Oh yes, some statements don’t/won’t date well and said political topics simply divert attention from the privacy concerns expressed at the article’s core.
“Don’t mention the ___” - Fawlty Towers
Red or blue pill, no matter, it is up to the end-user to navigate one’s own path. No tech company anywhere should have so much control as to choose which view is right or wrong - unless this is the desire of the user (as in parental controls to guide one’s children), but for the majority of folks, it is not desired for a software developer, or any of the billionaire’s club to parent our views and curate whatever “truth” is trending now.
You’re correct in that no tech company should be too powerful so as to stiff-arm and will proprietary standards into force. Microsoft (OS), Google (browser), and even Apple (payment services) have all been on the hot seat for this.
As for content passing through a tech company’s infrastructure, particularly publicly-traded ones, it underscores an urgency to de-commercialize those infrastructures and render them — by expropriation, if necessary — as public utilities.
Otherwise, at least in the purview of the U.S. (where a corporation is, in a twist of creative logic some two-plus centuries ago, a private legal person — literally, an
“it”, not a
“they”), there is no provision for dictating that legal persons are subject to the same legal constraints as public administrative bodies (which, in the U.S. context, the latter are subject to compliance with the First Amendment’s dictate on no law which may abridge “free speech” — however that may now be finely defined by volumes of subsequent jurisprudence).
In short, I look to tech shareholders to hold their end of the ownership share bargain by urging those corporations to jettison proprietary, short-term standards at the great benefit of long-term, open standards. Additionally, those shareholders (check your pension and retirement portfolios, folks) need to decide what’s more crucial: the greater good of corporations releasing proprietary platforms and rendering them into worldwide standards (even as that means losing some front-loaded, fast and big profit) before a public realm, as public utilities, or how big that quarterly dividend deposit into one’s pension/retirement account is gonna be.
It’s impossible and at fundamental odds against one another to wish, want, and expect for both, concurrently.
This goes for Cloudflare; it goes for Google/Microsoft/Apple/Mozilla (as major browser maintainers); and it goes for “Section 230”-adjacent social platforms. It’s impossible to expect corporate “people” to act as human as actual, living individuals and to expect them to also be in a legal, catch-22 to make their private, corporate “selves” (the Metas, the Xs, the Apples, and so on) operate as public utilities whilst conducting themselves in their own, “personal” (i.e., organizational), private/publicly-traded, for-profit interests.
Tech companies are no different than industrial and manufacturing companies of yore. If they want to survive and co-exist, sustainability, in a civil society — one held accountable publicly — then they will need to cede some of their proprietary grip and some of their quarterly earnings, or have it broken up (via anti-trust jurisprudence) and/or expropriated (legislatively).
tl;dr: Advanced capitalism means making, individually and collectively alike, challenging decisions about the kind of world we want.
Browser level, DNS level, ISP, backbone/Cloudflare or whatever level manipulation of content is simply wrong and goes against all ideas of what the internet should be - decentralized communication.
The internet should be (from the vantage of a fellow Old) a decentralized,
de-monetized paradigm/modal of public communication, within which newsgroup, forum, and chatroom policies, put together by private folks and orgs, can still be enforced, whilst the wider internet remains unencumbered by those policies. It also means no one gets to have a viral megaphone (which, frankly, would also be a delight, for a change).
To decentralize and to de-monetize, of course, would upend so, so much, but if one is old enough, it’s possible to at least remember what that once was like… you know, before the MBAs started moving to Silicon Valley and turning it into the hyper-commercial mess it is now.
