Democratizing the Internet

As we learn to adapt to the internet society that captures almost all parts of our existence, the fair distribution of power and control in this new age remains strikingly imbalanced. Not only a handful of mega corporations in the West monopolize this new continuum of our existence, but they also effectively prohibit billions of people from accessing this unprecedent source of knowledge and intellect. Trillions of dollars concentrated in a few companies are spent to solidify the perception that the “internet” itself is Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a few others. People are constantly kept in the dark by these companies and effectively prohibited from learning about the alternatives. Their data is continuously harvested for reasons unknown. As such, the most vital question that needs to be resolved as we are further connected to each other by the minute is how we are to democratize the internet.

Traditional colonialism may be for the most part dead, but the few privileged classes in the West still has an immensely tight grip on the rest of humanity. Christopher Wylie’s “Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America” clearly illustrated how data collected by Facebook in exchange for free access to its platform allowed private companies to carry massive psychological campaigns on entire societies. They first use smaller datasets to test their influence on smaller societies located in one of the former colonies, where their actions can go completely unchecked. And Wylie shows that the immense data that Facebook harvests is then used in the Western societies that allow these companies to safely exist in the first place. This is not the first time in recent history that a source of power is concentrated in the hands of the few. However, this is certainly the first time in history that a few companies have complete power as to determine how we think and act.

What is the basis for the claim of "complete power to determine"? If the correct word in this context was "influence," how is the role of these social actors to be compared with that of , say, the Catholic Church or the British East India Company?

In this regard, the power concentration of today is a lot scarier than the monopoly Standard Oil had in the early 20th Century.

Indicating that this is not probably the correct comparison.

A few companies in the world have a dominion over our minds. And this is simply unacceptable. It is not possible to be free in the age of the internet where the central mechanism of how we are connected to one another is owned and manipulated by a few entities.

Why does it matter whether the entities are companies or governments?

The mission is clear: we need to break these monopolies and intervene in this market failure.

What market failure?

But how can we achieve this mountain of a task? The challenge lies in the fact that we live in broken societies; we are controlled by crooked politicians who worship money and power.

In this case. what societies are not "broken"?

The monopolies of our current age have immense financial resources, and they have certainly enough of it to influence our political agendas. Assuming that “We the People” can define our destiny as a society, we need to take immediate action in how we democratize this next medium of human existence.

We cannot simply allow hundreds of years of inequalities to persist in this new age. We have to accept knowledge as a basic human right and provide all tools and basic knowledge necessary to allow people to make the best use of what the web offers to them. This does not mean that we should destroy all differences in wealth and power overnight; however, it means that the next generation of humans must be allowed to have equal opportunities in their access to knowledge and intellectual growth. Even though it goes against the long-established patent rights, it is in the government’s, and the people’s, best interest to nationalize certain patents and allow free access to the use of them.

What has patent law to do with anything you have so far discussed?

Most groundbreaking scientific patents are a result of billions of dollars of government investment, meaning they were directly funded by the taxpayers.

In which fields is this true, and in which not? Is this about pharmaceuticals, about IT, about some other areas of effort? Is a patent more valid in a country in which there has been no government investment in research than in one which lavishly funds research?

We cannot allow risks to be collectivized while allowing profits to be privatized.

Is that the bargain involved in patent law? Or is it an entitlement to economic rent for a fixed period in return for public disclosure of invention?

It is in the right of the people to seize control of what belongs to them and allow the new generation to truly write their own destinies.

For those who don't believe in revolutionary expropriation, does your essay have nothing to offer?

A seizure and emancipation of patents would allow cheap reproduction of hardware and software around the world.

Hardware around the world is exceedingly cheap: what is the sign that patent rights are significantly increasing the cost of hardware? I have explained why the free software idea effectively achieved the universalization of software knowledge without expropriation of rights, and affected both copyright and patent law in the necessary directions already. Please give an example of an area in which patent law substantially interferes with the spread and development of software knowledge.

This would necessarily mean that hundreds of millions of people may get their hands-on machines that would fully allow them to truly connect with the web. However, such a scenario on its own does not guarantee that people would be truly freed. The bright and able minds of the world have to come together to write user-friendly online manuals and perhaps digital classes to teach ordinary people of all ages how to best utilize the machines they have. Governments are for the most part incredibly inapt in equipping their people with the necessary knowledge to bring about social mobility. As such, even though perhaps we can trust our power as the people to free some patents, we cannot rely solely on the government to educate people in how to use computers for attaining knowledge. I believe this will necessarily be a collective effort of dedicated idealists around the world. Another issue that needs to be resolved in democratizing the internet is the monopolies in existence. Will they simply wither away if people know that they can use safe alternatives? I do not believe that it will be the case; human beings are strange creatures after all, and the “sexy” services and hardware provided by the 21st Century monopolies are highly attractive to them. They do not even realize that they are being kept in the dark; their minds are controlled by people unknown to us, and they keep living in an exquisite Truman Show. As such, do we proceed with breaking Facebook and Google into smaller pieces? And even if we can, how are we to deal with the Chinese internet giants? Does the humanity need to live in completely segregated online worlds? Or can we unilaterally breakdown the CCP’s monopoly over the Chinese internet? The problems are relatively easy to identify, but the solutions seem to be a lot more complicated.