Neoliberal privatization decisions shaped the corporate-controlled internet

Evidence

The Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton administrations privatized the machine world into corporate America. Nothing was more natural for the politicians of this era—public ownership was seen as barbaric, if not outright un-American. So for-profit firms would control the computers and the built environment of the online experience. One could very easily imagine a different internet if it had been built by a different country—France? Vietnam? Iraq?—or even at a different moment in US history. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 288

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Speaks to the argument in the trees-as-infrastructure essay about how underlying choices of infrastructure shape what’s possible.
• QUESTION: The counterfactual of a different internet actively invites imagining what a publicly-owned or non-US design would look like.
• XREF: connects to: Free Silicon Valley services are funded by surveillance of users for advertising; Silicon Valley ideology fused free-market libertarianism with New Left anti-hierarchy — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 290; The internet’s egalitarian founding promise hardened into corporate libertarianism — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• The internet’s egalitarian founding promise hardened into corporate libertarianism #corroborates (0.85) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34