Posted on 08/31/2024 8:51:40 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The world’s internet regulators are no longer playing around.
Two days after France indicted Telegram CEO Pavel Durov on a range of charges, Brazil on Friday ordered the suspension of Elon Musk’s X after it defied a mandate to designate a legal representative in the country. While the details differ in important ways, both cases involve democratic governments losing patience with cyberlibertarian tech moguls who thumbed their noses at authorities perhaps one too many times.
The crackdowns, which come months after the United States passed a law that could lead to the banning of TikTok, herald the end of an era. Not the social media era, which is still going strong. But the era in which tech titans enjoyed free rein to shape the online world — and a presumption of immunity from real-world consequences.
While freewheeling internet companies have long clashed with authoritarian regimes — Google in China, Facebook in Russia or pre-Musk Twitter in Turkey — Western governments until recently generally did not regard social media and the vision of free speech they promoted as being fundamentally at odds with democracy. Politicians and regulators recognized there was bad stuff on the internet, decried it and sought ways to mitigate it. But banning entire social networks or arresting their executives simply wasn’t something liberal democracies did.
Now, for better or worse, it is.
“The pendulum has swung from public discourse being all about ‘internet as a tool for freedom’ to ‘internet as a threat,’” said Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and a former Google lawyer. “So there are far fewer other governments, media, civil society, etc., taking the platforms’ side.”
Does that represent an ominous turn toward repression, or a long-overdue reassertion of the rule of law in the...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Ultimately, these authoritarian regulators will have to be dealt with. And they are taking on billionaires who are also fighting for freedom. Elon doesn’t seem to be evil. But there are people in this world if they had billions of dollars would have that judge in Brazil whacked. Easy to make it look like a street crime. I know I’ll lift a glass if I ever see those kind of people start getting their just reward.
Excellent information and assessment, Thanks !
“ Thank God we’re a republic”
Not any more, and not for a long time.
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