Why the Internet should be publicly controlled - Knowledge is Power
The internet is our information road network. It's time to get rid of the gaslight "right to lie" invented by the corrupt US Supreme Court in 2012 and the disinformation "law of the jungle".
The internet is our information road network. It's time to get rid of the gaslight "right to lie" invented by the corrupt US Supreme Court in 2012 and the disinformation "law of the jungle".
Watch the first part of Yanis Varoufakis on the death of capitalism, Starmer and the tyranny of big tech. It’s terrifying.
The internet is no more of a "rental" space than our roadways. Roads are almost universally recognised as public infrastructure, publicly owned, and publicly regulated and maintained for public safety and usefulness.
The internet is no more of a "rental" space than our roadways.
Roads are almost universally recognised as public infrastructure, publicly owned, and publicly regulated and maintained for public safety and usefulness. People are required to have licences to drive on them. Anyone is free to travel anonymously, as passengers. People get banned and punished for dangerous or negligent behaviour putting others at risk.
Why should the internet be any different?
Imagine if all the roads in the world were privately owned by the 5 tech giants, who
refused to provide road rules, refused to do anything to keep them safe, refused to accept liability for damage, deaths and maiming from their negligence, and refused to make homicidal and negligent drivers answerable.
collected and sold personal information about every person that travelled on the roads: facial, voice and physical identity, financial data, their vehicles, how they drove, where they went, how long they were there, their IP addresses, hardware and software used, physical and communications addresses, all data transmissions from their electronic devices, and what they say, while they were on the roads.
randomly forced people to go to locations they didn't want to go to, prevented access to people's local shopping resources, friends' and relatives' addresses, libraries and workplaces, either by making people drive thousands of miles, or blocking them off altogether - for payment, for political reasons, or to make people stay on the roads for longer being exposed to disinformation and uncontrolled fraudulent advertising as they were driving.
While governments stood by and wrung their hands, and created a "right to drive dangerously", and said it was up to road users to stop reckless drivers, homicidal maniacs, and people who bought their information, from robbing or killing them and their passengers.
There you have the internet serfdom, "cloud capital", as it is today.
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Along the way, the question jumps out, why don’t our privacy laws apply to the tech giants? No one is allowed to collect and sell personal information in my country, without consent. But there is no consent if people are required to “consent” in order to use and essential service, which the internet is, and computer operating systems are.
Either those “consents” must be made non-conditions by local laws, and tech providers must develop algorithms to deal with each country. Or, if they are to be outside national laws, then people’s privacy needs to be protected by international laws.
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The solution proposed by Varoufakis is along the lines of workplace democracy, where employees get shares in their employer, with votes. A brilliant idea for workplaces, but not for the public and tech giants.
Direct bidding is a must.
His idea of giving people’s “identity” to the toxic tech giants the last step of ultimate control by the tech giants. Why do you need a government digital identity to hail a cab, or buy groceries? That would be the last step of ultimate control by the tech giants.
Apart from, who is going to monitor whether fair dividends are being paid to some kid in Africa? And
So, we give away our entire identity, total control over us, in return for a "dividend" - presumably of the "profit" of some unspecified corporate giants?
Have a look at the tax they pay. How would we actually get anything after they have shipped around the takings shaving it off into their own pockets until there is nothing left?
Not going to work. Totally wrong approach. What we need is to enforce laws against profiteering, stop them manipulating us through lies, information unavailability and algorithms for profit, break monopolies and tax excess profits - 100%.
There is plenty of wealth in this world to go around. The only problem is, 3000 families controlling corporate giants are taking it all.
We don't need either communism, or digital identities to fix that.
If putsch comes to shove, nationalisation will suffice.
In my country, a state owned bank keeps the other banks honest, with competition. The same could easily be done with IT.
I would much rather have properly answerable elected representatives manage dividends to the public through tax and a social welfare system, than "Trust Me Bro" through the very technology these oligarchs control.
But the fundamental issue remains transparency - total public access, open source monitoring and reporting. No secrecy except to protect privacy of individual end users. No privacy for people who choose to work as public servants.