Posted on 03/05/2021 7:31:00 AM PST by Kaslin
The only way remaining to truly protect freedom of expression and, in turn, our democracy, is by building free and open internet.
In a meeting of a House antitrust subcomittee last week, members took turns lamenting the market supremacy of Big Tech — and making pledges to curtail it. Bipartisan consensus on this is refreshing, and it is in fact the charge of government to ensure free markets by breaking up monopolies.
Americans, however, should not put their trust in princes. While these hearings make for good campaign ads, Congress has a bad track record of helping Americans, and American innovators can never forget this.
The hard reality is Congress doesn’t, at least right now, have the time, the resources, or the willpower to make even the tiniest dent in Big Tech’s titanium armor. Frankly, it doesn’t even currently possess the practical understanding of the internet to formulate the questions that need to be posed to the tyrants of Silicon Valley. It’s only a matter of time before some clueless representative asks how much weight “the cloud” can hold before it falls back to earth.
At the end of the day, we can never forget Big Tech isn’t the internet, even though they put billions into making us, and our elected officials, think they are. Our American internet is the framework of datacenters, ISPs, hosting companies, and the applications built on top of it — and there are free-market solutions happening today to take it back and build alternatives outside of Big Tech’s reach.
This all means Americans can’t only wait around for legislative “fixes.” So it’s up to us, as individuals and American citizens, to do what we’ve always done when faced with an existential threat to our way of life: band together, build, and fight.
Last year marked ignoble heights in the chronicles of monopoly power. The only genuine competition within Big Tech involved which incalculably powerful corporation could most effectively mute conservative voices.
Google continued its purge of conservative outlets. Apple and Amazon – along with Google – teamed up to shutter Parler. Meanwhile, Twitter booted the president of the United States of America. Lo and behold, it continues to provide a soapbox to Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, whose regime is a state sponsor of terror.
If you want to know who really runs our country, see who has the final say. It’s not us, the citizens. It’s not elected officials, either. When the leader of the free world is excommunicated from essentially all the platforms that are indispensable to public communication in the 21st century — and is offered no recourse — that’s a sure sign certain private players hold too much power.
We must keep in mind this stunning fact: Big Tech spent more money lobbying the last Congress than any other industry did. This power goes beyond a direct and traditional one, which may even be more frightening. Their ability to control distribution through shadow algorithms that simply remove our ability to participate in their platform without any accountability or knowledge of how it changed is downright dangerous.
Why, for instance, does Rep. Devin Nunes have fewer than 10,000 followers on YouTube, yet on its competitor website Rumble, his reach is approaching 700,000 subscribers? Are we to believe his message and audience has no interest on one of the largest sites on the internet?
Republicans and Democrats continue to put on a nice show, forming an ostensibly united front in committee hearings. Most of their castigations of Big Tech are nothing more than pot shots — vocalizations absent intentionality. Scratch the surface, and you’ll see that the two sides of the aisle don’t even agree upon what constitutes “good” or “bad” behavior.
Some individuals can’t even agree with themselves. For example, when Facebook blocked all Australian users from viewing or sharing news links, an apparently-enraged Democratic Rep. David Cicilline, the chairman of the subcommittee, declared, “Facebook is not compatible with democracy.” But when President Trump, the political leader of Cicilline’s own country, was deplatformed by Twitter, he said with a shrug, “If you can’t be trusted with a Twitter account, you shouldn’t be trusted with nuclear codes.”
The issue here is that conservatives and leftists increasingly interpret the First Amendment in fundamentally different ways. Those on the right err on the side of freedom of expression, while those on the left are convinced that freedom of expression must be curtailed to limit “hate speech”—that concept which, because of its subjectivity and arbitrary application, actively seeks to erase an immutable right. This is why, when conservatives are censored by Big Tech, the right is justifiably outraged, but the left exasperatingly asks the Silicon Valley Police Patrol why it took them so darn long to respond to the Five Alarm Toxic Discourse Fire.
What is to be done? To Americans who have expressed concern, Big Tech has suggested, without irony, that they start competitors. “You’re tired of Twitter? Build your own Twitter.” Of course, Parler attempted that. The moment that would-be-alternative started picking up steam, Apple, Google, and Amazon snuffed it out. (And Cicilline was MIA.)
There is something to building, though. Conservatives guffaw when elites tell Americans in Rustbelt towns whose jobs have been shipped overseas to “learn to code.” Yet we can’t afford to repeat our mistake of 30 years ago when we surrendered culture to the left.
Moreover, we can’t rely, as we too often have in the past, on the courts. Also, the “regulators” across the federal government are either co-opted or currently underequipped to perform their task. At least some people on our side, even just a vanguard, must step into the breach and code. Conservatives cannot cede the digital realm, which impacts virtually every single aspect of our daily existence, to our adversaries.
To be sure, the solution isn’t building an alternative to Google or to a social media platform. It’s much more revolutionary than that. It’s much more American, too. It’s building from scratch to battle back against overwhelming odds. Our task is to foster the very infrastructure upon which a new search engine or a new social media platform could be entirely safe from deplatforming.
That starts with building our own backbone of the internet: data centers, servers, and cloud hosting services. In other words, the only way remaining to truly protect freedom of expression and, in turn, our democracy, is by building free and open internet whose elements, from top to bottom, are immune to external forces.
Congress can huff and puff about Big Tech. But in the meantime, conservatives – and all others who prize American exceptionalism – should invest in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, ingenuity, and good-old-fashioned gutsiness.
Financed by whom?
What are “they” waiting for ?
We are past this point. Already Gitmo.Life is up with tens of thousands of users, no censorship and no SPYWARE tracking anyone.
So, go see what happens when Patriots fight censorship by taking industry into their own hands. (Beats easily Gab and Parler.)
The author’s ignorance is astounding.
There’s only one internet. There will always be only one.
The internet is fiber, routers and switches upon which applications are built.
Who didn’t know this was coming? Our side is tolerant. The left is maniacally intolerant. Anyone who has engaged in political debates over the past 30 years is aware of this.
If it their last card in the deck, government officials would force utility providers to turn off the power and water to offending parties.
You WANT Congress to stay out and stop interfering with free enterprise (Big Tech).
Conservatives should absolutely build their own internet.
The answer is never more unconstitutional government. The answer is always LESS GOVNEMT, MORE FREEDOM, opening up competition in the marketplace so rich and smart Patriots can out-compete the Left.
But get unconstitutional out of there with their with their unconstitutional subsides, bribes, and kickbacks which is why we have Leftist Big Business and Big Tech dominance right now.
It’s already happening. Conservatives are using Gab and Telegram for socializing, Duckduckgo for searching, Rumble for videos, Brave for browsing, Proton and Tutanota for email, etc.
I went Gitmo.Life and I saw nothing except a request to sign up for their service.
That’s just what they want - dissenting ideologies to be siloed off and not incluence mainstream cultute.
Be a lot cheaper to just buy Google and Twitter
You have to sign up to get access to the content among the tens of thousands of users I think.
I forgot as I did it earlier this year. But it’s a rollicking good time. Lots of patriots with varying interests and views.
Businesses in the same industry don't have to ride on the public internet. They can setup a secure private network for themselves.
This is what's called an IPX or IP exchange.
So there's really no need to build a whole new internet, or HTML protocols. You just use existing telecom infrastructure, data centers, and ISPs to deliver private conversations and surfing. Just set up a secure overlay on the existing infrastructure -- an IPX.
In the mobile telephony business, for example, a few IPXs are used to move data and voice between operators when a person roams to a new country. Many hundreds of companies are connected on these fast and secure private networks.
So if Parler and Gab and the rest them want to compete, this is the way to go.
Governments must not be allowed to interfere with the flow of these IPXs. The Trump wing of the GOP should have its own. And don't allow Rat Romney in.
From the Wikipedia story, an expert at the mobile association GSMA says,
And I would added:
The biggest problem is that the internet is advertising-based. When you search for information, you're bombarded with advertising or commercial bias. This is the not-so-secret conspiracy that's destroying free speech on the web, and Wikipedia is inside the conspirators' walls so cannot be trusted for objectivity in the realm of politics.
And this also explains why political truth is buried by CNN stories. One big reason is that Comcast, Disney, AT&T, and the other big news networks are paying Google for that search engine bias.
To get around this, we need unbiased moderators. And a private IPX is a good technical path to move in that direction.
They need to open up and give people a peek. People are tired of signing into unknown companies on the web. But I wish them success.
I can only recall that it took all of a minute to sign up and I hear it has tens of thousands of people already.
The Gitmo.Life creators saw the weakness with Parler and Gab but recognize the entire social media scene is bereft with problems of censorship, Spyware and tracking you across the internet. This information also goes to the government.
So, I saw Richard Baris there with his wife and he speaks highly of Gitmo.Life too.
Nice deconstruction....thanks.
Well, hearing that Richard Baris is there gives me confidence. I saw him on election night with Larry Schweikart. He’s terrific.
There’s a factor known as The Network Effect that gets ignored or overlooked in these fantasies of “build your own internet”.
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