Since the beginning of the internet, politicians have been trying to get control of it. The idea of a vast landscape completely outside of their control, where people can associate with each other from thousands of kilometers away and even transact business anonymously, with cops being powerless to stop them or even spy on them very effectively, was obviously a terrifying nightmare to sociopathic control freaks whose entire lives revolve around telling others what to do and enforcing their arbitary diktats with threats of violence. So naturally, an attempt to destroy it was made before most people had even heard of it, much less figured out how to access it; this was the Communications Decency Act of 1996, an attempt to turn the internet into a walled garden under Congressional control. Large portions of the Act were so blatantly unconstitutional they were struck down the following year, and the only important section to survive was the one which had exactly the opposite effect the law was intended to have: Section 230, which immunized websites from nuisance lawsuits and megalomaniacal prosecutors alike. Naturally, both politicians and wannabe internet cops of all types couldn’t stand that, and have been trying to overturn that immunity ever since; after years of attempts, generally pretended to be about “THE CHILDREN!!!!!TM” and always dying before passage or being executed by judges in court (again, due to their blatant unconstitutionality), they finally succeeded with FOSTA just one year ago.
Longtime readers will recall that I’ve been sounding the alarm about these attempts since the beginning of this blog; as I wrote in “The Camel’s Nose” (October 2nd, 2010): “once Big Brother has the power to shut down big hunks of the internet for one specific purpose, does anyone honestly believe that he will only use that power for the stated purpose and no other?” Whores understand only too well what useful idiots never do: that though surveillance, censorship, criminalization of consensual behavior and other such obscenities often start with whores, they never, ever stop with us. I wasn’t even close to the only harlot warning that laws like FOSTA would destroy the internet as we know it, and basically every single civil liberties organization and internet company were saying exactly the same thing. This broad opposition might have prevented disaster had Facebook not betrayed every internet user on the planet in order to curry favor with Congressional censors, but that was exactly what it did and I don’t think any regular reader needs an itemized list of the damage that has already been done as a result. Until now, all the damage has been self-inflicted, as companies eagerly castrate and/or lobotomize temselves in order to avoid liability; however, that changed last week with the filin of the first big nuisance lawsuit under FOSTA, against a company that even few “sex trafficking” fetishists would have predicted as a target:
[Shysters recruited] fifty women [as plaintiffs in a predatory lawsuit claiming that deep-pocketed]…tech giant Salesforce…help[ed] the now-shuttered website Backpage facilitate sex trafficking…The [shysters claimed the]…women…were “sexually exploited and trafficked through Backpage”…[in] New Orleans, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Seattle, Chicago and Phoenix, among others. The lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court accuses Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff of overseeing a strategy where the company claimed to be fighting trafficking but “Behind the scenes … kept taking Backpage’s money and supporting it with the CRM [customer relations management] database of pimps, johns, and traffickers that Backpage needed to operate”…
Basically, this is equivalent to suing a paper mill because lawyers claim that its paper was used to print a book that a woman claims inspired a nameless boyfriend to beat her up at some point in the past (even though there were neither witnesses nor evidence to said beating). Such lawsuits, however flimsy, are generally settled out of court for tens of millions of dollars and are thus accepted by the hoi-polloi as “proven” even if they could never have actually won in a jury trial. And that’s not even the worst of it; as Elizabeth Nolan Brown explained,
…Backpage and FOSTA tested the waters. [Politicians]…are now talking about carving out more exceptions in Section 230 or abolishing it entirely. That would allow not just any politically disfavored platforms but anyone that provided any services to them—cloud companies, payment processors, any kind of software, vendors, etc.—to be sued or charged criminally. It could make it completely untenable for many such services to work with companies that let user-generated, social, free speech flourish. That’s the end goal. Don’t be fooled by the cynical “sex trafficking” spin…
The internet may survive outside of the US and be accessible to US citizens, but that would require other countries to invest in building new internet “backbones” out of the reach of power-mad US politicians, and nobody seems inclined to spend that money yet. Until and unless they do, the internet as we know it will be gone in a very short time, replaced by something much more like cable TV than the powerful engine of free thought it has been until now.
You’re even more sanguine about the state of the Internet than I am, Maggie. I think the Internet, as we once knew it, is already gone, and has been for a long time. Laws like FOSTA and the extent to which many sites (Craigslist being one of the more obvious, but by no means only, example) just caved and self-censored as a result of it are but the latest entries in the obituary. As it is, views outside the mainstream are shunted to the side, crushed, or prosecuted on a broad basis.
Those who would control and regulate the rest of us know no bounds. They will not stop no matter what legal tools, no matter how unconstitutional, they have available to them. Their prejudice against ideas that run counter to their own is too strong. And it’s not only an American phenomenon. We see efforts to control free expression in lots of places, in some cases even more virulent than here. We at least have some protection, as abused as it is, in the form of the First Amendment, which does not exist in most places.
As this Salesforce suit demonstrates, they’ll use any means, legal, extra-legal, financial, or just plain defamatory, to attack the targets of their discontent. I don’t see that going away and, if anything, accelerating. It is very disheartening, indeed.
Mr. Yacenda, that was well said. Truth be told, I see the Internet’s equivalent of the 1983 video game crash on the horizon, and that event is coming faster than we would hope.
A pretty good explanation for this phenomenon is given by https://www.theauthoritarians.org (free ebook). Sorry for pushing this again, it just explains so much.
I see the best hope for the Internet to be a series of antitrust lawsuits against Facebook, Google, et al.,to shatter the control they have.
Not probable, but I can dream.
Very true. Many people are actually frightened deeply of individual freedoms and they vote for the politicians that promise to make them go away.
One nit-pic (since I am actually kind of an expert here): The Internet backbones (i.e. networking infrastructure and support systems) are not an issue. If the US fell off the planet, the Internet would continue to work, some adjustments required in the next days after, but not a lot. I think you may be referring to “platforms”, like Facebook?
No, I’m referring to the backbone (domain registries, etc). The US has claimed jurisdiction over the WHOLE internet because traffic passes through US servers. The only way to eradicate the possibility of the US actually stopping traffic to some foreign-based site simply because it can is to create structures that don’t pass traffic through the US at all. It’s happening already, but too slowly. This has been written about on sites like TechDirt more than once.
Ah. Well, domain registries are not an issue here, all countries have their own with their own domestic name servers. Sure, .com, .info and the like may have an issue when the caches expire, but .de addresses, for example, have zero connection to any US-only infrastructure. Also, no actual expert would call domain registries the Internet “backbone”. The term is reserved for the redundant mesh of high-speed geographical network connections.
The second thing is that most Internet traffic does not actually go over US network infrastructure and even the one that does has alternate routes with lots of reserve bandwidth.The US routinely vastly overstates their importance for the Internet continuing to work. Like Al Gore stating that “they could take the internet away”. Had a good laugh with a senior engineer of a backbone operator here at a party and he though that maybe the US could do it for half a day or so without actually using act-of-war level sabotage. Many journalists just bow to power here instead of actually finding out things. In actual reality, the importance of the US is pretty small and they can mostly only control traffic from and to the US. They can listen in on a lot of traffic but that is basically only because local governments allow it and these are “passive” taps, not active filters.
I know that this gets written about a lot. And I cringe when I read the half-truths, non-truths and “the US is Top Dog” statements that are not mirrored in actual technological reality.
That said, if you are concerned about network filtering or censorship, use the Tor browser. Its main goal is exactly to make such filtering ineffective.
New reader to your blog. Couple thoughts. I think Congress will be in a log jam for a couple of years or more, so don’t expect change. The courts will be the place this law gets changed or defeated so will take awhile. I am so glad I do not live in the UK – terrifying what they are doing.
I also think we are in waiting game for new technology that will allow client and provider to connect safely. Thoughts?
Would I be wrong to say people with agendas on left or right use human trafficking worries as a way to control what they do not like. In this case prostitution. I actually think legalization is the best way to combat human trafficking in prostitution.