Big Tech’s control of digital identity is a deliberate US government political choice

Evidence

It did not have to be this way. When the US Pentagon chose to make GPS available to everyone, to turn it over to the digital commons, they granted each of us the right to know our location in real time. For free. No questions asked. It was a political decision to do so. As was the sinister decision that you and I should not have any means of establishing, or proving, our online identity – another political decision by the US government, except this time clearly aimed at boosting Big Tech’s power over us. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 303

Categorization

• QUESTION: Implies a counterfactual worth chasing: what state, or what political coalition, deliberately kept digital identity out of the commons?
• XREF: Connects to the base-empire chapters on how American state power undergirds platform dominance. — connects to: Technology’s liberating or enslaving character is decided politically, not intrinsic — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 63; US political choices made identity ownership private while keeping GPS common; Scientific-technological ordering is inherently political — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 618 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• US political choices made identity ownership private while keeping GPS common #exemplifies (0.95)
• Technology’s liberating or enslaving character is decided politically, not intrinsic #corroborates (0.92) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 63
• Scientific-technological ordering is inherently political #corroborates (0.82) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 618
• The free digital universe was produced by political decisions, not inevitability #corroborates (0.80) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 82
• Neoliberal privatization decisions shaped the corporate-controlled internet #corroborates (0.78) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 288
• Big Tech seized publicly funded technologies while claiming the language of the commons #corroborates (0.75) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 285