[phaser]

Every time I see an idea like this (or a politician talking about tech 'sovereignty') I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.

> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

edit: formatting

[Nursie]

This reads as very naive now. As soon as a critical mass of people got online, and they wanted their governments to apply laws and regulations there, it was going to happen.

This declaration was written from the days when those who were interacting online were making a real effort to do so, who really wanted to be there, who were in a niche, who were observing 'netiquette' and other quaint notions. They were generally educated, generally technologists by profession or interest, and in those circumstances it's easy to see the utopia you have created and declare it good, with no need for regulation.

It's a little like when you have a small team of skilled, motivated engineers - work gets done to a high standard without the need for onerous processes. But when you start recruiting and growing the team wider, and bring in lots of juniors...

> We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

That didn't turn out so well IMHO. People got on there and then ... yuck, they did people stuff. Harassed each other, commited fraud, blackmail and extortion, created and exchanged CSAM. Cyberspace has suffered from government and commercial overreach, certainly, and so much regulation has been commercial in nature rather than actually about safety.

But the dream of an internet free from any form of government regulation? Never could have lasted when everyone got on here.

And just look at our civilisation of the mind, in its centralised fortresses with its own aristocracy exerting control over what information gets fed to the masses.

And even on a technical level, in 1996 people still used to leave mail relays open to be neighbourly!

[andsoitis]

> I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.

Cyberspace depends on physical reality and everything that comes from that. Resource constraints, economics, politics, arms races, warfare, etc.

[isodev]

Cyberspace promised us we can all work together to create things, like one species coming together to solve problems. Now in 2026, we need to “space” for every little tribe…

[aljaz823]

It was in no position to make such promises.

[isodev]

But it’s nice to think we can eventually end up as one big planet building things instead of 200+ tiny bickering states that need to redo all the work

[spwa4]

Exactly. There never was a declaration of independence of cyberspace. BUT government and law moved too slowly by years and years. And they have, of course, not learned their lesson.

For example: suing Nappster 2 years after it launched. And that was just because it was an extremely clear-cut case. By the time they did that there were 10 such networks, none of which were sued, none of which had clear laws or court decisions stating clearly one way or the other if it was legal.

And when we're talking a vague issue, for example how copyright affects search engines, the first actually settled case (which was still a far cry from establishing the rules) happened in 2006, 16 years after the initial search engine started operating and over 8 years after Google started it's meteoric rise. The specific decision the courts deigned to make, after 16 years? That caching a page so it can be used to build a search index in the first place does not by itself violate copyright. Great, well, that covers it then. My point is, by then the cat was out of the bag, ran to the neighbors house, got 6 kittens, who each got 6 kittens themselves and one of it's grandchildren ate the sandwich the judge was hoping to have for lunch and one of the other kittens got adopted by the president of the US, while the rest invaded and destroyed the houses of publishers that tried to protect their copyright.

Imagine the insanity, the damage that any real court decision against search engines would do today. "No you can't show previews". "Ads don't respect trademarks". There is no room for any such decisions now. The few decisions they have made (in >30 years) have amplified the damage to the victims that the court system tried to help (just ask a few newspapers).

Of course, none of this has instilled any sense of reasonableness, modesty or urgency in any parliament, court or even executive around the globe. For instance, they could PRE-clarify the laws before AI takes over 5 industries. Does AI training violate copyright? What are the rights of an employee that gets fired because AI does their job? No government felt the need to answer the copyright question when it mattered, 7 years ago, and there is ZERO action on the second question. Are they planning to answer the people displacement question once 99% of companies have done it because competition forced them to?

Now any answer they give on the copyright front is beside the point since no court or Parliament actually has the power to order existing (potentially law-violating) models to be destroyed. Once again, they have placed themselves into a position where they are totally irrelevant. Now one might ask, the time is to decide if you violate copyright by training a model using a model that was trained while violating copyright. Perhaps that one is still relevant. But nothing will be done.

And please, it doesn't matter what your position is on the issue. Can model training violate copyright? Yes or no? We live in a democracy and no decision is made. This is an important part of why big companies get to openly violate laws on an unprecedented scale for billions and billions without consequences while kids sometimes get locked up for stealing a single candy.

[ares623]

it was true for about 3 years give or take

[westpfelia]

I maintain the peak of the internet was Numa Numa. After that its been a ever gaining speed decline of the internet.

[marssaxman]

Yes, all of our 20-year-old selves eventually learned that. No need to rub it in!

[stackghost]

Indeed. I first encountered the "declaration of independence of cyberspace" a few years after it was written, and at the time I was immediately reminded of the Full Metal Jacket quote that goes something like "you can give your heart to Jesus but your ass belongs to the Marine Corps!"

That is to say the Declaration is pure cringe. The idea that cyberspace could become sovereign unto itself is patently absurd: The user's ass belongs to whichever country they inhabit.

[yipbub]

Maybe it can be aspirational.

[pjc50]

Worse, physical reality now also depends on "cyberspace".

This stuff only worked, socially and politically, when it was a niche. Echoing the comment of Nursie, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47071177 ; as soon as "everyone" is online, online is also real life. People thought it might be a haven for progressive politics, but that didn't outlast the Howard Dean campaign and it turned out that the right-wing could do online politics as well. The medium doesn't care whether your message is pro- or anti-genocide.

The ability of hyper-online memelords to inject bad ideas into the online right policy space has been an absolute disaster for all concerned. US policy is now downstream of Twitter. Let that sink in, as it were.

In a very cyberpunk dystopia way, online warfare is now co-evolved with both kinetic warfare (Ukraine's meme army trying to secure them external support) and urban warfare (following ICE agents around to post video of what they're doing on the Internet is as effective a tactic as legal action).

People forget that the "cyber" of "cyberpunk" and "cyberspace" comes from "cybernetics", meaning systems of control. In the beginning amateurs had control because it wasn't important. Now it turns out that, yes, the question of which country owns the chat client all the government staff are using is a question of national security.

[intensiveBoar]

As someone who remembers my local ISP come home to install a router and fiddle with cables when I was a child, saw governments block and censor specific parts of it, and had a weeklong ordeal getting PPPoE on my own router to work with my ISP just recently, this seems immediately intuitive and understandable. Frankly I'm surprised it wasn't for some people, at any point.

[21asdffdsa12]

Missing on the list, but mostly part of it - human retardation. In politics, in private, everywhere.

The surplus binges of the 90s do not make for an accurate sample of human and politics nature.

[11mariom]

> I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.

I would say it was… until everybody is connected to the internet all the time. I would love to get back to the internet from… around 2010? Something like that. IRC was still a thing (made a lot of friends there, many of them I know in person now), forums was still live, blogs were still worth to read and write (nowadays I see like most of ppl moved to fb/ln/x to post…).

When it got "crowded" it's stopped being government independent. Back in a day everyone was (pseudo)anonymous, and here - we're thinking about age restrictions, socials requesting ID/face scans… I do not like the ways it's moving.

[21asdffdsa12]

Its most horrifying if you look at what it usually burns down and fizzles out to. Governments in the middle east- one dominant family, extracting, the rest suffering in silence boxed away in silos, with no chance to move and create ever again - well except for unrest and fundamentalist movements.

[wlecometo]

we have been living in the US sovereignty until now, if you don't trust me ask, the people behind, The pirate bay, Dmitri Sklyarov or Kim dot com.

[shiroiuma]

Such an idea never made any real sense, and never will until you can figure out how to move IT infrastructure into a separate dimension where governments have no authority. Those servers have to sit somewhere.

[RobotToaster]

Doesn't have to be a different dimension, international waters or space would do.

[Semaphor]

All this, and no mention of Sealand [0]? An unrecognized micronation in (formerly) international waters, with a hosting company (back then) that allowed almost everything, and its own coup and counter attack by the "legitimate" royals (and then Germany having to negotiate POW release of the coup organizer).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

[XorNot]

Both those places are heavily government controlled.

In fact international waters if you're not flagged and registered to a specific country, then it's open season for anyone to board and seize you.

[brabel]

Which is something the US has demonstrated so clearly recently.

[shiroiuma]

This shows that if you want real freedom on the high seas, you need a submarine. Captain Nemo had the right idea.

[RobotToaster]

Can tap directly into the undersea cables too!

[plagiarist]

I'm so mad that the bitcoin bro cruise ship never set sail. We missed out on some exciting drama.

[shiroiuma]

Aside from the counterpoints made by the other responders, this still won't work: you need a physical connection to those servers, and you can't just WiFi to servers thousands of kilometers away. So the servers need to be in another dimension, so you can access them without government interference.

[wafflemaker]

That's the whole plan with the space servers. As soon as we sort out a few problems, we're good to go.

Problems: Solar flare & radiation resistance. Heat dissipation. Energy (more effective solar panels, for things as close to sun as we).

Partially solved - getting to orbit. And as much as we hate musk, SpaceX might solve it once Starships start flying commercially.

If we would separate energy part out and beam it somehow, we could sit in a body's shadow in some Lagrange point equivalent for a given body system and greatly reduce heat dissipation requirements and suspectibility to solar flares.

[pseudony]

Look at what he does now, you honestly think a person this greedy would ever exercise less than maximum control?

[Towaway69]

Wait a one minute, who owns those space Servers? The same guy who runs starlink? The one who uses that power to threaten to cut access to those who refuse to do his bidding?

Come on, pull the other one, surely it can’t be that something so useful can be used as a tool for Mafia style politics.

[RobotToaster]

As someone extremely sceptical of musk, I do have some hope that competition between spacex and it's Chinese competitors will make space somewhat accessible to hobbyists.

[Towaway69]

Hobbyist is another name for consumer, so yes, consumer will have access as long as they pay.

Those that can’t pay or are politically undesirables, will be excluded from the global commons of space.

My take is that the great dream of unifying humanity through the internet won’t be helped by having it run in space.