spirit of people caught in the teeth of the gears of history. What makes this so appalling to us is the almost religious belief that this is period of great historical exceptionality-- consider though that Caesar, Alexander, Hegel, and Napoleon also considered their time, "exceptional." Consider the October Revolution and Marx' historicism.
Life is better than it's ever been. We're upset because out expectations are made artificially high by our own lack of historical prudence and a strange overabundance of imagination. The post-war culture lied to us and told us anything was possible. We're constantly traumatized by the fact that we're not living in a perfect world. Bless our little hearts.
People like Ajit Pai are flies in the ointment. When the priests see what's happened they'll throw the whole jar away and I'm quite sure all the little flies will have learned their lesson; that is of course until they have the cunning to become wasps or dragonflies.
I wish I could post a screenshot of this site, because it proves beyond all measure why the commercial web sucks. Two modals for "sign up for our mailing list" and "accept all cookies". Fuck you very much. Why would I read your opinion whining about the web when you contributed to the downfall of the web yourself?
Whereas it would be perfectly valid to dislike the opinion because it is published in a lefty publication, the web design annoyances described really have little to do with the political stance of the publisher. The op-ed author likely has no control over the web design.
This site like "99.9%" of other sites looks just fine in the links text-only browser. The annoyances of web design usually depend in part on the browser. If one uses a browser where Javascipt, CSS, images and cookies are enabled, then one is at the whim of "web developers". Less so if one is using a simple HTML viewer like links, w3m, reader mode or some other way to read the text of the page.
HN uses some Javascript. Does that mean every HN commenter favours Javascript. I make zero use of the Javascript that is in HN pages. I use a text-only browser. I do not see indented comment threading or text colours. Because I publish opinions on HN does not mean I use Javascript or even that I necessarily approve of HN's graphical design, whatever it may be.
EDIT: Wow, HN just changed the title. It no longer matches the title chosen by the author. The author must be hitting a nerve with HN's "tech" worker reader base. I used the internet in the late 80s while there was still a rule against advertising and commercial activity. It was amazing. I used the www when it went public in 1993. There was generally no advertising and certainly no surveilance like today.
Jacobinmag it's not your average website. It's full on communism over there. So they should guard better against critiques like "some animals (our righteous website) are more equal than others (their commercial websites)"
I was not familiar with the publisher posting this article, but briefly overlooked your comment before opening the link. At first glance, I was amused, genuinely thinking this article/website a interesting parody of making a website with all the dark patterns and implementation of sign-up-to-mailing-list/tracking/shopping/subscription/etc. and was excited thinking it was awesome someone was so aware of the problems with the internet today they encapsulated the issues into the website itself satirically.
But upon clicking around around further the author was indeed completely unaware of the irony of its own article.
I don't see how my comment was proposing an argument to the content within the article. It was merely a criticism and would hope to it interpreted as such. Wouldn't be nice to see a higher level of quality and consistency in commentaries like this, especially when the title is as ambitious as something as 'fighting for the digital future'?
I don't mean to sound rude, but your response sounds a bit presumptuous and complacent with hypocrisy.
As a meta point, the requirement to discuss ethics independently of one's ability to exercise said ethics is critical for honest discourse. This applies to general opinion too. I'd be surprised if the author of the piece has any influence on the web design, so discounting it on that basis seems rather limiting.
It does point out how ungrounded one's ethics might be if one can't even bother to adhere to them in the small. The piece could have been posted to a blog.
Try browsing by default with javascript off, and enabling it only for sites that don't work. It's actually not that annoying to do since many sites degrade gracefully and degrade the "features" I don't want anyway(like promo or cookie banners).
I can read the whole article without any distraction, except for the bright red banner which remains at the top.
Bright red banner?
Those are the things that really make me appreciate the pipette(?) tool in ublock. My joy of the internet somewhat improved with that, especially on return/ repeat visits to various sites.
I’m not sure if this is genuine question or not (and forgive my presumption, if there is any, as I know not everyone is privileged with both a technical and legal education), but the reason these kinds of modals exist is because of (1) legal expectations, and (2) the organization’s function as a(n advocacy) publication and a likely desire to collapse two necessary but intrusive elements into a single interruption/intervention.
Again, I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I would encourage you to (1) investigate the privacy laws behind cookie permissions and why consent forms are becoming ubiquitous, and (2) the UIUX logic governing prioritization of interactive elements.
“Need” here is overdetermined. From a primordial perspective I suppose you could argue the design “force[s]” users to take certain actions, but it’s not like there isn’t a substantive and more intellectually honest take, which is that the modals are annoying but unextraordinary and in-line with standard legal expectations and design practices.
> but I would encourage you to (1) investigate the privacy laws behind cookie permissions and why consent forms are becoming ubiquitous
If you're referring to GDPR and ePrivacy, then there's literally no reason to show that consent form for cookies that are strictly required for the functioning of your site.
> and in-line with standard legal expectations and design practices.
> If you're referring to GDPR and ePrivacy, then there's literally no reason to show that consent form for cookies that are strictly required for the functioning of your site.
This is why I guard against presumption: so I don’t make references to forms of European legislation (GDPR and ePrivacy) as if they are the singular authorities governing internet privacy law, or that legal expectations are formulated exclusively through civil law.
Don't be a vague asshole. If you want to talk about real laws, don't make people play guessing games, especially when you're excusing these sites' bad behavior. If you're basing your argument on theoretical laws, then it's not the other person that's out of their depth.
Fact of the matter is that the comment we’re both party-to displays some fundamental misunderstandings of the law.
You may call it “playing guessing games,” but to those with domain-specific knowledge, glaring errors with respect to fundamental legal concepts are obvious and indicates a lack of expertise (e.g. here, not understanding the consequences of the jurisdiction of their named laws to the soundness of their argument) and a possible violation of the law (though the present situation does not rise to that level).
Calling out false expertise is part of the self-regulating nature of the professions, even if doing so can be reasonably called “be[ing] a… asshole.” I think it’s worse to mislead people.
Demagoguery. There are no "fundamental legal concepts are obvious" that require a cookie pop-up.
> not understanding the consequences of the jurisdiction
It was your third chance to name which particular laws and jurisdictions you allude to. And it was the third time you didn't take it. So, I presume, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Look, superficially I could list out ICO, IITA, AAPPI, and a host of other privacy and cookie-related laws and legal bodies. Anyone with Google can do that and it’s not really an indicator of expertise because listing things doesn’t mean I understand their content or their consequences.
Also recall, the jurisdiction you’re demanding was mentioned in my very first response to you: Europe.
What exactly is it that you’re trying to argue at this point?
> Look, superficially I could list out ICO, IITA, AAPPI, and a host of other privacy and cookie-related laws and legal bodies. Anyone with Google can do that
Yes, you could. No, you didn't.
> Also recall, the jurisdiction you’re demanding was mentioned in my very first response to you: Europe.
This is what you said: " I guard against presumption: so I don’t make references to forms of European legislation"
So no, you didn't make references to Europe, and you continued to vaguely describe some vague unknown jurisdictions.
> What exactly is it that you’re trying to argue at this point?
You could, of course, respond by pointing out legal frameworks or laws where the discussed cookie banner is actually required. And yet, here we are, in a pointless thread where you've pointed out none.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
You could, that wouldn't make them less uninteresting even if we somehow accept an exceptionally generous interpretation
of irony that includes 'generically yelly tropecomment'.
Compared to my general, average impression of news sites:
1) The amount of trackers is 4-5 times lower
2) The cookie banner is best-in-class: A directly visible "reject all" button
3) The modal, I half-way agree here, but at least appears only on first visit
It is a commercial site, after all. I couldn't see any paywalled articles, but if you try to browse the archive by tags, it'll tell you to subscribe first.
For a price of 1.60 per month, which is what I personally consider reasonable and sort of ten times lower than what news sites usually want you to pay.
The "bring the mainframe to the battlefield” is just false. As is the idea it was built to withstand nuclear attack. It's uncited in the book, I've got a copy.
Anyone could just fraudulently send email as generalSmith@dod.mil in 1975 and you'd have no way of knowing if it was real.
And then it would traverse in a nondeterministic unencrypted way over any machine that claims it can get it there with no way of knowing whether it succeeded or whether the message received was the message sent.
It was built by academics for tasks like remote timesharing and it ran mostly on minicomputers, not even mainframes. All the early nodes were at academic institutions. Exactly
0 were on military bases.
The project goals, people involved, sites it was installed at, technologies built, all the founders, Cerf, Kahn, Taylor, Roberts, Linkletter - zero military people - 100% academics. None of this suggests military purpose
Look at the abysmal security the network had. Do you think email, rcp, ftp and telnet was designed for military use?
It was openly bridged to the Soviet research network through IIASA, you know, cause that's how cold war things happened - open door policy to the enemy
Or what about the routing protocols where a rogue network switch could just announce itself and then start soliciting for traffic to pass through it.
Look at DNS host transfer up to about 2002 - you could just query for all records dumping your entire network topology, to just anyone - extremely valuable information for your enemies.
Look at finger and the original whois, an email and personnel lookup tool. You could use it to get people's schedule, all the people who work under them, what they're doing, how to contact them, where they last logged in at - do you know what I'd really like to have as your military enemy?
Heck let's cite Wikipedia as if reality matters:
"20th century WHOIS servers were highly permissive and would allow wild-card searches. A WHOIS query of a person's last name would yield all individuals with that name. A query with a given keyword returned all registered domains containing that keyword. A query for a given administrative contact returned all domains the administrator was associated with."
Sending out spies, espionage, sabotage, all unnecessary if you're enemy is using this technology. You could do it all from a terminal.
There's zero security in any of these. The doors are unlocked and swinging open with a giant honking welcome sign blinking.
Edit: Apparently reality is unpopular. I'm committed to reality far more than being popular. My politics are on the far left btw, that's why I demand such high standards from these people. They're supposedly playing for my team. But let me tell you, they don't seem to care either.
> The "bring the mainframe to the battlefield” is just false
It's actually true, more or less. Bob Kahn's initial motivation for thinking about internetworking was in order to connect PRNET[0], a packet radio network intended for possible field use by the Army (by using mobile trucks as stations), with the computing power in ARPANET.
> As is the idea it was built to withstand nuclear attack
PRNET is based on Aloha, which was already part of a functional ARPANET which had been operational for over 6 years before his 1975 theoretical paper.
Citing an academic paper published years after something was built as the inspiration for building that something is just not possible. It'd be like saying Facebook is why Tim Berners Lee made the World Wide Web.
The narrative isn't physically possible regardless of arguments because that's simply not how time works.
Here's an early network diagram btw. IMP is the network device by BBN (they're still around in mini-museums at some of these sites):
The GE-645 at MIT there is the multics machine. The TX-2 at Lincoln Labs was Sutherland's machine he did sketchpad on while that link at Utah is the one that Martin Newell used to collaborate on his Bézier control points in constructing the Utah Teapot in 1975.
Every one of these links has a story to tell. None of them however involve wars, battlefields or bombs. I've dedicated years of study to computing history - it's not a supported hypothesis unless you want to handwave and string unrelated things together.
DARPA which provided some of the cash, which is the only real link there is, was really unhappy because these researchers just used them for their money - they didn't work on or produce results for them. Go read "where wizards stay up late" for very detailed drama surrounding this.
There's a typo at UCLA btw, that's an SDS, not an XDS Sigma 7 (It's a weird typo because it was later sold off to Xerox and got renamed the XDS 4 years later. But here, it's a typo because again, that's how time works). The Illiac IV at Burroughs would have been very interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILLIAC_IV
I think you're just inferring something that isn't there at all in the OP. Here's what it says:
> The book takes us through a series of key moments in the development of the internet: 1969, when the publicly owned Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the first public computer network that became a forerunner to the internet, went live for the first time; 1976, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) linked two networks for the first time in pursuit of its goal to “bring the mainframe to the battlefield”;
The only mention of a military application is related to the event of DARPA linking two networks for the first time. This is in fact what happened. That event has nothing to do with the creation of ARPANET, which is clearly mentioned here as a distinct, earlier event. There's no other mention in the article of a military motivation for the creation of the Internet, or other computer technology.
I've heard the author interviewed twice on leftist podcasts and they also drop the "mainframe on the battlefield" thing in the introduction, on both ...
You can read work from actual scholars on this supposed connection, like say Rob Larson, Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley, Haymarket Books, 2020
It's 316 pages talking about silicon valley's cozy relationship with the defense department. Unlike the tech journalist Ben Tarnoff, Rob Larson is a professional historian and so you will note the phantom connection is absent from his work.
And it's not like Haymarket Books is politically divergent from Verso, Larson's just a more careful writer.
I feel compelled to point inaccurate things out because if people actually take heed and do their diligence on it, using reality should help them better analyze the world around them.
We should all strive to have as little nonsense as possible when we're trying to be serious.
Everyone loves a Tom Clancy secret spy story but here it gets substituted as if it were the primary sole purpose
It's true that one of its uses is to verify nuclear test ban treaties because that's how you got government money for research in the 1970s
You can see from the documents the myriad of scientific use cases for these systems such as moving towards a global computer based weather model
You can also see from say, the Wikipedia page, it was how people got SATNET up so there could be a European link to systems like JANET
The problem with the Clancy stuff is it's supposed hidden. So when the evidence isn't there that it's a central player, well that's because it was secret
Then in cases when there's really no evidence and it's genuinely absent well that's because it was super duper tippity top secret.
So we get these narratives of "well the real reason was a clandestine program with sunglasses and trenchcoat wearing feds that of course there's only rumors of and all of the computing time and resources are allocated for but I swear it's being downplayed"
> In his analysis of capitalist development, Karl Marx drew a distinction between the “formal” and “real” subsumption of labour by capital. In formal subsumption, an existing labour process remains intact, but is now performed on a capitalist basis. A peasant who used to grow his own food becomes a wage labourer on somebody else’s farm. The way he works the land stays the same. In real subsumption, by contrast, the labour process is revolutionised to meet the requirements of capital. Formerly, capital inherited a process; now, it remakes the process. Our agricultural worker becomes integrated into the industrialised apparatus of the modern factory farm. The way he works completely changes: his daily rhythms bear little resemblance to those of his peasant predecessors. And the new arrangement is more profitable for the farm’s owner, having been explicitly organised with that end in mind.
> This is a useful lens for thinking about the evolution of the internet, and for understanding why the dot-coms didn’t succeed. The internet of the mid-to-late 1990s was under private ownership, but it had not yet been optimised for profit. It retained too much of its old shape as a system designed for researchers, and this shape wasn’t conducive to the new demands being placed on it. Formal subsumption had been achieved, in other words, but real subsumption remained elusive.
> Accomplishing the latter would involve technical, social and economic developments that made it possible to construct new kinds of systems. These systems are the digital equivalents of the modern factory farm. They represent the long-sought solution to the problem that consumed and ultimately defeated the dot-com entrepreneurs: how to push privatisation up the stack. And eBay offered the first glimpse of what that solution looked like.
You know, somehow I just have a hard time getting behind the most numerically murderous ideology in the history of the planet. Communist periodicals have just as much business being on HN as their nazi counterparts: none.
You should read about Minitel, the French state-owned internet precursor that was flourishing before floundering due to a few reasons ( competition from the internet, delays in new features, tech choices that were coming to bite back, etc.)
This really shows the range of government effectiveness. At one end you have bored public servants who produce nothing but kafkaesque nightmares. At the other end you have government-employed academics who produce cool stuff that drives tech innovations. When thinking about the government, people often only think about the first case.
Your two statements are practically in contradiction with each other. It reminds me of the right-wing that wants to cancel programs for the lowest income, yet votes for bills to bail out and provide welfare for the largest scum corporations all while getting kickbacks and taking bribes. I agree having government manage projects is not ideal, but there are certainly times and teams that have been a lot more efficient and better than others.
With a name like Paris Marx you hardly need to question where this author's bias lies. Right now with my smartphone (a device you can be sure would never have been invented on a government committee) I can stream any song released in the past 100 years, I can get detailed step-by-step instructions on how to drive to the other side of the continent, I have access to the biggest encyclopedias that have ever existed, I can learn any programming language for free, I can keep up to date 24/7 with current events (even if the government doesn't approve of the news outlets I'm looking at), I can make a living working remotely (with software developed by private companies), I can order literally any item and have it delivered straight to my door, the list goes on... Having worked as a software engineer, it's a miracle that any of this works at all. Adding in 7 layers of government bureaucracy sounds like a good way to have the whole edifice come crumbling down, not to mention stifling any sort of innovation that might be left in tech.
I guess my point is, if there was every anything that has done more to liberate the average human being, it is the internet. I just don't buy the argument that any of this would have happened without free market competition, or that the state of the internet not is somehow worse than it would be otherwise.
> I guess my point is, if there was every anything that has done more to liberate the average human being, it is the internet. I just don't buy the argument that any of this would have happened without free market competition, or that the state of the internet not is somehow worse than it would be otherwise.
The Eternal September is a real phenomenon. That's a particular "worse" aspect, even if the overall effect of that sharing of the wealth is massively positive.
While that is true, and the author seems biased supporting some degree of federal/international government ownership of the internet while also having borderline satirical levels of tracking, popups and subscriptions on their site. I think saying that the internet is completely healthy at the more abstract level of humans communicating to each other without borders would be incorrect.
Search engines funnel the typical 'surfer' into platforms rife with newsfeeds algorithmically curated to influence them for engagement or garbage SEO spam networks attempting to get every last cent of advertising revenue they can acquire. There is a genuine issue with discoverability on the internet directing people towards content that is meaningful.
> While that is true, and the author seems biased supporting some degree of federal/international government ownership of the internet while also having borderline satirical levels of tracking, popups and subscriptions on their site.
It isn't "their" site. They are the author of an article published to that site, not the site's owner. They aren't responsible for whatever tracking/popup/what have you Jacobin chooses to employ.
The author has some agency in the quality of the website due to his expertise and subject matter of the article. Food for thought https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
You would prefer the author refuse a platform which gives their work an audience? Because that platform uses methods of advertising which have become perfectly standard across the web? Their job was to write a book review, which they did.
Oh to be sure there are all sorts of problems with the internet today. And the government certainly has a role to play in making the internet better. I’m just not convinced that the solution is centralizing and socializing the tech giants.
So many in entertainment. I guess people were right about communists running hollywood. And some people were so clever they had the name before Karl Marx was even born!
Well I mean obviously political beliefs are not heritable. But this guy does seem to have made a name for himself as an internet socialist, judging by his other publications
Like "Adding in 7 layers of government bureaucracy sounds like a good way to have the whole edifice come crumbling down, not to mention stifling any sort of innovation that might be left in tech."? I don't agree with this article but you gotta have something better than "government slow, private fast".
What makes the government more bureaucratic than a business? Have you looked at the corporate structure of the telecos, like Comcast or Verizon? It's layers upon layers of bureaucracy. Can you explain why the government is somehow guaranteed to be worse than a business?
>What makes the government more bureaucratic than a business?
It's telling that you rattled off a list of companies that have local monopolies or duopolies where they operate.
Look at the incentives at various points in these organizations and the answer should be glaringly obvious.
The government lacks big stakeholders at the top insisting upon being in the black. Bureaucracy always wants to expand. A C-suite who wants to make a fuckton of money counterbalances that more directly than the feedback loops that control costs in government.
If you want to reduce the number of variables further look at the contrast between local governments (who are less abstracted away from the source of their money) across municipalities of varying wealth.
> It's telling that you rattled off a list of companies that have local monopolies or duopolies where they operate.
... No I listed telecom companies. This whole thread is about telecoms after all. Your arguments apply to generic businesses. But let's focus on the actual industry at hand.
I don't think the populace will ever gain enough education to be able to democratically steward the internet properly, leading to a value captured internet strictly worse than our current private one, so I disagree with the article (and its selective retelling of history claiming the internet was invented by the government). But there's the reality that the internet is mostly run by oligopolistic telecos that your arguments ignore to make a generic "business good government bad" argument. Can you come up with something more specific to this market?
Nobody is going to run core internet infrastructure for free. The government can’t even handle our current infrastructure of roads, bridges, electrical grids, and utilities. How on earth is the government supposed to operate as an ISP? We need better regulation, not public ownership.
Or I guess we’ll just tack on another Trillion dollars to our annual deficit…infinite government expansion/spending can solve every problem right?! /s
there is a middle ground in between asking that the government run the internet, and allowing telecom behemoths to merge as they please and reduce consumer competition.
You can run a totally fine regional last mile ISP with 10, 15, or 50 FTE staff positions. Depending on your geographical scale. Or 500.
You don't need to be a Comcast, Centurylink or Verizon sized monster.
In fact some of the absolute best consumer-service quality 1GbE and 10GbE symmetric FTTH ISPs that I'm aware of are run by teams of less than 25 people in total. On a county sized scale.
Sure, nobody is saying the government should do nothing with the internet. It's already involved with subsidies. But the article is about government ownership of the internet. That's a very different thing.
I worked for a government telco and ISP, that serviced govenrment customers. At the time, our cost structure was about 30-40% less than an equivalent telco service.
Once you get past the “derp, government dumb”, the government has a lot of competitive advantages. Government entities have better ability to do capital spending as they aren’t beholden to Wall St analysts, who hate capital.
For an ISP, a .gov could bond out to build and contract private operators at a much lower cost than monopoly companies charge themselves internally.
Working for the public trust does not automatically make people incompetent. Publicly run projects have been run fine in the past with excellent results and there is no inherent flaw in the model that prevents public projects from succeeding.
The "Deficit" boogeyman is a tired scare tactic. Spending money on things that are worth their cost is not bad.
> The "Deficit" boogeyman is a tired scare tactic. Spending money on things that are worth their cost is not bad.
This is insane. Look around at the economic turmoil in the US right now. The government spent $400B last year on interest payments alone. That’s 2/3 our military budget. We’re never paying down our $30T owed.
They fund the difference by selling bonds to the central bank, creating money out of thin air. This destroys the lower class, who have no assets that move with inflation.
In what world do you think it’s appropriate to deepen our debt burden and destroy American savings to “deprivitize” the internet? Americans can’t even afford healthcare and shelter for gods sake.
You seem to be assuming government means federal, but local government is also government and there are many towns with municipal fiber their residents are happy with.
That’s awesome and in no way do I argue that shouldn’t be allowed. I’m arguing for the sane moderate position that regulation can be tightened instead of eliminating private internet. That doesn’t mean local government can’t build their own infrastructure.
Yes consumer focused regulation to ensure net neutrality, ISPs not spying on you to sell data, and good value for money would be the solution IMO. You pay for broadband, the watchdog ensures that the monopolies are doing a good job.
> The government can’t even handle our current infrastructure of roads, bridges, electrical grids, and utilities.
Other than the (private) electrical grid in California and the blunders in Texas, handling of the electrical grid has been pretty good. And despite all the complaining from government contractors who want more road/bridge repair funding sent their way, those things are honestly in pretty workable shape
> The government can’t even handle our current infrastructure of roads, bridges, electrical grids, and utilities.
If they stop doing this today, because they're so bad at it, what system do you think would take roads, bridges, electrical grids, and utilities over, and would they do a better job or hasten us into libertarian Mad Max hell?
> "A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few"
Giving control to the government is rather explicitly giving control to the few - the government is busy responding to issues voters see as key (eg, inflation, war, environmental concerns, skirmishes between different political groups, etc). Unless a voter is willing (and stupid enough) to prioritise cheap internet access above the important issues then public internet is just asking for regulatory capture.
The government doesn't have the bandwidth to do what this quote implies they can. It will just result in an incompetent, politically connected few in control. We know there is a group who are willing to get involved in corrupting the regulations - it is the people currently profiting off poor internet regulation. How many people are going to use voting as a signal for their displeasure in corruption of a Board of the Internet?