Does anybody still believe cyberspace is a land without controls, without borders, without laws? The Internet-is-freedom hype from the mid-1990s seems to have finally died out even amongst popular commentators, to say nothing about more sophisticated analysts who have been saying this for some time now.
There are two now-obvious reasons that the border-less Internet was a mythical beast. The first is that the infrastructure of the Internet is rooted firmly within national borders. The Internet is nothing if not its infrastructure, the wired and wireless connections between individual computers that make up its communication network. While the popular idea of this is as a completely decentralized, unruly mess, in reality most of the main passageways are controlled by a handful of major corporations, and these corporations are, unsurprisingly, not only influenced by national laws, but are also the creators of laws that serve their corporate interests (e.g. the “net neutrality” issue, where the central contention is whether broadband carriers can set up different bandwidth pricing schemes based on the sites being visited).
The second is that the powers-that-be — the governments and corporations which have the most stakes in regulating certain types of communication — are considerably more powerful than the powers-that-would-be-free. This is not a conspiratorial statement; rather, it is a simple observation that the resources that can be spent on controlling information vastly outnumber the resources available by those who would like it to be free.
The result has been a progressive clamping down on communication freedoms that shows no sign of abating. (more…)