[ferzul]

so how does that work? i cannot think of a workable solution short of an end to the world wide web, and the beginning of a system of national internets and data ports (as in, places you send your data to to export them from one country and import them to another).

otherwise, the democratic oversight will just be whatever the u.s can manage.

the internet is already falling apart; i notice many u.s media sites are inaccessible from europe. i guess national internets are less painful in europe, where almost every country has its own language, than in the anglosphere, where there are many smaller countries that use english.

it solves many problems - it puts an end to cyberattacks, for instance. but is it right? i doubt it.

[yodelshady]

> it puts an end to cyberattacks, for instance.

Luckily for infosec professionals - we are never putting the lid back on that particular box. International businesses need the internet, just as it needs encryption. It'll only be proles facing restrictions.

I can't help but echo that I'm simply grimly fascinated by how far and fast the standard of discourse has fallen, however. And a decent chunk of that political interference, gaslighting and general verbal abuse and toxicity is from the US - "progressive" and "conservative" regions alike.

[Barrin92]

>it solves many problems - it puts an end to cyberattacks, for instance. but is it right? i doubt it.

I think it's right. Countries have sovereignty over their physical territory and they ought to have sovereignty over their digital territory, that's the basis of any democracy and self-determination.

Of course it produces awful results in Turkey because Erdogan is an autocrat, and autocrats use power to enact dumb policies, in this case censoring something because his family was insulted.

However in democracies it is necessary to not be defenseless and to maintain values. Here in Europe I've always felt that we're pretty much exposed in the digital sphere to either American norms due to sheer size, and nowadays more and more to negative campaigns by countries like Russia and China as they've learned to weaponize cyberspace.

[pasabagi]

I think cultural defensiveness is a strange phenomenon. The musical tradition that grew into jazz survived centuries of the most brutal slavery, but now it's the basis of most of what we hear in our day-to-day. Ultimately, cultural values that work will win out, and art that is beautiful will shine through. No amount of political pressure, violence, boundaries and borders can change that. You can't mandate that people should buy bratwurst, or read Horace, or go to church - but equally, if your values are good values, they can only be suppressed for some time, before they spring up in new forms and new places.

In China, they are conducting a great experiment in suppressing and controlling culture. Perhaps it will work - perhaps not, but I think you could only really achieve such a goal with such means, and moreover, I think such means are far more insidious and corrupting than any kind of foreign influence. Sheltered culture becomes irrelevant, then idiotic, then it becomes something only idiots and fossils can believe in.

[Barrin92]

> You can't mandate that people should buy bratwurst, or read Horace

of course you can. Do you know why the Breton language in France is reduced to 200k speakers and the Académie française gets to determine how French is spoken? Because the state stamped out every regional language during the creation of the Republic, and that was that.

Are the native cultures of the new world almost gone because they're worse cultures? No, it's because they were defenseless. Did Chrisitanity and Islam spread because they "worked?" No, they were spread by sword or settlement.

China's experiment isn't new, it's not even an experiment really. how do you think the Romanization of large parts of the old world happened, or the Russification of much of Eastern Europe? Is Finland 'idiotic' for defending its culture? Are they actually just living in a worse culture and haven't realised it yet?

What a terrible might makes right logic.

[pnako]

>Because the state stamped out every regional language during the creation of the Republic, and that was that.

They had signs on the walls in Breton schools telling that "it's forbidden to spit on the ground, or speak Breton".

[redis_mlc]

Malaysia, a former British colony, stopped teaching English in schools for the past 2 generations out of local pride.

Ironically, the generation older than that can still speak English, and roll their eyes when they have to translate for their adult kids who can't engage in tourism or trade.

[salmonfamine]

Yeah, good questions.

I'm not advocating an end to global platforms. And I don't think the democratic oversight should come from the US government. The end goal should be a website like Wikipedia -- non-profit, maintained and perhaps even funded by users.

In fact, I think a lot of the fragmentation of the internet you see abroad is a reaction against the powerlessness of users and governments against the unassailable power of these corporations. Maybe, if we are able to give users some degree of control over the design and policies of these platforms, we might be able to preserve the global internet. Some of that fragmentation -- as you see in the OP article -- is simply a result of governmental authoritarianism, which is a problem either way.

I think the first step would be to re-align some economic incentives by creating digital rights laws. GDPR is a good first step. So establishing something similar in the US. This itself is a hugely complicated step that could go very wrong, and due to the corrupt nature of US politics and the desire for large tech companies for regulatory capture, the potential pitfalls are many.

Then, if we manage to get that right, I think we need to find a way to create legislation that requires these platforms to give their users control regarding how content is presented to them -- essentially, the ability to control their feeds.

I don't know how we would manage to transition these companies to a true non-profit model. As long as they remain for-profit, they will fight and subvert these efforts every step of the way, even after they became law.

However, I think we are increasingly seeing how dangerous and unsustainable the current model is. Perhaps the best way to accelerate data rights is accelerationism -- making the exploits and faults in these platforms as visible as possible by "hacking" them.

[nickik]

> is a reaction against the powerlessness of users and governments against the unassailable power of these corporations

Its about governments powerlessness to control the message from foreign cooperations likely influenced by foreign governments.

Maybe 0.000001% of it is 'protecting users'.

> essentially, the ability to control their feeds

Again, probably 0.0001% of Users will so even if you give them the option.

> making the exploits and faults in these platforms as visible as possible by "hacking" them.

So hurting users even more in the process?

[vharuck]

>Again, probably 0.0001% of Users will so even if you give them the option.

It depends on the implementation. A good example for user control is Pandora. Not hard at all to control what music I'll hear.

[salmonfamine]

> Its about governments powerlessness to control the message from foreign cooperations likely influenced by foreign governments.

Fair enough, that is also an issue.

> Maybe 0.000001% of it is 'protecting users'.

I think we need to bring in concrete examples here. Consider GDPR -- would you characterize that as a governmental entity protecting its users?

> Again, probably 0.0001% of Users will so even if you give them the option.

I kind of doubt that. Facebook has introduced limited control over certain aspects of your feed and everyone I know has used those features. Even non-technical people I know routinely complain about suggested content, non-chronological feeds, and so on. These are popular (if not nearly-universal) concerns.

> So hurting users even more in the process?

Ok, I was off the mark there. I just mean that there are problems with the current platforms that expose real vulnerabilities into public discourse and democracy that have been exploited, and will be exploited much more thoroughly in the future. So doing nothing is not sustainable.