The open Internet is coming to an end - but there's still hope
Anonymity, the free flow of information and the open Internet are under attack. But it’s not too late. And we can fight back.
Imagine a future without access to free and open knowledge. Instead, rigid copyright laws, crackdowns in misinformation and state-run firewalls turn the Internet a walled garden. Well-protected and moderated by government agencies and a few tech giants.
Quality journalism has moved behind expensive paywalls, only accessible by a wealthy elite. The rest of the population is getting free conspiracy theories and deep fakes. Wikipedia is banned. Myriads of local laws and lawsuits have led to a “Balkanisation” of the Internet, with government firewalls as we are already seeing them in countries like China, Russia and Iran becoming not the exception, but the rule. Tech giants are complicit, surveilling and profiling their users extensively while keeping them in a strictly moderated environment, only letting them see things that government authorities have approved. What you are allowed to see depends on where you live and whether your government is an open democracy or a strict autocracy. Handing over data to authorities via AI-based algorithms is automated and happening in real-time.
Sounds too dramatic? Well, journalism is already moving behind paywalls, or in other words, “the truth is paywalled, but the lies are free”, and deep fakes will be crazy. The community-driven NGO Wikipedia has been warning about attacks on free information for years. A firewalled Internet is a harsh reality in autocratic countries, and we see similar tendencies globally. The copyright industry is not helping creators but primarily itself. The US is having heated debates around “content moderation”). And big tech is doing what big the does: Bowing to authoritarian governments, perfecting their surveillance capitalism business models.
Source: Mozilla Internet Health Report 2020
For more scary looks into a possible future, you should check out the Internet Archive’s project IA2046.
Source: Mozilla Internet Health Report 2020
But we shouldn’t be too pessimistic. Sure, consumer tech surveillance keeps on getting normalised (according to MIT Technology Review, you’ll “fall in love” with Amazon’s mobile surveillance robot). But it’s not too late. At least in the European Union, there is some pushback via Europe’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR), and the European Parliament recently voted against biometric mass surveillance. We also see more and more local bans on facial recognition, for example, in Belgium, Morocco, and certain U.S. cities (Portland, Boston, and San Francisco). In addition, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook are increasingly facing antitrust challenges and lawsuits in Europe, the U.S., Japan, and other countries. In addition to that, we’re seeing activism rise from those tech giants, as former or current staff members criticise their monopolies and surveillance capitalism tactics. And the way it looks like right now, the E.U. will most likely also regulate A.I. stricter than others.
It will be for sure a fine line to walk between regulation that limits the power abuse by the few ultra-dominant tech giants and not overdoing it with demands for “content moderation”. Unfortunately, the debate around the reform of Section 230 in the U.S. could even foster the dominant role Facebook has, as it would make it harder for competitors to comply with stricter content moderation rules. But, on the other hand, regulation is for sure needed to tame Facebook’s and other tech giants appetite for more and more data.
One other reason to be somewhat optimistic is that we see the limitations and downsides of centralised power daily. Privacy is slowly getting mainstream, as password managers, 2FA tools, VPNs, secure messaging, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies and access to TOR are easier to implement and use than ever. Sure, there is a long way to go, and most people don’t care about it.
The future doesn’t have to be a dystopian one. Instead, it’s a matter of intelligent political decisions and basic knowledge about the tools available to protect your privacy.
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Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash.