[Governance] New Yorker: Can the Internet Be Governed?

[Joly MacFie via Governance]

Lengthy Op-Ed by Akash Kapur. Paywall but first time visitors should be
fine. If in trouble, ask me for the text.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/can-the-internet-be-governed

Will the Internet harden into an oligarchic playground, or will it become
> the tamer (and perhaps less innovative) place envisioned by European
> regulators, something akin to a digital public utility? Will large sections
> of it eventually bend to the power of tyrants and illiberal populists,
> determined to stamp out what Xi Jinping has castigated as the network’s
> “hidden negative energy”? Or will the more consequential influence be the
> model that India is pioneering, a walled garden in which private enterprise
> is allowed to flourish, but within confines established by the state?


The answer may at least partly lie in how—and where—the Internet is being
> used. In 1996, when Barlow wrote his manifesto, there were some eighty
> million Internet users around the world, eighty per cent of whom lived in
> North America and Europe. Today, there are more than five billion people on
> the Internet, roughly two-thirds of them from countries in the Global
> South. India and China now account for about half the world’s mobile-data
> traffic; the fastest-growing population of users is in Africa. The Internet
> remains a work in progress. But there’s reason to think that its future is
> being written in a very different place than its past was.


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