[governance] FW: [Dewayne-Net] The Decentralized Web

[michael gurstein]

-----Original Message-----
From: dewayne-net at warpspeed.com [mailto:dewayne-net at warpspeed.com] On Behalf
Of Dewayne Hendricks
Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2013 4:52 AM
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Decentralized Web

The Decentralized Web
By Josh Levy & Renata Avilia, Free Press Dec 11 2013
<http://www.freepress.net/blog/2013/12/11/decentralized-web>

Nearly half a billion people use Gmail. Facebook boasts more than a billion
users. Want to host documents in the cloud? Dropbox has you covered. Photos?
Ditto for Flickr (which Yahoo owns) and Google.

If you buy an iPhone, you'll likely be sucked into iCloud, the service that
backs up your email, photos, address books, calendars and documents - all at
no cost (not including the price of the device). Same goes for Android and
Google's own offerings.

All of these companies are moving fast to implement fingerprinted
identification. And they all provide one-stop access to your full
information dossier.

Welcome to the centralized Web. As the next billion Internet users come
online in the coming years, they'll encounter a different Web than its first
pioneers found. Corporate walled gardens are replacing open, community-run
platforms. An unholy partnership between corporations and government
iskilling online privacy and free speech. The result is access to a few
useful services - at great cost to our digital rights.

The newly online - most of whom will log on via a mobile phone - will
encounter new uses of technology that violate our basic rights. For example,
Pakistan has implemented a mandatory biometric regime for new SIM-card
users, who must submit their fingerprints upon purchase so that private
companies can line up matches with the state fingerprint database.

Contrast this with Talea de Castro, the Mexican village in Oaxaca that built
and has full control of its own mobile network - a private oasis outside the
realm of state governments and big corporations.

For most Internet users, the availability and utility of services like Gmail
are prime examples of the magic of free.

For others - free press advocates, corporate watchdogs, human rights
defenders - Apple, Facebook and Google provide a kind of poisoned fruit:
It's seductive but destructive.

The very fact that just a handful of companies are capturing the vast
majority of Internet users' communications and data is the great challenge
of the information age. Most Internet users make a Faustian bargain with
these companies: We give up our basic rights in exchange for convenient and
inexpensive communications tools. But, as with any deal with the devil,
we're ultimately on the losing side.

Companies like Apple hook users with beautiful designs and usability.
They're status symbols. They're convenient. But the hardware and software
are usually locked so you can't see what's going on inside - or know who has
access to your private data.

But back to that bargain we've made. Who doesn't find comfort (and utility)
in powerful search engines and bottomless email archives and deep databases
of everything you and your friends (and their friends, and their friends'
friends) value in this world?

This is what people like to call Big Data: vast troves of our innermost
secrets, our spending habits, details about our private lives, our preferred
foods, our most-hated foods, our favorite musicians, our political
interests, our social connections, our political preferences, our sexual
preferences, our readings.

And all of it can be mined either for good or evil. It can be used to
deliver targeted advertising that allegedly benefits us. It can also be used
to discover the illnesses we cover up, the financial distress we ignore, the
unpopular beliefs we harbor and the suspicious people we know.

Your data can be with you or against you. Most often, it's a mixture of the
two. In too many ways, the Internet has become a vehicle for consumption,
redirecting your attention to the wares of corporations. And as we now know
thanks to the ongoing revelations about unchecked surveillance activities,
this "attention economy" has made it all too easy for government to spy on
us.

Thanks to Google and others, the U.S. or EU governments don't have to
compile a deep profile of you: These companies already have it. Whether
these tools of surveillance are in state or corporate hands, that they exist
at all should raise grave concerns about the future of democracy and our
basic human rights.

This exploitation of data is a tool of totalitarianism. As legal scholar
Eben Moglen reminds us, this kind of surveillance is incompatible with "the
system of enlightened, individual, democratic self-governance."

[snip]

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