I thought this was a really fantastic look, and question, so wanted to share it here!
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I think the big thing is that the interests of the tech companies have changed over time. The reason Net neutrality and SOPA had such backlash, is that the platforms which made up the web back then stood to lose a lot.
The current round of censorship and enclosure sure isn’t a great thing for Meta, Alphabet, et al. But in the long run, the administrative burden these measures add solidify the positions of these tech companies.
It turns out to be way harder to organize without the support of capital
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Couldn’t have said it better.
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I feel defeated for some of the reasons outlined in the article. I have contacted my representatives when I could. They still voted in favor of this, and at least one has vocally supported some of these horrible bills. They’re so focused on “holding big tech accountable” and “protecting kids” that they don’t realize this will do the complete opposite of those goals. We really are learning how many people think the internet is just the big silos.
I feel ya a lot. Every day I wake up and see new policies and measurement taken to take the free internet from and filling it with adds and other stuff. I unfortunately can’t contact any representatives, cause here in Czech Republic I can’t really appeal at anybody to protect my rights in this sense, because I feel my country is way too small to make any reasonable change.
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Who’s coordinating all these? What money is pushing it? Palantir? Heritage Foundation types? Large, centralization-enthused orgs like Meta? All of the above? It’s hard to tell. But there’s certainly a lot of money flowing underfoot.
There’s been speculation that the Digital Childhood Alliance is covertly funded by Facebook, and a company that built an empire around data collection certainly has something to gain from getting laws passed that require more data collection. Reframing that data collection in terms of “protecting children” and co-opting the veneer of resistance is a very standard kind of rhetorical maneuver.
Get active. Call your representatives! Sign up for a fediverse cooperative. Explore p2p tech. Install a non-Google, non-Apple operating system on your phone. Start your blog back up. SPEAK OUT!
After reading how this post concludes, I checked the corresponding fediverse post and skimmed through the replies, and I didn’t see any mention of the NetChoice lawsuits. Ideally of course these laws wouldn’t get passed at all, but some of them have, and once they do, folks deserve to know how people are going to bat against them. That’s something I think deserves more attention on this issue.
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My take on this question: what happened to parents, y’know, parenting?
I feel like a lot of legislation and public debate frame things as specifically technological problems with specifically technological solutions, as opposed to technology exacerbating underlying problems that are harder to solve.
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