The privatized internet has failed us

The only credit to the original author is at the very bottom, and that's probably accidental (it was mixed in with the article content in the original).

It got edited.

I listened to an interview with the book's author. The title of the book is "Internet for the People". It argues privatisation, i.e., opening the internet up to commercial use in 1995 and terminating the government's leases for the internet's backbone, lead to the foreclosure of other possible uses of the internet. Hardly a conclusion that required much thought. It never uses the word "mistake". In fact, the author states that privatisation was the government's plan all along.

The author defines "the internet" as a language, i.e., protocols, as it happens, TCP/IP. IMO, that is not a bad analytical framework. TCP/IP was by and large academic work, funded by government, i.e., taxes, i.e., the people. Whereas something like "QUIC" today is a corporate project initiated and led by an advertising company, funded by advertisers, not the people. (Funnily enough, these intermediary companies seeking to profit from the internet have seemingly become dependent on so-called "user-generated content", and actively try to recruit non-corporate "creators" who are willing to upload content for free.) The author recounts that the reason TCP/IP "won" over alternative protocols was that it was the only solution to work in time to meet a Pentagon deadline. As such, we have had a an internet that comprises a noncommercial language. As commercial use of this internet has exploded, and the internet has become monopolised by intermediaries, what will become of the noncommercial language.

But focusing on the "privatisation" of protocols is not where the author takes the discussion.

He does discuss two examples of community internet service ("community networks")

1. The EPB in Chatanooga, TN

2. Cooperatives serving Nelson, Logan and Kidder counties in North Dakota

The author acknowledges that the backbone will always remain private and so at best some parts of the internet could be public and some parts would remain private. He makes the same case for centralisation/decentralisation: some things could be decentralised but others would remain centralised.

There are many interesting stories in the book, many with which readers will already be familiar.

There is one that I always enjoy reading and that is "Page and Brin hated online advertising... Moreover, advertising wasn't central to the business model: revenue was mostly expected to come from Google licensing its search technology to other sites."