We the Media

Chapter 11. The Empires Strike Back

The promise was freedom. And, for a time, freedom was the reality.

The Internet, some of us believed early on, would be a largely unregulated sphere where boundaries would not matter—where, for good and bad, individual freedom would be the paramount condition. After all, the Internet was a robust communications system; it could, in theory, withstand a nuclear attack. So early Netizens can be forgiven for assuming that different rules applied because, for a time, they did.

Cyber-liberty, we saw, would extend to culture and information in powerful, even unprecedented, ways. The Internet—the first many-to-many medium—was going to liberate us from the tyranny of centralized media and the rancid consumerism that says we are merely receptacles for what Big Business, including Big Media, wants us to buy. We were going to turn the world of “take it or leave it” into an informed global conversation. Consumers would become true customers. The governed would become “we, the people” participants in the political process.

But the clampdown has begun. Everywhere we look, the forces of centralization and authority are finding ways to slow—and perhaps halt altogether—the advances we’ve made.

They include the usual suspects, namely government, big telecommunications companies, and what I call the copyright cartel of entertainment companies. But, sadly, they also include some of the technology pioneers who once promised so much in the way of digital liberty.

Could these ...