[liberationtech] Commercialization makes your online rights irrelevant, more thoughts from my talk with @ioerror at #rp12

Pavol Luptak wilder at trip.sk
Sun May 20 04:52:51 PDT 2012


Just few notes:

1. It's the commercialization (economical profit motivation) that drives
technological progress and that's why these "centralized social media 
monopolies" have so many features, they are so user-friendly and so successful
for the masses

2. If these "social media monopolies" become really bad for their users, they 
just move to diaspora / identi.ca or something else.  
Now this level of "evil" is too low for the most people, so they simply do not
care.

3. You have no moral right to steal money from taxpayers and use them to 
regulate business of these social media monopolies, because you think their
users deserve a better privacy protection. 

Pavol

PS: I am a big fan of opensource, openness, freedom, but also voluntary 
decisions.

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 02:30:58PM +0200, Dmytri Kleiner wrote:
> Commercialization makes your online rights irrelevant, more thoughts
> from my talk with @ioerror at #rp12
> 
> 
> Last week I wrote about one of the topics Jacob Appelbaum and I
> discussed at our talk at Re:publica 2012 {1}; that as a result of
> the commercialization of the Internet, we have moved from free and
> open social platform, to the centralized social media monopolies we
> know today. Today I want to mention another issue that we covered,
> how commercialization is putting an end to the Internet as a public
> space.
> 
> It's import to understand that it's not that capital does not want
> to fund free and open platforms, or that capitalists choose not to:
> capital simply can not do so.
> 
> Capital can not fund free and open platforms because capitalists
> must capture profit or lose their capital, and thus for-profit
> platforms that can not capture profit must eventually vanish.
> 
> In order to capture profit, capitalist funded platforms must
> introduce choke-points and/or toll-gates into there platforms,
> because their business models depends on the control of user data
> and interaction, and therefore these platforms can not be free and
> open.
> 
> Thus, the prospects for free and open platforms returning in any
> mainstream form seem slim without alternatives to the profit motive
> to finance them.
> 
> Free and open communication platforms that don't surveil, control or
> exclude can only be provided socially, as a public good.
> 
> However, in the current era of unchallenged neoliberal ideology
> imposing public austerity and community precariousness everywhere,
> building the social capacity to create alternative platforms at a
> scale that can displace Facebook and the others seems unlikely.
> 
> As these are commercial platforms, which are operated for profit,
> you only have the privilege of using the private platforms so long
> as you use them in ways that benefit the platform operator.
> 
> The result of this, is that using these platforms becomes the only
> popularly accessible way to communicate with the masses, whether
> your an activist, an artist, a journalist or anybody who has
> something to say, privately run social media platforms are the only
> way you have to reach the majority of people.
> 
> Activists, artists and journalists often have things to say that
> upset people, sometimes powerful people, who can create problems for
> the platform operators.
> 
> As nobody has any explicit right to use a private social platform,
> these platforms have a strong incentive to remove users and content
> that may may create controversy.
> 
> The early internet was conceived as a sort of virtual public space.
> In his 1996 "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" John
> Perry Barlow writes "We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere
> may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear
> of being coerced into silence or conformity."
> 
> Barlow's colleague John Gilmore famously claimed "The Net interprets
> censorship as damage and routes around it."
> 
> The critical feature of the Net that gave rise to such freedom was
> the mesh topology of the network and the distributed and
> peer-to-peer architecture of the applications that ran on it.
> 
> The early Internet was a social platform that allowed groups and
> individuals to interact directly with each other, and thus, such
> communications where unmediated by any public or private third
> party. As a result, it was difficult to monitor and control such
> communications.
> 
> To preserve this freedom Barlow and Gilmore became two of the
> founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with Barlow's
> declaration becoming something of a manifesto for the group.
> 
> The immediate threat was Government legislation intended to make the
> net more suitable for the purposes of commerce and law enforcement.
> 
> Barlow's declaration warns how legislation such as the
> "Telecommunications Reform Act" (Telecommunications Act of 1996) are
> threatening to destroy the freedom of cyberspace. Barlow was so
> offended he claimed that the US 1996 act is one "which repudiates
> your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson,
> Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis."
> 
> The 1996 act was followed by many more in the US, as well as other
> countries. Some of these are well known. DMCA, SOPA, ACTA, The
> Digital Economy act 2010, the list goes on an on, all with the usual
> concerns: piracy and cybercrime. All part of the effort to make the
> Net safe for business and under the control of law enforcement.
> 
> Yet, none of these laws where ever able to totally take away the
> freedom Gilmore and Barlow saught to protect.
> 
> Since legislation is a public sphere, there is public contestation.
> 
> These laws where opposed by the EFF, along with other groups such as
> Le Quadrature du Net, along with large social mobilizations, and
> even by the emergence of a political wing in the form of the Pirate
> Party phenomenon.
> 
> Even if much of the opposition failed, some succeed. Certain laws
> where delayed, a few totally defeated, and many modified to include
> concessions.
> 
> Opposition did not only take political form, the laws where also
> flaunted and simply shown-up by inspiring renegade sites such as the
> Pirate Bay.
> 
> Legislating the public internet was no easy task when the people
> where willing to fight for their online rights.
> 
> Laws such as the DMCA where conceived in the days of a peer-to-peer
> internet. When groups and individuals controlled their own means of
> communications, by, for instance, running their own mail and news
> servers, their own web servers, etc.
> 
> If somebody was hosting content somebody else objected to, coercive
> laws where required to force the person to remove the content from
> their own server.
> 
> While these laws where written in such ways so as to favour the
> interests of intellectual property holders and law enforcers, they
> where none-the-less regulating the internet as a public sphere. They
> recognize some rights and liberties for both sides, and, though with
> unequal capacity, both sides had the chance to fight for these
> rights and liberties.
> 
> However, starved of sufficient financing, the original distributed
> and peer to peer applications that where the communications tools of
> the public internet began to be abandoned.
> 
> As capital can not fund such platforms, online communications has
> largely moved to privately controlled social media platforms. Being
> private, they are not subject to the contestation of the public
> sphere.
> 
> Our social space online has moved from the public square to the
> shopping mall.
> 
> From the public sphere where we can fight for our rights and
> influence the laws and bylaws that govern our conduct, where we can
> engage in civil disobedience when we oppose the rules, to the
> private sphere, where we have no rights, and can be expelled and
> excluded at the pleasure of the private owners of the platforms.
> 
> Today, if somebody is hosting content that somebody else objects to,
> that content is not likely to be hosted by a server they control,
> but rather by a commercial social platform. Such content can be
> removed with no due process, with no recognition of the rights and
> liberties of both parties, simply the unilaterally imposed rules of
> the platform operator.
> 
> In the case that the content is controversial, and the objecting
> party is powerful, the operator has strong incentive to remove it,
> and very little incentive to put themselves at risk to keep the
> content online.
> 
> The powerful interest that wish to control content online no longer
> need coersive laws to do so, they simply need co-operation from the
> platform owners. Such co-operation is happily provided by most
> operators, and is often even a precondition of their financing.
> 
> Commercialization has made online rights irrelevant
> 
> The world where "anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no
> matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or
> conformity" can not exist on Facebook, and can not be built by
> capital.
> 
> 
> A sharable version can be found online here: http://wp.me/p24fqL-xK
> 
> 
> I'll be at Cafe Buchhandlung at 9pm as usual tonight. Please join us.
> 
> {1} http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/
> {2} http://bit.ly/buchhandung
> 
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