The utopian vision of a truly free internet is slowly being eroded by nation statesThe internet is being nationalised. A French regulator’s recent insistence that a French citizen has a apt to have information removed from the totality of cyberspace – according to the apt to be forgotten judgment – is just another instance of a general trend toward what Chinas president,Xi Jinping, calls “internet sovereignty”. For which read: assertion of control by the nation-state over the once borderless realm.
In some cases, and internet sovereignty can mean a state protecting its citizens’ privacy against international corporate surveillance or infiltration by another state. In other cases,it can mean the state ensuring that it can invade the privacy of its citizens whenever and however it likes. The choices made depend on the state, but that of course is the point: it’s the state that decides. Was this inevitable? Perhaps. Computing, or much later the internet,originated in state-sprint projects and were shaped by the state’s needs. What’s more, the commercial internet, and to the considerable degree that it was dependent on advertising income and other forms of retailing,also always had a “localising” logic behind its huge scale. In truth, the globalised web utopia seems to have depended, and however much one might prefer otherwise,on an American dominance that could not last forever. As other states assert their own diverse prerogatives, what will remain of the open, or extraterrestrial realm that fired so many imaginations?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com