How the Internet was Stolen

foreign this is a story of deceptive manipulation big money political lobbying lawsuits and ultimately covert theft the history of the Internet has been one of major thefts of capital from public investment and national infrastructure the expropriation of academic research from democratic sources open Alternatives illegally forced the market for devices to steal our privacy for profit is rapidly creeping into our homes, our cars, our watches, glasses and phones is a story of unethical business practices of the power of Monopoly, a story that could to have been different and, in the end, a story of competing hopes and dreams. for the future is a big story that needs to be told properly and in which that verb steal will be returned to steal can happen in many ways through the Force through dispossession through tricks power and cash of physical infrastructure and ideas attention and privacy can be

stolen

just as much as hardware and physical goods we will see how this story has some surprising parallels throughout history this is the story of ideologies battles court cases innovations lost hopes from Microsoft to Uber to eBay to US Google, Department of Defense to dimly lit university laboratories in basements, from Napster to 911, this is the history of the Internet abroad, all of this can be fed into the computer through these magnetic tapes to a speed of 12,000 numbers or letters per second on the web as we do.

We have come to know that it is a big ocean, we know that we only swim by paddling on its surface, we never dive deeper than the first pages of search results, we rarely interact outside of our own social network, we swim occasionally to find new journalists or creators. follow some new products to buy, but its depth of what it is made of how it was made the history that shaped it what lies beneath its surface what might be possible to remain as the ocean surprisingly unknown to us the

internet

was meant to be a new Utopia is a tool of freedom, fraternity, equality of radical democracy and freedom, and it could have had its moment, but it has a tool celebrated for its openness turned into a kind of cage.

To understand this, we have to look at the values ​​of those who built it. why and how it was designed what motivated its pioneers and look what they faced look what changed them because the history of the Internet perhaps more than any other story of our present moment is the story of the future today is a new moon in the sky a 23-inch metal sphere placed into orbit by a Russian rocket our satellite program has never been run as a race with other nations The Internet is a complicated system, even when Charles Babbage designed the first mechanical computer or calculator in 1819, it was Too complicated for Babbage to finance on his own, he received a grant of 17,000 pounds (a fortune at the time) from the British government to finance his project, which ultimately failed for a long time during the Industrial Revolution.

Individual innovators could design and build machines that were the most complicated devices ever imagined and they could do it alone, but with computers this was no longer true. Source transmitter channel Message destination channel The first two modern computers were built at the University of Illinois Innovation Center in 1951 and were funded by the Department of Defense and the US Army just 18 years later, in 1969, at the height of the Counterculture Revolution, four computer terminals were connected remotely for the first time at US universities, from California to Utah. The project was the ongoing result of Department of Defense funding through DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, investment that would cost the American taxpayer $124 million, nearly $1 billion today.

The result of the work was a network called arpanet the advanced research projects agency network why so much money was spent since its inception arpanat was the culmination of two visions: the first was to find a way for academics to exchange data between institutions and, what's more important, sharing computing power that at that time was expensive, slow and valuable for university researchers. Arpa director Charles M. Hertzfield recalled that arpanet arose from our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country and that many researchers who should have access to them were geographically separated from them;

As historian Brian McCullough puts it, it was a researcher's dream of an academic utopia, but it was also a product of the Cold War, and deputy director Stephen Lukasik questioned how Hertzfield remembers its development, saying the goal was to exploit new computing technologies to satisfy military command and control needs against nuclear threats and achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces. and improve military tactical and administrative decision making to protect America's future Tomorrow's defense techniques had to be discovered now they were discovered in electronics, here's how wise and pristine computers entered military service as they As the Cold War developed, the US spent more and more on its growing military industrial complex working not only with industry but also with academics and universities Air Battle lightning ships the Air Force asked IBM for a computer capable of translate changing volumes of data into a continuous stream of interpretations open your eyes what can you see around the wind of the open sky over the sounds of sirens this is a dream enter the royal scar hold a diamond disc throw it away defense aerial required split-second presentation as well as split-second calculations.

Many academics wanted arpanets to be open to all. Researchers funded by taxpayers or universities should be able to access it, so they believed there had to be a common universal language that supported how the new communication network operated. Steve Crocker, the inventor of some of the first protocols used by the Internet. on said they were looking at ways to make the procedures open so they could be added to, changed and updated democratically. It is important that no institution should be in charge when MIT administrators began to lock doors or put passwords on computers that until then anyone could reserve a space to use and experiment with students and researchers would defend themselves began to call themselves hackers a young enthusiast named Richard Stallman remembers that anyone who dared to lock a terminal in his office said because he was a professor and thought it was more important that other people would probably find his door open until the next morning.

I would just climb on the roof or under the floor, take out the terminal or leave the door open with a note saying what a big inconvenience it is to have to go under the floor. so please don't bother people anymore by closing the door. There is a large key in the AI ​​lab called the seventh floor master key that will be used in case someone dares to lock one of the fancier terminals. As Arpanet proved useful to other government agencies. sought at the NSF, the National Science Foundation created the NSF network in 1985 and eventually linked more universities across the country in 1977.

The first transmissions were made wirelessly around the world. Under the sea to space and then back to where they started and in the early 80s NSF was investing heavily in infrastructure, they built a backbone in the US that could connect universities with other research institutions. Today, the NSF website states that throughout its existence, NSF net transmitted free of charge to institutions any US research and education traffic that might reach it in the At the same time, the number of computers connected to the Internet increased from 2,000 in 1985 to more than 2 million in 1993. To handle the growing data traffic, the NSF backbone network became the first national 45-megabit-per-second Internet network in 1991. any school It could apply for an NSF grant to connect to the network, but its popularity would become its undoing in the '90s, the infrastructure was becoming overloaded, and there wasn't much desire to increase funding.

At the height of the neoliberal period, the NSF continued to improve itself, but failed. To keep up with demand, data was and is measured in packets and in 1988 one million packets of traffic were sent over the network; by 1992, just four years later, this had increased to 150 billion. Commercial use was prohibited. The network was to be used for research and education only, a 1982 MIT manual states that personal messages to other arpanet subscribers, for example to arrange a meeting or a friendly check-and-greet again, are generally not considered harmful. Sending email through arpanet for commercial or political purposes is anti-social and illegal.

When sending this type of messages you can offend many people at the same time, small commercial operators began to provide alternatives using the same protocols as nsfnet. and often hiring DARPA researchers. Pressure to change the way the network operated increased as more and more people and more and more institutions wanted to join. The day was sometimes over in 1991. Democratic Senator Al Gore began working on a Computer and Communications Act. high performance arguing that, of course, the market should have access to this new information superhighway, but that a Middle Way was important. Senator Daniel Inouye argued that the legislation should preserve 20 of the infrastructure for public use to provide quotes libraries education nonprofit organizations government agencies museums to provide educational information cultural civic or charitable services directly to the public free of charge this would be based on the law public broadcasting To supplement private media with publicly funded ad-free television and radio programs to provide an alternative like highways—the information superhighway was, after all, publicly owned—a group called the Public Broadcasting Roundtable was formed.

Telecommunications Policies, its co-founder Jeffrey Chester told the New York Times. In 1993 there should be a national debate about what kind of media system we should have. The debate has so far been framed by a handful of communications giants who have been working overtime to convince the American people that the data superhighway will be little more than a virtual electronic mall that seemed to most like a partnership. Public-private was inevitable and Gore, with his support for a public Internet, became Bill Clinton's running mate for the presidency, but when Clinton won the election in 1993, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan visited and convinced him.

He told her that the new computer network in the hands of industries and banking could revolutionize the economy by using vast stores of data and super calculations to protect against investments. America could enter a new era of prosperity in which the economy would be perfectly balanced and everyone would prosper. After a period of boom and bust as Clinton Gore and the Democratic Party received one hundred and twenty thousand dollars in contributions from a consortium of telecommunications giants, Gore suddenly changed his mind about public-private partnership. Telecommunications should be deregulated. the NSF Nat infrastructure should be sold. and all left to the whims of the market American consumers want the options that competition offers The Communications Act of 1995 will give them those options The Mitigations Act of 1995 will promote competition and virtually all telecommunications markets While this was happening, the NSF had outsourced the network operator to a consortium called Merit Merit was made up of representatives from universities, research institutions, and major computer companies such as IBM in 1991.

Merit first began selling network access to more and more those who were accused of carrying out clandestine transactions and profiting. So many members of the network were outraged that congressional hearings were called in 1992. Businessman William Schrader testified that it was like giving a federal park to Kmart, but it was too late and it was decided that NSF Nat would be broken up and transferred to corporations with the The delivered infrastructure was officially dismantled in 1995 with barely a whimper of protest a a couple of years later, in 1998. The Washington Postreported that the country's local long-distance wireless telephone had generated $66 million in legislative and regulatory lobbying since 1996, more than the Aerospace tobacco sector. and the gaming lobbies combined, the main donors during the 1997 to 1998 political year were T with almost 2 million, Bell Atlantic with just over one and a half million, Bell South with the same CBC with 1.2 million and MCI with almost a million to which the money was donated.

Candidates of both parties, Democrat Edward J. Markey, heavily involved in telecommunications legislation, received 124,000 donations, but Clinton himself was the largest recipient, receiving $169,000, of which at least $1 billion has been transferred of current public investment in networks. With little fanfare for the private sector, the Internet is part of a long history of computing that has depended on public money and public investment from that first computer to the father of modern computing, Alan Turing, who worked on government projects in the Second World War in Great Britain and the first IBM. The digital computer is the result of a Department of Defense contract during the Korean War.

Additionally, California's economy more broadly relies on government investment in aircraft and missile defense and military electronics, as well as irrigation systems, roads, and universities. The Pentagon has been very involved in helping corporations. invests in R&D in everything from jet engines to transistors, circuits, lasers and fiber optics. Today, the Pentagon works and finances at least 600 laboratories throughout the United States, as the American scientist explains. In truth, no private company would have been able to develop a project like the Internet, which required years of research efforts spread across dozens of remote agencies and which began to take off only after decades of investment.

Meanwhile, in California, a pair of young computer geeks have been working on the first user-friendly programming language. Bill Gates and Paul Allen struck a deal with electronics company mits to distribute their new basic language with the 8800 exterior. in 1978. The Exterior was one of the first new, affordable microcomputers, primarily advertised to computer enthusiasts, hobbyists, and hobbyists through Electronics. magazines by mail this informal network of hobbyists was generating a new home Computer Revolution they joined clubs and shared ideas and software they had received with mail order Hardware Gates was infuriated because he believed that the only way to popularize and innovate further in the computing was whether programmers were paid for their software and for their time, he wrote a widely cited letter called Open Letters Hobbyists in 1976.

In it, Gates reported that less than 10 percent of users had purchased commodities themselves and that, taken together, this reduced his and Alan's hourly compensation to less than two dollars an hour. a bad negotiation with alter there was nothing wrong with selling software with computers but there was nothing wrong with sharing it afterwards and despite their salary of two dollars an hour Microsoft quickly became the largest company in the world by the year 2000 they would have a stake of the personal computing market and despite Gates's argument for strong intellectual property rights in the 1980s Microsoft Apple and Xerox were in a race to build the first graphical interface for computers and were borrowing and stealing ideas from each other. from others with such frequency that they were all embroiled in lawsuits and countersuits against the other Apple argued that my Microsoft had

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the Kuwaiti look and feel of its operating system and Xerox had argued that Steve Jobs had copied its own work, specifically the design of a maze On a visit to their headquarters, the judge decided that of the 189 claims that Microsoft Apple and Xerox were making only 10 could be upheld in court with an agreement to install Microsoft DOS and then Microsoft Windows on IBM computers with a graphical user interface. borrowed from Apple and a strong disdain for free open source software or shareware Microsoft quickly dominated the foreign market a computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee came up with an idea that combined the Internet infrastructure developed by harp, which focused on sharing files and computing power, with a simple text-based delivery system.

He wrote an announcement saying that the World Wide Web project had been started. To enable high energy physicists to share data, news and documentation, we are very interested in spreading the web to other areas and having Gateway servers for other data contributors. Welcome, the World Wide Web was unceremoniously launched with a few dozen servers communicating with each other around the world. one of those servers was at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, a research department funded by the US government, the World Wide Web servers discussed how the project would work, they needed a language of programming that converted Internet code into HTML and an application to translate that code, what would be known as a web browser, berners-lee worked on the first very basic web browser, but a 21-year-old graduate of that National Center for nsca supercomputing applications Mark Andreessen decided to work on a browser that would be easy to use.

Andresen remembers that there was a clear element among academics of not wanting to make it easier or wanting to keep out the riff-raff. He and his colleague Eric thought that the World Wide Web should be easy to use and have the ability to include graphics. Berners-Lee disagreed, thinking that they should only include text and perhaps some diagrams, all that would be necessary to share things. as scientific papers, but at the University, Drayson and his colleagues worked hard on a brazzer that they launched in 1993 former Berners mosaic. -lee published an exciting new global web browser written by NCSA's Mark Andreessen when Mosaic was launched there were a few hundred websites up and running around the world two years later in 1994 there were already tens of thousands in the first 18 months Three million of people installed the new browser.

Fortune magazine listed Mosaic as its product of the year. By writing this software is transforming the Internet into a viable network rather than an intimidating domain of nerds, the NCSA began to take note of what until now had been a small project and in 1994, Andreyson stopped working on a commercial version of Mosaic. Riser, took the same team and, with the help of investors, started what they called Mozilla the Mosaic Killer, the world's first Internet startup. People magazine named Andresen as one of the most important of the year. Intriguing people Fortune listed them among the top 25 companies the company they eventually called Netscape was private but they adopted the open practices that were dominant in computing at the time instead of patenting features of their browser that they wanted others to be able to copy and use those. functions in the hope that they will become standard SSL, for example, this security information was a Netscape innovation, but anyone could use it.

It's now used everywhere they wanted users to be able to add feature plugins like Microsoft wanted the platform to be. that other developers would see as standard and create their own software because, for these reasons, they decided to adopt a new business model: the browser would be free for public use in the hope of achieving dominance and because it aligned with the existing computing culture of sharing and share. Similar technology writer Glenn Moody writes that this new logic introduced the idea of ​​capturing market share by giving away free software and then generating profits in other ways from the resulting installed base;

In other words, the launch of Mosaic Netscape marked the first example of the new Internet economy. which have since come to dominate the software world and beyond and you can access pages again just by pressing the usual buttons like next and back and glossary and all that kind of stuff and here we are now with the familiar kind of Windows graphics . of several pages superimposed on each other, that's right, yes, from Netscape, which is the browser that is used correctly, with the most well-known browser, well, it is actually Mozilla brazer, it was downloaded six million times in a few months and quickly They achieved 90 percent user engagement while also selling a corporate version with technical support for 39.

When the University of Illinois found out Mozilla threatened to sue alleging that Andreasen and his team had stolen the code from John Mittelhauser University one of the developers responded that we didn't want to take any of the old Mosaic code, that's what we wanted to start from scratch, we wanted to do it right, however, Mozilla ended up paying the university $2.2 million in damages and agreed to change the name from Mozilla to Netscape when the company went public in 1995. The stock value quickly tripled and Drayson appeared on the cover of Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal wrote that it took General Dynamics Corp 43 years to become a corporation with a value of 2.7 billion dollars.

It took Netscape Communications Corp about one minute over 18 months. It had 38 million users. and had reached $533 million in revenue by 1997. Meanwhile, Bill Gates was skeptical about the Internet, knowing that eventually the technology would be advanced enough to play videos and interact in some way between homes, but he didn't believe that anyone I would like to do it. sitting in front of his computer at a desk thinking instead that the television would be the medium at the center of the change when he saw how popular Netscape had become, he quickly turned around and licensed the original Mosaic source code from the University of Illinois. and quickly launched the first version of Microsoft's own browser, Internet Explorer, in 1995.

The difference was that it was completely free. Gate said one thing to remember about Microsoft: we don't need to make any revenue from Internet software, the launch of Windows 1995 was huge. the Empire State Building was illuminated in the colors of the Windows logo the commercial featured the Rolling Stones this happened in the new operating system came preloaded with Internet Explorer Steve Jobs said that if Microsoft's competitors couldn't keep up in the next two years, Microsoft will own the web and that will be the end Microsoft increased its efforts its browser department grew from six to a thousand employees in 1999 they required manufacturers to install Internet Explorer if it was not already installed and included a line in their contract Quote prohibiting modifying or removing any part of Windows 95, including Internet Explorer, before it shipped In a desperate attempt to survive, Netscape attempted to deal directly with computer manufacturers such as Compact and Microsoft responded by threatening compact with lawsuit and ban from using Windows Compact was immediately retracted in 1995. 90% of Netscape's revenue came from licensing its browser, while 97% was squeezed out by Microsoft's monopoly position, which was below 20 percent.

Netscape wrote a letter to the US Department of Justice complaining that Microsoft was using its position to drive Netscape out of the market by preventing them from dealing with manufacturers in the first quarter of 1998. Netscape reported a loss for the first time and Internet Explorer took the lead. first place in user engagement in May of that year 20 states and the Department of Justice filed antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft's lawsuit. This continued for several years and in 2001 Microsoft was found guilty of monopolistic practices. Judge Thomas Jackson said that Microsoft had maintained its monopoly power by anti-competitive means and had attempted to monopolize the web browser market.

The allergy towards monopoly had always been fundamental to philosophy. The culture of the early American settlers had been fleeing the twin monopolies of Church and State in England. Government-granted monopolies were the norm. Thomas Payne had said that England was divided into monopolies. Historian Christopher Hill writes that a 17th-century Englishman lived in a house built of Monopoly bricks with windows, if some Monopoly glass heated by Monopoly coal in Ireland Monopoly Wood burning in a grape made of Monopoly iron slept on feathers Monopoly combed his hair with Monopoly brushes and Monopoly combs, washed his clothes in Monopoly starch with Monopoly soap, dressed in Monopoly lace, Monopoly linen, Monopoly leather, Monopoly gold thread, and his pants were tied with monopoly belts,Monopoly buttons, Monopoly pins, food was seasoned with Monopoly salt, Monopoly pepper, Monopoly vinegar, and mice caught in Monopoly mouse traps as early as 1641, Massachusetts.

The law declared that no monopolies will be granted or permitted among us except those that are new inventions that are profitable to the country and that for a short time the American Revolution had begun as a revolt against the monopoly power of the East India Company as protesters over their tea in Boston Harbor Maryland's first constitution in 1776 said that monopolies are odious, contrary to the spirit of free government and the principles of commerce, and should not be tolerated. The Carolinas were similar. This antitrust culture continued until the 19th century, when the robber barons. They attempted to monopolize the railroad and telegraph oil industries while suppressing strikes and unions, reducing wages and art, artificially inflating prices in response, the Sherman Act was introduced in 1890, the first section prohibits any combination of contracts or conspiracy to restrict the commerce and the second makes it illegal for any person or form to monopolize any part of commerce between several States or with foreign nations.

My name is Richard Urowski and I represent Microsoft. These are appeals from a final ruling finding Microsoft defamed under sections one and two of the Sherman and ordering the dissolution of the company, as well as other extreme measures, Judge Jackson decided that Microsoft violated the first section by forcing manufacturers to include Internet Explorer; The second part, using its market dominance to force a monopoly, the judge concluded that Microsoft used incentives and threats to pressure manufacturers to adopt promotional and technical distribution efforts that would favor Internet Explorer at the expense of Netscape Navigator. He suggested that Microsoft split into two companies, one that would run its operating systems and the other its software, of course, never this. happened when the Bush administration took office in 2001, the verdict was appealed and overturned, instead Microsoft made a deal that required them to open their APIs, i.e. their application processing interfaces, and also refrain from monopolistic practices .

Opening up its APIs means that third-party developers could have more access to effectively design software that worked with the nuts and bolts of Windows by effectively opening Bonnet and allowing applications to interact with all components with the intention of opening up Microsoft and allowing greater competition and innovation. They also had to accept consent decrees prohibiting them. to retaliate against manufacturers who might develop, distribute, promote the use of cells or license any non-Microsoft software, on the one hand this was a victory for Microsoft, but on the other, Microsoft got a bit distracted while new and unexpected competitors grew to challenge its dominance and even appeal.

It meant that Microsoft didn't have to play ball with giving its rivals ammunition that could be used against the company. It meant that Microsoft had to consider the legal repercussions before acting in the future. Without the trial, the Internet might have taken a different path dominated by Microsoft. have become a kind of AOL walled garden, an Internet built into the architecture of Windows itself running on some kind of grotesque Microsoft software, and forcing Microsoft to open up those APIs, called interoperability, is something that could be useful for some challenges will arrive today while Microsoft was distracted America Online was staging a coup d'état had been successful by offering a service that connected to the privatized Internet infrastructure you entered a web portal by doing so your users entered a web portal which acted as a directory of sites, news, chats, email, weather and other similar categories just before his trial, Gates had approached aolceo Steve Case and said: I can buy 20 of you or I can buy all of you or I can come in in this business myself and bury you, AOL, decided to fight like Netscape.

They knew that market saturation was key. The company spent a quarter of a million on AOL test discs to distribute in magazines. It worked. The conversion rate was an unprecedented 10 percent and suddenly AOL was everywhere marketing Mogul Yan. Brandt, who worked on the campaign, said he took the drive, put it in the computer, signed up and gave us a credit card when I saw that, honestly, it was better than the sex in his story. McCullough writes that AOL discs began arriving in Americans' mailboxes, seemingly daily, on almost every computer. The manufacturer shipped an AOL drive with a new computer.

AOL discs were given away with movie rentals at Blockbuster. AOL discs were left on the seats at football games. At one point, Brandt even tested whether disks could survive flash freezing so he could give away AOL. records with Omaha Stakes incredibly half of the CDs manufactured at that time were for AOL its customers tripled in one year Microsoft responded with its own web portal called MSN the Microsoft network but AOL dominated was the Internet as Microsoft AOL used its dominance to squeeze or buy its competitors it was so lucrative to be on the aol web portal that companies were giving millions of dollars to the Dr Coop ipo'd health website and raised $85 million spending it all on a four-year contract with AOL to provide its users with health content Tel save paid them one hundred million dollars Barnes and Noble 40 million Amazon 19 million eBay 75 million should be on their home portal the most coveted position on the High Street network a store in the digital Times Square One businessman remembered that AOL had demanded 30 from his company and then, just in case, they tell us that these are our terms, you have 24 hours to respond and, if you are not wrong, you will go to your competitor.

AOL's stock price skyrocketed by 80,000 throughout the '90s, but even in its heyday, cable companies were beginning to develop faster, cheaper ways to connect to the Internet. AOL and Microsoft imagine themselves as walled gardens that control and master their own cyberspace, desperate to keep the hordes of invaders and competitors at bay. Like the settlers who came to America, many imagined cyberspace as an empty canvas, a state of nature, an ethereal region where civilization could begin anew unfettered by corrosive power, corporate domination, corrupt politics where a new kind of freedom democracy could flourish like a blank slate.

Many imagined it as a lawless country, but as a pre-colonial America that was theorized as a good thing because it was known that better ideas could be written in it. In 1995, two media scholars, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, wrote an influential article about what they saw emerging in Silicon Valley. They called it the Californian ideology. Barbara Can Cameron argued that this new ideology was the product of an informal alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the west coast of the US, they said it was a strange fusion of cultural bohemia with the high technology industry.

Combining the free spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies, Californian ideologues imagined a new world made possible through computers where everyone would be at once modern, rich and free. The computer revolution is often compared to the famous importance and scope of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution effectively freed man from being a beast of burden. The Computer Revolution will suddenly free you from a boring and repetitive routine. However, the Information Revolution is perhaps best compared to the Copernican or Darwinian revolution, both of which greatly change man's idea of ​​himself in the world. for which he lives, this ideology, the best of all worlds, emerged from two places, one progressive liberal that rejected the narrow confines of conformist postwar American corporate values.

This place celebrated difference in everything related to gay rights, feminism, literature, music and recreational drug use, they despised the old forms of power and the repression that kept the true inner self locked away, they believed that the Internet could generate a new radical democracy where people were free to organize and express themselves in new ways by voting directly on the issues that affected them they shared software and computer parts in computer clubs Homebrew was a new class, a virtual class, but tailored who built businesses and joined companies, came into contact with traditional businessmen, venture capitalists and financiers, through them they adopted the idea that they should be left alone, free of everything. free regulation of meddling governments to print their Vision on that blank canvas of cyberspace regulated only by the Invisible Hand of the market Barbara Can Cameron asked well, the advent of hypermedia realized that the utopias of the new left or the new rape are a hybrid.

Californian ideology happily responds to this enigma by believing in both visions at the same time and not criticizing either of them. The ideology of the left and the right combined in support of a new type of Jeffersonian democracy, small direct democracies where everyone would own property and everyone would vote and everyone is involved in managing their own lives, their own affairs, the problem and this was a key line from their 1995 article was that hippies cannot challenge the primacy of the market over their lives, but they said they are hidden away from Silicon Valley in Chinese factories. in the extraction of necessary materials in developing countries in right-wing policies hostile to unions in the weakening of welfare and social security a new underclass was emerging they said that the dispossessed only participate in the information age by providing labor cheap non-union labor for the unhealthy factories of the Silicon Valley chip manufacturers and warned that Freedom Technologies are becoming machines of domination one of the believers in this new digital utopia was a man named Pierre Omada in the early years from Silicon Valley Omadar co-founded an e-pen startup that sold to Microsoft for $50 million in 1996.

Omada began working on a new libertarian platform that he believed would revolutionize commerce by allowing people to find exactly what they wanted and allowing that the Invisible Hand of the market perfectly calibrated the price. all without the need for third party interference. He believed that by removing any interference the perfect Online Marketplace could be created. His idea was an auction website and he said that if there is more than one person interested in an item, let them fight. The seller, by definition, would get the market price of the item, whatever that was, on any given day.

He launched the auction website, which he later renamed eBay and was initially completely free of interference. There was nothing, no payment feature, no ratings, no regulatory infrastructure, just connected buyers. sellers who would fill out the details of the transaction on their own from the beginning, the site was a success, but investors were wary of what Auctionweb did. There were no goods provided, no real services. One investor said they own nothing. They have buildings, they don't have trucks, this of course is exactly what Omadar wanted, he wanted the community to regulate itself, he encouraged users to talk to each other, share tips and finally leave reviews of many of the companies that were. that soon went bankrupt with the.com crisis in the early 2000s, were traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, pets.com, sofa companies, even the first grocery delivery services, and at the turn of the millennium, hundreds Of these companies went bankrupt, but eBay continued to grow. a new type of service a pure intermediary a simple platform a basis for a community of buyers and sellers without real own content without stock or warehouses but the idea that it did not have its own content that it did not have It did not have to do any regulation and it turned out to be a McCullough writes that the market turned out to be imperfect.

He writes that disputes arose between buyers and sellers and that Omidar was frequently called upon to decide that he did not want to have to act as an arbitrator, so he came up with a way to help users resolve it themselves. A forum where people left comments about each other creating a sort of rating system. He gave praise when it was due, he said in a letter posted on the site. File complaints when appropriate. Omadar had come across a The strange new dynamics of eBay were only possible thanks to the contributions of its users, but without some type of award, without some type of organization, the platform would collapse under its own weight in his book Internet for the people.

The writer oftechnology Ben Tarnoff writes that the auction website was not just an intermediary, it was also a legislator and an architect who wrote the rules for how people could interact and design the spaces where they did so. This was not in Omadar's plan. He initially wanted a marketplace run by its members, an ideal shaped by his libertarian beliefs. Anyone who had noticed eBay could have predicted that being a platform was both the future and that Californian ideology was based on flawed logic. Google Schmidt and Cohen's words that the online world is not truly subject to earthly laws;

It turned out to be the largest ungoverned space in the world. To be a misconception, there was no blank canvas, problems from the offline world were moving to the online world and new problems were emerging. We commented on later platforms like Uber Airbnb and Facebook, which we will turn to soon. Political scientist James Muldoon writes that platform owners claim their products in neutral spaces and that they simply provide an intermediary service to connect the parties, this is only half true through the design and architecture of the platform, the developers of Software play an active role not only in connecting the parts but also in shaping the conditions under which they operate.

The first ad on the Internet may have been this one from 1994 on hotwired.com because it had a huge click-through rate, people clicking on it just to see where it went. Clickable ads were a novelty that AOL and eBay had demonstrated. something that online businesses were not about selling but connecting, and it was Yahoo that was the first to realize that capturing more audiences and keeping their attention so they could serve them more ads was key to increasing revenue. Yahoo began as a project of two Stanford students, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web included their favorite websites and became the most popular home page on the local Internet, but Jerry and David had no way of make money, surely no one would accept ads polluting this small directory without another way to finance their project, they decided to try tentatively when the first ads were published.

Product Manager Tim Brady remembers that the email inbox was immediately flooded with people bothering us and telling us to take it down. What are you doing? You are ruining the network, but the traffic to the site. remained stable ads were grudgingly accepted and Yahoo began adding sections to attract more interests stocks horoscopes movies television travel weather the key was to match subgroups with ad groups one executive described it as a land grab Jerry Yang said we started with a search simple and that's our Seinfeld is still a big hit, so to speak, but we've also tried to develop must-see TV programming Yahoo finance Yahoo chat Yahoo mail we currently consider ourselves a media network, a Wall Street analyst told businessweek you have to looking at Yahoo as the new media company of the 21st century Meanwhile, looking at Yahoo's increasingly complicated board, two computer scientists, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, realized that there had to be a better way to organize the network in rather than humans deciding which websites would fall into which categories. and in what order, like AOL and Yahoo were doing, an algorithm should do it.

The algorithm they designed was deceptively simple. Any website that linked to another website was counted as one vote for that site. The more links a website had, the more popular it was. and the higher you ranked in the search rankings, it was easy, but innovative journalist David Kirkpatrick wrote an article in Fortune magazine in 1999. He typed the 1990 New York Yankees playoffs 29 into both Google and Alta Vista and said That first listing on Google took me directly to data about that night's game, the first two in Alta Vista linked to information about the 1998 World Series. Outside of Vista, he had to click the third link down and then click another link to find the game results.

He actually typed into Google. It works, but like Yahoo, Google had a hard time coming up with a business plan. Paige and Brynn hated advertising and decided on a licensing model instead. They signed deals with Yahoo and AOL to be powered by Google. While Yahoo saw the power of Google's innovation, they insisted it was a small part. of their service, the main directory would always be curated by humans, as humans were of course more trustworthy than algorithms when they realized that Google was the future. Yahoo tried to buy them for three billion dollars. Google rejected the offer.

Yahoo canceled their license and Google went to work on a new model and realize they had no choice but to make their search engine work on its own, but Paige and Brynn were academics, they still believed the online world was not really subject to Earth rules and thought their search engine should be scientific, not influenced by offline money At a conference in 1998, Bryn and Page presented a paper that pointed out that we expect ad-funded search engines to be inherently biased toward and away from advertisers. Due to consumer needs, this type of bias is very difficult to detect, but could still have a significant effect on the market.

We believe that the advertising issue generates enough mixed incentives, so it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the In the academic field Paige and Brynn were beginning to realize that markets could distort the utopian vision of early cyberspace abroad, at the same time Google was taking off. Sean Fanning, a young student programmer and hacker, was fascinated by a new type of sound file, small, compressed and quick to process. Downloading it was called MP3 and was shared by college students on Usenet newsgroups across campus. A 19-year-old student, Justin Frankl, had designed a program called Winamp that allowed him to organize and play his MP3s, but Fanning wanted an easier way to share them among friends.

He came up with a file-sharing app called Napster when he launched it in 1999; it was downloaded 10 million times in less than a year, with 73 percent of college students using it. Napster was on the cover of Rolling Stone and time, but some included Metallica's late Ulrich. They were outraged that their music could be shared for free. Ulrich went to the Napster office and personally delivered a list of 300,000 usernames of people who had pirated his music. Napster staged a counterprotest that same day and protesters chanted, "Lars, it's our music too." Fanning argued that Napster was just a middleman like eBay, but the Recording Industry Association of America sued.

It doesn't go through the Napster system. You don't even have his hands. Your fingerprints. You can't find them in those things. Can? fingerprints that you can't find because Napster doesn't want you, they don't touch them, they never have anything to do with it, they have my partner in New Jersey and my partner in Guam will have a direct connection to the Internet, right, but that's The way music is streamed is streamed over the Internet and we're not trying to stop the Internet, certainly, but it's the only way to admit that even on copyrighted material, a user can stream from New Jersey to Guam over the Internet and it was not an infringement, the advertising caused a surge of interest in Napster, the courts decided that Napster had to block copyrighted material or shut down and Fanning tried to implement a system to do so, but failed and after a few years the company went bankrupt. in 2002.

In reality, Fanning stated that he never wanted to give away music, he believed that artists should be paid, but he wanted an app store to grow quickly to test the concept and then reach a deal with record companies. McCullo writes that in Hindsight, there is no shortage of people, even within the music industry, who imagine how different the world would be if it had worked that way, if music companies had partnered with Napster and accepted the inevitability of the technology that Napster co-founder Sean Parker predicted at the time. that music will be ubiquitous and we believe that you will be able to listen to it on your cell phone, you will be able to listen to it on your stereo, you will be able to listen to it on any device in the future and I think people are willing to pay for the convenience LimeWire Basha and others tried to take napsa's place but forced to go underground none were as successful the music industry for its part was at the peak of its power having spent decades reissuing old vinyl albums on expensive new CDs and taking advantage of new media anklets like MTV to promote new artists , eBay, Google and Napster had something in common: they all thought it was possible to create a self-balancing platform where the supply of information perfectly met the demand, a self-sustaining rational system that, importantly, was free from interference from the offline world. , but inevitably everyone ran into the pressure of the physical world at Googleplex, investors were starting to demand profits after the.com crash, no one was thought to be safe, it seemed like you could have a winning model one day and you could disappear the next Google wondered if Google could turn their innovation into a profitable company, so Paige and Brynn accepted the advertising model and the results were unheard of in 2003, Google made $500 million in revenue in 10 years.

Google made more than $50 billion in revenue with Google Adwords McCullough writes Google was able to accomplish something surprising: It made the Internet profitable on a large scale for the first time. Between 2002 and 2006, the amount American advertisers spent online skyrocketed. tripled, the idea of ​​privacy has waxed and waned. In history, but in the modern period it has often been considered sacrosanct for an Englishman's house to be his castle, the idea of ​​rights arose from the notion that some parts of us were unviable and outside of private boundaries. Some theorists have argued that having a private place is a private right.

The space outside the boundaries of infringement is crucial for thinking about formulating and debating the ideas needed to have a good, functioning deliberative democracy. Early radio stations rejected the idea not only of advertising but even of speaking on the air. Surely no one would accept the blatant invasion of privacy. a stranger talking in their own home people would probably prefer to talk to each other anyway in the year 2000 a group of scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology worked on a project called warehouse whose goal was to study something they called ubiquitous computing a house full of different types of sensors designed to predict the needs of the inhabitants and make their lives easier but the researchers naturally assumed that the data would belong only to the people who lived in the house the purpose of the data was to make their lives easier meanwhile Google Also realizing that they were in the data industry, if their job was to predict what people wanted, the more data they had on people, the more effective they would be.

Google's mission statement was to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This applied to organic. search and advertising to match businesses with consumers to make advertising more efficient and relevant Google needed to expand the way they capture data Google's chief economist how Varian explained that Google's model was based on what they called data mining and analysis through better tracking, personalization and continuous experiments this was the key to Big Data and better prediction conclusion Larry Page had said that the problem with Google was that you had to ask it questions, it should already know what you are going to ask it Varian said that every user left behind a trail of breadcrumbs that Google euphemistically called Data Exhaustion.

He wrote that every action a user performs is considered a signal that must be analyzed and fed back to the system. In 2001, the site had said that the sensors are really cheap. Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enormous amounts of data, everything you have ever heard, seen or experienced will be searchable in your entire life. Google's main product, they realized, was predicting what a person wanted at any given time before searching for it, and the clues about what users were searching for often lay far from what they were typing in a search box.

Google wanted to know what users wanted before knowing what they wanted and what they wanted couldvary between geographic locations and weather depending on who they were talking to and what their situation was. Previous searches were the mood they were in and what they were doing at the time, so Google started investing in collecting all this data. They invested in email. Street View Mapping. Cameras. Integrated word processors and spreadsheets. Calendars. Photo and travel storage. thermostats anything that could tell them something about their users' interactions with the world began placing cookies on users' computers that could track them across third-party websites In 2015, a study found that if you visit the top 100 websites popular on the Internet, it would collect 6,000 cookies that track your online journey Google had cookies on 92 of those 100 sites and 923 on the top 1,000 sites.

The study concluded that Google's ability to track users on popular websites is unparalleled and approaches the level of surveillance that only an Internet service provider can achieve. They use hundreds of signals to predict what a user wants to see on a given moment. One study found that a single Google Nest device connected to so many other services and products that a user would have to read almost 1,000 terms and conditions. and privacy policies, another found that it would take 76 days to read every policy that affects us each year. Google bought a satellite imaging company called Skybox that could capture images so detailed that if you were to see exactly what was on your desktop, they began investing.

In Street View, with camera technology that went on backpacks, snowmobiles and boats to capture places that could not be reached by car, they began a project called Ground Truth that analyzed through deep mapping what they called a logical of places that tracked the paths people would take. ponds people sat in what the traffic was like which parks people used which buildings they entered at what times and which areas were busier than others Street View cars collected data from open Wi-Fi networks as they traveled around the world , including data from people homes a long list of countries from the United Kingdom to Japan complained in Germany residents could demand that their homes be erased Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has argued that we live in a new economic order that claims that Human experiences release raw materials for hidden commercial extraction practices. prediction and sales: this is the basis of a new surveillance economy in which our privacy is progressively invaded through an avalanche of new and smaller sensors, cameras, microphones and devices connected to dishwashers and ovens, smart speakers and doorbells in shopping centers and stores, restaurants and stadiums. data in the 21st century to coal in the 19th century Drives revolutionary change in the economy data becomes the raw material that can be transformed into an asset to sell advertisers smart beds that track sleeping positions and sell us different sheets new running shoes after a slow run vacation after a stressful day bad news when we are angry and celebrities get angry when we are bored clicking patterns are measured microphones listen for the tiniest details and food choices are used to predict Zuboff Health Patterns argues that surveillance capitalism is always looking for new supply routes, new devices, and new ways to collect new kinds of data about our lives.

She says this manifests itself in a logic of extension into as many areas of life as possible: your refrigerator, blender, dishwasher, bloodstream, and a logic of drilling down into richer, more precise, more detailed measurements about your emotions. , personality, sweat levels, temperature, hormone levels through digestible sensors or correlations between things like mood and music and movie selection or the inflection and decibel levels of your voice while having certain conversations with certain people in Sometimes all of this is measured to predict how we might act in the future, and when combined with advertising or the delivery of news or information to click on, it is about subtly nudging us into action, our present state is measured. incessantly so that the future. attention can be captured stolen surveillance assets act as raw material for digital divination according to zuboff the tentacles of surveillance capitalism push, cajole, tune and herd Behavior directed at our desires is like casting a net leaving a hook in place right with enough bait with the right wording the right photo at the right time in the right place while under the influence of the right emotion to push us towards the highest bidder for our attention.

Zuboff says that users were no longer ends in themselves but became means to the ends of others. You may remember that we launched our Nico video into cyberspace, which is obviously where he is now with an Internet diary on the popular Myspace site in your arms. When Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, he quickly realized that the social graph was a treasure trove of useful data. He became obsessed with measuring it. He saw something Myspace hadn't seen and Friendster hadn't been able to tap into: we were fascinated by the people closest to us. Zuckerberg carefully studied what the students called the Facebook trans.

The addictive state of endlessly clicking on your friends' profiles, the students were obsessed with finding out what was new, but they had to click on each profile to find out. Facebook designed an innovative solution. The news, instead of clicking on each profile, changes or updates would be delivered in a long and endless feed on the home page, the task was complex, they had to program elaborate code to get a unique news feed for each person depending on their contact list and Facebook quickly realized that having the feed ordered chronologically was not optimal, instead a person should be shown updates from their friends. that they actually interacted with, with people who were most popular or people who weren't watching but might be interested in a few years the news would be so ubiquitous that in retrospect it seems obvious and inevitable, but at the time of its publication it was hated, As McCullough tells it, Facebook employees were inundated with messages of pure outrage, with only one in a hundred posts saying they were positive and the majority complaining about privacy.

A group called Students Against Facebook News Service quickly attracted seven hundred thousand members. one complaint read, few of us want everyone to automatically know that what we update is too creepy, too harassing, and a feature that has to go. The college newspapers had headlines like Facebook Is Glaring at You and Facebook Fails Over Changes to an Online Petition. quickly attracted thousands of signatures Facebook was concerned Zuckerberg responded personally by saying calm down, breathe, we hear you and moments like this had killed several sites that seemed Invincible Dig lost its users on Reddit and soon disappeared after it made an unpopular algorithm change.

Facebook almost removed the feature. but Zuckerberg realized something was happening. Strangely outraged in private, they were still using the feed and were using it more and more. He decided to keep it and gave them more new data to analyze, but they still needed to expand their supply routes in 2010. Zuckerberg added a simple method to collect even more data: the first "Like" button almost immediately, millions of people were sending millions of data points of information about what Silicon Valley liked and, through a mission, what they didn't like. Soon, Facebook users “liked” it more than 4 million. posts every minute, even in 2012, Zuckerberg boasted about what Facebook could predict about its users.

I mean, you want to figure out the strength of a lot of those relationships and how, and what really matters to each person on a more granular level. One of the things one of my friends and I were playing with the other night was to see if we could use the information we had to figure out who we thought were going to be in relationships, so we tried this about a week later and found out. Realized that we had more than a third chance of predicting whether two people were going to be in a relationship within a week, so we can use things like that to filter out the weeds, like Google, they started buying and investing in anything that could collect data through Facebook bought Instagram, WhatsApp and now, if the Oculus headset can track even your facial expressions, Amazon, Microsoft and many others followed the example of Google and Facebook, Microsoft chose Skype for 8.5. billion dollars and Linkedin for 26 billion started tracking more data on Windows his Sartori program started collecting up to 28,000 DVDs of data each day the senior project manager said it's mind-blowing the amount of data we've captured in the last few years The line would extend to Venus and would still have 7 billion pixels left.

Amazon began to carefully analyze all the companies listed on their site, they decided to carefully record data on sales, shipping and marketing and monitored which products do well and then they would copy the best ones. sellers and make their own duplicates cheaper FTC Chair Lena Khan said Amazon is a Petri dish through which independent companies take on the initial risks of bringing products to market and Amazon can leverage their expertise, often at their expense, said former Amazon executive James Thompson Amazon sold products, but it is a data company. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all moved to cloud storage where users could upload any information they needed.

It was the next natural choice for companies looking for more and more data to analyze. Other smaller surveillance capitalists arrived. The scene also has a secured score in the UK offering a service that scans your social media accounts for landlords to predict risky tenants and startups like lendup. Look at your social media to determine your credit worthiness. A high IQ analyzes the social media profiles of job candidates quite accurately. identify employees most at risk with laser precision data everywhere was vacuumed up in the quest for profits became a race to the bottom of data this race to discover and collect more lines of surveillance data the search for a increasingly lucrative supply Paths of personal information extending into more areas of our lives and delving into richer data measurements is not just a natural progression of technology: it occurred in a context in the early '90s in which The Internet was still largely seen as a space for information. which had emerged from academia and research, but in 1993 activist Jeffrey Chester warned that it could become a privately owned public space, a virtual electronic mall, as corporate interests were circling.

The old NSF network infrastructure had been dismantled and, during the 1990s, Internet over Telephone lines then over cable were being dominated by the Telecommunications Giants in the spring and Verizon Western Union had dominated Telegraph Communications to late 19th century buying more than 500 competitors to have control over a quasi-Monopoly. He began to abuse his position by using it to keep driving his competitors out of the market and prioritizing his own associates over others as the antitrust movement grew. Those fighting monopolies were not only concerned about anti-competitive practices but also what it meant to have single men like robber baron J.

Gould at the helm. of almost all of the infrastructure that was essential for the country's security, in response, Congress passed a non-discrimination law, no company should have a say in the entire network and Telecommunications and Railways had to abide by what was called Common Transportation, they had to Treat Anyone who wanted to access the network in the same way, until the 1990s and the same rules were applied to the networks of the Telecommunications Giants, had to grant access and could not treat their own partners or affiliates with favoritism. A judge said to ensure the public has access. to a multiplicity of information sources is a primary government purpose because it promotes values ​​central to the First Amendment, but throughout the 1980s and 1990s this changed when the Soviet Union collapsed Market liberalism Triumph Neoliberalism was at its peak and theGovernment interference of any kind was challenged in 2002 George Bush repealed mandatory carriage rules and the cable giants began denying access to smaller Internet providers across the country, who quickly shut down and across the United States the companies Telecommunications companies pressured local governments to prevent new networks from emerging.

Municipal broadband is banned in 18 states, and large telecommunications companies sign agreements with local authorities that often prohibit them from using other Internet service providers. Net neutrality, the idea that data sent over networks should be treated equally, was also questioned and corporations began paying to get preferential treatment for sending their own. data faster than competitors foreign giants like Facebook Google and Microsoft make deals with telecom giants to send their own traffic at faster speeds essentially fast lanes for the rich This shift toward digital laissez faire coincided with another shift after 9/11 September security became more important than privacy The Bush administration passed the Patriot Act, radically expanding the state's powers to monitor its citizens and collect data around the world using 911 as justification.

The surveillance state grew at the same time that Google began to expand its own surveillance practices abroad. Obama administration privacy expert said that with the September 11, 2001 attacks, everything changed: The new focus was overwhelmingly on security rather than privacy. NSA chief John Poindaxter proposed a program called Tia, total information awareness, that could detect signals that would predict and help. stop future terrorist attacks abroad with this change politicians seem to lose interest in regulating big technology companies Google and the NSA, for example, announced a partnership for Google to provide a search device capable of searching 15 million documents in 24 languages , the NSA director wrote that an effective partnership must be formed with the private sector so that information can quickly move from public to private and from classified to unclassified to protect the nation's critical infrastructure.

The new military techno-industrial complex was born. Google spent more time in Washington spending more money. On lobbying, the Washington Post called Google the master of Washington influence, while the New York Times published a story saying that Google is very aggressive in spending its money in Washington and Brussels and then pulling the strings. People are so afraid of him. Now, the military-industrial-technological complex. provided the context for corporations to spend large sums of money expanding their operations and influencing both politicians and the public through public relations claiming that what they were doing was good for the community and that the social fabric was being destroyed When Margaret Thatcher made her famous claim that there was no such thing as a society, increasing numbers became isolated and atomized.

Memberships in churches, unions and even famous bowling clubs declined and Big Tech claimed that in its space they were rebuilding that lost sacred notion. The public, Airbnb's communal CEO said Airbnb started. actually, as a community probably even more than as a business, it became a business to scale the community, but the point is that when it became a business it never stopped becoming a community. Their motto was the world's largest community-driven hospitality company. Global Community Head Douglas Atkins said Airbnb and its community want to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, but throughout that world Airbnb faced Royal Community regulations that often aimed to keep rents low. for the locals and keep our private investors who could leave the empty apartments as financial assets.

To appreciate or at least match wealthy travelers in many places in the UK, including some of the most beautiful parts of the country such as Cornwall and Wales, locals are being forced out of the property market as houses are considered second nature. residences or are listed on sites Like Airbnb, Airbnb knew that to fight this in so many places around the world they had to mobilize their own community. They couldn't do it alone. They began posting jobs like this looking for candidates with experience organizing community political and government campaigns. The premise was simple: Airbnb would make sure that its own members fought for their own right to do whatever they wanted with their own home.

They wanted to maintain the image that this was not landlordism or rentierism, but local communities defending their local areas despite this. image What was being posted on the site was changing, it wasn't just people or families renting a spare room in their home or place while they were away in 2020, hosts with more than one property accounted for 6.63 percent of Between 2017 and 2020, hosts with between 101 and 1,000 properties increased by 50 percent and 14 of the hosts had more than 21 listings. What on the surface seemed like a project to democratize the vacation market was quickly becoming a means for owners to consolidate and attract rentals from their capital and assets.

Several reports, including one from the Centrist Economic Policy Institute, found that Airbnb has a harmful effect on the economy with a fight on its hands Airbnb mobilized a war fund in a campaign in San Francisco they spent eight million dollars on television advertisements Billboards and lobbying campaigns against the regulation that restricts the rental market in Airbnb Atkins said the mobilization was absolutely critical to changing the chain law. We managed to get around 250 of our hosts to appear at land use hearings and give up a day of work in the meantime in 2018. Amsterdam Barcelona Berlin Bordeaux Brussels Krakow Munich Paris Valencia and Vienna wrote a joint letter to the EU asking them to They intervened and what they saw was a growing problem.

Airbnb had been involved in 11 lawsuits against authorities to try to avoid regulations, while many cities have fought back. Calling this communitywashing, Muldoon writes according to the spin of billion-dollar tech CEOs, it's almost incidental or a welcome but unexpected byproduct of their social mission of connecting the world and giving people a There is a deep irony in having one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs present his company as a grassroots community champion at a 2017 Facebook Community Summit. Zuckerberg took the stage saying no. It is enough to simply connect with the world, we must also work to bring the world closer together.

Communities give us that feeling that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are not alone, that we have something better ahead of us to work for the current mayor of Chicago with everyone. All of you here today have created some of the strongest communities on Facebook. They know they build communities for new moms and dads to help kids get into college. One of the leaders here today. Derek. Hooker runs a community of locksmiths, where are you Derek? So we're all here trying to do as much good as possible for our communities. We know how lucky we are to be here and have this opportunity, and we know how much we owe it to them. our communities to give back now, today I want to share a milestone that we are very close to reaching for the entire Facebook community with the support of large technology companies and the lobby for deregulation that allies big capital to invade community spaces in the others co-opt the language and sentiment around the idea of ​​community, giving the impression that they are on the side of the community, like George Orwell's famous rape.

Political language is designed to make lies seem truthful and murder respectable and to give the appearance of solidity. a Pure wind power twists commonly accepted values ​​to make them seem attractive, all good and well continued, so political language has to consist largely of euphemisms, begging the question and sheer vagueness like Airbnb, Uber spend millions lobbying governments to repeal regulations that have often been the result of lengthy negotiations. Battles fought by local taxi drivers over certain regulations, such as limiting the supply of taxis, were aimed at reducing risks so that during a recession drivers could still make enough money.

Uber systematically tries to circumvent and replace laws like this, while one study found that half of drivers in Washington DC were living below the poverty line. Uber has fiercely resisted classifying riders as employees, insisting they are self-employed. own to not have to pay them sick leave at minimum wage or paid vacations, the incursion into our political space, the theft of the community in a period in history that prioritized the issue of glass and the security of surveillance reminds us that the shape and direction of any change is not natural, there is no empty cyberspace that can be molded with new utopian rules from nowhere, the offline world, real power, real history, real politics. the real economy always gets in the way, thanks, the word utopia comes from the Greek and means "nowhere." It's an apt description of the Californian ideology that saw cyberspace as a "nowhere," an infinite blank page on which entirely new rules could be written in some disconnected realm. foreign metaphysician, but of course there is no place where the big tech platforms and ISPs are made up of cables, servers, hardware and codes written by people who thought in a particular way in a particular historical context with particular rules and regulations, particular cultures and social realities Despite this, big tech platforms often try to absolve themselves of any real-world responsibility while at the same time playing a big role in shaping what we all see, what is amplified, and how we see it.

Platforms like Facebook are not treated like real-world publishers. They are not subject to the same defamation or copyright laws or other regulations as their users. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 decided that no provider or user of an interactive Computer Service shall be treated as the publisher or spokesperson of any information provided by another information content provider in this Among other laws, they set the tone for much of of how social media platforms would be treated in the future, but all these platforms use mountains of data collected about you and your neighbors to decide what you will buy and what you will watch and what you will read Facebook news what mood you are in if you are alone love sick happy if you have been paid politically disenfranchised and I can show you not only what you want because not even we know what we want but what you are most likely to click on about the turn towards surveillance in a political context that justified the decrease in protection and reduction in privacy was like coming into your house with candy to tempt you while secretly watching your likes and dislikes who you live with, what your pet's name and what you are cooking everything up for the sake of personalization and subtly modifying behavior and ironically from their utopian nowhere they have become ubiquitous how we travel we eat we look at what applications we use what we listen to two thirds of us receive news through social networks Facebook and Amazon have acquired almost 100 companies each and Google and Microsoft over 200 there is no place everywhere zuboff calls it dispossession a foray into helpless space your laptop your phone or website the street where you live and an email to your friend your walk in the park browsing online for a gift birthdays share photos of your children your interests and tastes your digestion your tears your attention your feelings your face they extract more and more information and suck it like vampires from the corpse of History while they say they are from nowhere and that The corpse of history It is a long tradition of public investment that is sold or given at a low price while pretending that only capitalists are capable of innovating.

Internet. The touchscreen. GPS. on things that are too risky for individual companies to carry out without public subsidies Nathan Newman has pointed out how the development of the Internet is sometimes compared to the development of highway systems, but he says that the Internet is much more complex and the comparison makes no sense unless the government had first imagined the possibility of automobilessubsidized the invention of the automobile industry financed the technology of concrete and tar and built the entire initial system we are hungover drunk from neoliberalism we eliminate regulation that protects local residents and people like the taxi Drivers let large amounts of money in in our political lobbies, they hand over chests full of our personal data and transfer infrastructure to telecom giants who have no incentive to reinvest in faster broadband and instead pay higher dividends to shareholders they did not invest in . neighborhoods or rural areas that endure unbearably slow speeds and the United States in particular has some of the most expensive

internet

rates and most terrible speeds in 2018, according to Microsoft, almost half of the country cannot get or use broadband and are low income and rural areas in Detroit, for example, 70 percent of school-aged children do not have Internet.

Tarnoff writes that the big ISPs are essentially slumlords and their primary function is to fleece their customers and funnel money upwards. Furthermore, the broadband cartel regularly receives large injections of public money. cash for all this talk about state investment and the rollback of regulation and the adoption of laissez-faire markets. I am not suggesting that Facebook, Airbnb or Twitter should be handed over to national governments. I think choosing who should decide how the platforms work. Directing capitalists or politicians is a distressing but fortunately false option. The solutions are difficult. Real solutions must be multifaceted. I think some combination of regulation, cultural awareness and democratic alternatives should be sought, all together.

Foreign signs that before the middle of the 20th century. The idea of ​​what constituted public interest was much broader, which we often bear, as banks or energy companies, at great cost, and regulation has long protected the weak from the strong. In an 1877 case, for example, Munn v. Illinois, the court concluded that a company involved in large quantities of grain were in the public interest and could therefore justifiably be regulated. There are many reasons why something could be of public interest, but the main one is that it is public, it is in everyone's interest, it tends towards monopoly and therefore affects us all.

There are clear harms to many people and at least some, if not all, of how they run should be decided democratically. This jurist Frank Pasquale has said that decisions at Googleplex are made behind closed doors. The power to include, exclude, and classify is the power to ensure which public impressions become permanent and which remain fleeting despite their claims to objectivity and neutrality, they are constantly making value-laden decisions. Controversial decisions that help create the world they say just show us first, let's look at the benefits of being open. Transparent Democrat. If it does not work commercially, then we will see political politics and the construction of alternative spaces.

In the 1970s, a group of computer scientists at MIT were working on an operating system called Unix, which was owned by telecommunications giant T, a programmer and hacker, Richard Stallman. he wanted an alternative, something that was unrestricted and free to work on adding and sharing. Stallman published the gnu manifesto and became a pioneer of what came to be called open source. gnu was an acronym for gnu, not Unix, and he proposed a legal method. called left copy instead of copyright creating terms of service in which anyone could add or modify software as long as they did so under the same conditions;

In other words, it had to be transmitted. Stalman began working on several pieces of code that would contribute to the execution of an open source operating system that anyone could use through which innovation could be collaboratively pursued. He believed that access to software source code was a right. In the 1980s, a Finnish software engineer, Linus Torvalds, contributed new open source code to the project. operating system called Linux and anyone could download it, use it and contribute to its development. Both Starman and Torfield opposed the position that Bill Gates had outlined in his open letter to fans a few years before the type of software they developed became known as floss.

The free open source software Libra became such an influential movement that we all rely on dental floss every day. Every supercomputer in existence runs Linux, for example, including one at the US Department of Energy, one on the International Space Station, and one on the USS. nuzwald, the most technologically advanced ship in the world, the reason they use Linux is because it is open and can be edited to highly specialized needs. The servers that host most of the world's websites run on Linux, as do the computers of many government agencies and Google's phones. The Android system is based on Linux, making it the most used operating system in the world.

Libra Office, a free alternative to Microsoft Office. VLC, an excellent multimedia player. Firefox, a web browser. Audacity, which I'm using right now to record this, and WordPress, used by over 60 million. all people floss. Open source practices are a challenge to Bill Gates' biggest complaint in his open letter to fans. Why would anyone build something if it's not commercially profitable? Studies have found that developers contribute to flossing for several reasons that don't add up. with the traditional economic psychological model of humans as selfish agents maximizing profits and contributing to a community or humanity at large, the desire to challenge oneself, the knowledge that a certain type of status comes from contributing to a project and because a person themselves needs the The project they are contributing to has been cited as reasons for working on something outside of the profit motive and flossing almost always develops outside a conventional hierarchy of bosses and workers.

Legal scholar Yokai Benkler writes that flossing is a radically decentralized, non-proprietary collaboration. about the exchange of resources and products between widely distributed and loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without depending on either market signals or managerial orders, media scholar Benjamin Berkembein argues that dental floss is an example of a system of alternative securities, a type of open digital public good that everyone can access. has the right to use non-proprietary property at Microsoft, as floss has proven to be a viable alternative to proprietary software. Corporations have slowly encroached on open source projects in an attempt to, in Birkenbind's words, capture the value that flossing communities are producing after its court case Microsoft has made an about-face in its position on software sharing , were forced to embrace interoperability by opening up their APIs so that third-party software could more easily interact with the Windows ecosystem, but it was around this time that floss was taking off as a viable way to produce software in 1998, a supporter of the Open source author Eric Raymond received leaked internal documents from Microsoft that became known as the Halloween documents.

In them, Microsoft outlined their new approach to open source, what they would need to use it while continuing to do so. In the event that Microsoft's software in particular was worth the price to do this, the Halloween documents revealed that Microsoft would use what they called foolish tactics, the sowing of fear, uncertainty and diet, they aired an announcement in the United Kingdom, for For example, which claimed that while Yes, free Linux was initially found to be 10 times more expensive than Windows Server 2003 in the long run, the UK Advertising Standards Authority found the claim misleading and banned the advert.

Microsoft was also found to be funneling money to a group. that they owned the original Unix operating system that were fighting a legal battle against Linux for copyright infringement, but the Halloween documents will say that they described internal surveys that found that there was a lot of support for flossing within Microsoft, so They had to balance the open source fight and incorporate it into Windows both for their own benefit and to avoid further legal problems. Nowadays interoperability is an important feature of everyday life that often goes unnoticed and unappreciated. Simple examples are railways and airports that have to share the same gauge or signaling or air. traffic control protocols, etc., if you have ever used Microsoft Word's Libra office alternative, you can open and save dot doc files.

Microsoft file formats and think about screws, plugs, banking systems and Internet protocols. Interoperability partly ensures that dominant corporations cannot dominate the market by forcing their own interfaces and driving out competitors and while the open source community remains skeptical of Microsoft, but Combine writes that Microsoft had to embrace open source because it had proven that it worked, that collaboration was the direction the industry was heading and that quite a bit, the company's pivot to open source can also be seen as a humble recognition that commons-based peer production that took place within the community floss was an efficient and effective model of industrial software production that could complement their own business practices.

Wikipedia is another example of a similar non-commercial alternative: the first Wikipedia article published was on January 15, 2001. In the letter, U McCullough writes that it was comprehensive, well-written and, to the surprise of Jimmy Wales and his team of editors, it took some Thousands of users who had come forward to test Wikipedia obtained, through their contributions and collective edits, the article polished to an almost authoritative quality, like dental floss. Wikipedia contributions are voluntary, access is free, there is no advertising, and it does not track its users or sell. your data and is based on the premise that everyone can participate equally.

It is deliberative rather than hierarchical. Administrators and delegates are voted in for the most part by Democrats and administrators are nominated and voted based on their familiarity with rules, processes and edits two of them had debated and voted on, what these examples and others like them have shown is that There may be open democratic and collaborative alternatives to Big Tech, influenced by sociologist Eric Olin Wright Muldoon, who argues that we should build radical democracies. institutions within the cracks of the capitalist system, what Olin Wright calls true modern utopias, defends what he calls platform socialism which, according to him, would involve the organization of the digital economy through the social ownership of digital assets and the democratic control over the infrastructure and systems they govern.

In our digital lives, it continues a broad ecology of social ownership, recognizes the multiple and overlapping associations to which individuals belong and promotes the flourishing of different communities, from mutual societies to platform cooperatives, data trusts and international social networks, and there are many examples of small platforms trying this. to challenge the great fiscal dominance up and go was a cleaning cooperative in New York Airbnb an alternative to the taxi application Airbnb and alternative to Uber Mastodon to the diaspora of Twitter and friendly alternatives to Facebook but there is something that they all have in common It is their clear failure to make much progress against incumbents who are protected by, among other things, what has been described as their Network effect, the more people use a platform like Facebook, the bigger they become and the more valuable they are to use, this It means that leaving Twitter has a cost.

Join Mastodon because everyone you want to follow is on Twitter. This is a problem and one of the reasons why Microsoft is so dominant and how they manage to push Netscape and other companies out of the market, but it is also the reason why interoperability may be the key to challenging the big boys. Technology monopolies in political terms sometimes, as the antitrust battle against the robber barons has shown. Alternative services are not enough. Only political power can fight the power of established corporations. I think many people see the regulation as too simple. Regulation and policy options come in many forms and often.

We can design policy that empowers alternatives rather than simply restricting, dividing or hitting big tech companies. Barcelona city council, for example, forces Vodafone to open its data for public use on the city's website.city ​​hall. Bernie Sanders has suggested billions in grants for local municipalities to fund construction. Publicly owned and democratically controlled cooperative or open access broadband networks. Public media outlets such as PBS and NPR, legislated by Lyndon B Johnson in 1967, and the license-payer-funded BBC in Britain, provide a quasi-political, but ideally politically independent, space motivated by values ​​that sit outside the mechanisms of the media. market and all of these are routinely seen in surveys as the most trusted organizations for news legislation could be designed to encourage the creation of national or local alternatives to Big Tech that are independent of government or operate through existing library networks, says your local.

Councils A government department could create and provide open source code to provide councils running alternatives to platforms like Uber and Airbnb that give drivers or homeowners and local citizens a say in how the apps are run personally. I would like to see an alternative to Twitter, which is funded by subscription rather than advertising revenue, for a few dollars a month you would get access to a network that is completely open and managed by its users, who can vote, choose, decide on options of algorithms, research addresses, privacy policies, etc., similarly. Interoperability would mean that an alternative to Facebook could be used that still works with Facebook. allowing you to maintain access to your social network to post to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter while using new platforms at the same time so that they would have to interact with each other and you could support a space for experiments in new ways of running platforms Senator Mark Warner proposes legislation that would force platforms with revenues over $100 million to comply with portability rules.

The profound contradiction of our time, as sociologist Sigmund Bauman wrote in 1999, is the enormous gap between the right to self-affirmation and the ability to control social environments. What makes such self-affirmation feasible is that abysmal gap from which the most poisonous effluvia emanate that contaminate the lives of contemporary individuals. The question is who has the legitimate power to control those social environments and how do we identify where those poisonous effluvia ooze from to persuade. push, watch, analyze and sculpt our digital elections by using Monopoly positions to subtly influence our politics and leverage our communities, should we rely solely on the words of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg that they are not biasing the news? community concept for Uber and Airbnb, it is imperative that we engage in more experiments in Alternatives and the politics that support those experiments, as Tarnoff says, while we work to dismantle online models, we must also be putting together a constellation of Alternatives that can claim the space they currently occupy Because unless the platforms we use every day are transparent, Democrats can open, then we are not the ones in control of our own social environments and while yes, sometimes the decisions that big tech makes can be the correct ones, it is also the case that, no matter how benevolent a ruler, there may always be differences in value systems from one person to another, from one place to another, from one group to another, and throughout Arc's long history has proven time and time again that moral monopolies of all kinds lead to stagnation.

Decadence, blunder or corruption, it only takes one. The Mad King, a greedy dictator, a slimy Pope or a foolish jester to push the levers hovering towards chaos, rot and even foreign tyranny. Well, first of all, thank you very much to everyone who provided their voices for this video. We are in hell, radical critic. Philosophy of the time Tom Nicholas Zoe B unlearning economics and the James Dune mode, you can check out his channels or his work in the description below. Muldoon's Platform Socialism is a wonderful book that I read in research for this, I recommend it and there is a link to all the others. sources with the next, thank you all, as always, for watching, especially if you made it this far.

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