The Internet Has Become Too American to Trust

This is why both decentralisation (federation or otherwise) and a healthy market are so essential. If one company controls a vast swathe of the internet and lots of people's everyday services, the country it's based in can force changes at the drop of a hat. If dozens of companies and groups provide a service, then it becomes way more difficult for any one person, country or organisation to force their worldviews on others/censor them.

But the only way to force this is to somehow force interoperability for products. Make it so anyone has the right to create a client for a service, or connect one service to another. Make it so whenever you buy a product, that's it you can do whatever you like with it. There can't be a license or terms of service beyond maybe "don't redistribute it as your own".

I was going to say there's too much Cory Doctorow in this piece, but it's actually Cory Doctorow. Lots of outrage, no real ask.

The distrust is not even ideological anymore, we just want our services to keep working without some guy deciding to nuke everything the next day for literally no reason.

I'd argue that there is far more American infiltration of Canada's political, legal, industrial and trade base that the internet, the one thing that could be cut off from America overnight, should be a distant afterthought.

What continent do they think they are on?

This is a very valid heading.

The internet is less American than it ever has been. The internet was almost entirely invented in America, by Americans (or at least people living and working in America), and funded and controlled by American companies. This has been the status quo ever since the Internet was 200 hosts in a hand-maintained TXT file in the mid-80s; and is only less true now because there are now substantial internet technology companies in countries genuinely-rival to America. Say what you will about TikTok, it's not controlled by Americans and a lot of people around the world care about it anyway.

> Drip, drip. Klein in 2005. Snowden in 2013. And yet, today, we are still using the American internet—the surveillance-prone, easily interdicted internet. Because Klein and Snowden were individual leaks, we put our buckets out and hoped things wouldn’t get worse. Instead of migrating off the American internet, we tried to regulate the tech giants. We pretended that the problem with Mark Zuckerberg was that he was the wrong guy to be the unelected, permanent social media czar with total control over 4 billion people’s lives, rather than confronting the fact that no one should have that job.

I'm not a fan of how Doctorow abruptly switches between talking about secret US federal government surveillance that was publicly exposed more than a decade ago, and the fact that Facebook is a gigantic and privately-owned social media platform. The main effect of the Snowden revelations was to create meaningful pressure to add encryption to everyday technologies people use to access the internet, an effort which has largely been successful. I talk to lots of people on Signal these days, which is great. And it has nothing at all to do with the fact that billions of nontechnical people around the world use Facebook or Instagram or one of a host of other private social media platforms as their sole internet presence.

> Here in Canada, we racked up an embarrassing string of abject defeats in our attempts to rein in big tech. When we tried to get Facebook to pay for news, they just deleted the news. When we tried to get Netflix to put some CanCon in the catalogue, they refused. When we tried to get them to pay a largely symbolic 3 percent tax, Trump rattled his sabre, and Prime Minister Mark Carney folded like a cheap suit.

I don't really see trying to impose some Canada-specific taxes or local content mandates as reigning in big tech in any meaningful way. I don't really care if Canada has a law about Canadian content requirements, but I also don't care if Netflix resists this, or any other country-specific local content law for places I don't live in and probably don't speak the language of.

Anyway, most of what this essay is talking about is Doctorow's standard argumentation against centralized technology platforms that are used by huge numbers of people. I'm basically in favor of this, although I think he weakens his argument by grounding it in the idea that the problem is that centralized social media is run by American companies specifically, and that Canadian (or in general any other country's) local companies would do any better, if they built a thing people actually wanted to use. Indeed, one major benefit of many internet companies being run out of the US is that the US has better legal free speech protections than basically every other country on earth. So much speech is illegal by statute in Canada or various EU countries that is unconstitutional to make illegal in the US.

But really, the actual problem is that there's a small number of privately-owned social media platforms in the world that huge numbers of people use because of a combination of genuinely solving user problems, and the network effect of large numbers of people already using them. There are all sorts of interesting decentralized, free-software technologies that are trying to replace centralized internet services used by millions or billions of people - and all of those services have extremely small user bases and often a bad user experience for things that the average person cares about. Solving that problem is a lot more important than trying to get Canadian companies in Canada to compete with American (and Chinese, and Russian, etc.) social media platforms.