The internet’s open protocols survived hidden beneath Big Tech’s rent-extracting edifices
Evidence
By the 1970s, as America’s Global Plan was dying and the Global Minotaur was being born, all the building blocks of this marvellous digital commons were in place. … And they still are, albeit hidden now under the monstrous edifices erected upon them by Big Tech. In fact, the remnants of Internet One still serve us well. Even though they function out of sight, deep within our computers, we can’t avoid occasionally catching glimpses of their acronyms: letters like TCP/IP, which refer to a protocol our computers use to send or receive information. Or POP, IMAP and SMTP, the original protocols that, still, allow us to email each other. … Or, perhaps the most visible of them all, HTTP – the protocol by which we visit websites. We pay not one penny to use these protocols, nor do we suffer advertisements as the indirect price for using them. Like Britain’s common lands before the enclosures, they remain free for anyone to use; not unlike Wikipedia, one of the few surviving examples of a commons-based service that takes huge quantities of work to produce and maintain, but which no owner ‘monetises’. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 289
Categorization
- DEFINE: Identifies TCP/IP, POP, IMAP, SMTP, HTTP as the surviving commons-based open protocols of ‘Internet One’.
- ADDENDUM: The commons-land enclosure analogy directly parallels the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s framing of common infrastructure being privatized.
- XREF: connects to: The internet enabled a shift to commons-based decentralized non-market production — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 77
Broader Connections
- The internet enabled a shift to commons-based decentralized non-market production
#corroborates(0.78) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 77