The EU Plan to Reshape the Internet Forever

The world wide web is no stranger to government control. The Internet itself was created by the US Military, and governments across the world have subsidized Internet infrastructure in all kinds of ways. Many factors, such as the economies of scale, and sheer workforce size give large organizations an immense advantage when it comes to shaping the future of cyberspace. Just as individuals struggle with troubles relating to digital privacy & security, so do large organizations and governments. In response, governments across the world are moving fast to address these concerns. With the motive and means to transform the fundamental elements that lay the foundation for our digital lives, a tidal wave of change is taking place and just beginning to accelerate. The winning move isn’t to challenge the whole tsunami directly, but rather to find the right waves that can carry us to where we would like to be. Indifference and apathy will certainly lead us to a similar place it took us all during the big tech era: to dependence and exploitation. “I am not familiar with the history of how the Internet/tech companies have infiltrated my life– I only know one day the past, the before Internet part of life was like in another galaxy, and I was forcibly acclimated into accepting an intrusive technology if I want to use the Internet or a “smart” phone.” Written by a friend If nothing else, this should be a reminder of the dire necessity to be vigilant of how governments and large corporations can shape cyberspace to tilt the balance of power against the public. Many governments like to be permissive in all the ways that don’t impact prioritized policy objectives, then turn brutal the moment public opinion starts to shift against those policies. As the digital world has taken hold over more and more aspects of our lives, now more than ever, we all need take responsibility for shielding ourselves and others from such abuses. Instead of continuing to let the web be dictated by American Tech Companies, Europe has a bold new strategy to plan, build, and enforce a new vision for cyberspace. The European Union’s Next Generation Internet, or NGI for short, aims to terraform cyberspace to represent the values of their elite. This plan is explicitly aimed at changing the Internet not just for Europeans, but for the entire world as well. Understanding the “Next Generation Internet” If you take a look at the brochure, it self-describes the plan as a “Human Internet for a better future”. Despite this, the document starts out making it explicitly clear that many technocratic ideals are directly woven into the plan. Surveillance, censorship, and more digital intrusion into our lives aren’t depicted as problems to be solved, but rather responsibly managed. The Internet is the engine of digitisation of our society and our economy. As connectivity increases, the boundaries between the real and the digital world are blurring. With the explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT), multimedia content and social media,the Internet offers an unprecedented access to data and online services.Artificial intelligence helps to extract meaning from this data and to embed autonomy and intelligence into networks, connected objects and services. However, there has been an erosion of trust in the Internet following revelations about the exploitation of personal data, large-scale cybersecurity and data breaches, and growing awareness of online disinformation. Do you feel the warm and fuzzy human feelings yet? To go further, this is an excellent example of “brokering legitimacy”. Which is when advocates for solving a problem undermine their cause by carving out counter-productive exceptions to their principles. This process uses the very real concerns about privacy and security to justify more control. Effectively binding critics of the plan, because it’s leveraging the unjustifiable aspects of the status quo to dismantle the parts worth preserving. It is naive to believe that the European Union, which very recently pushed to backdoor everyone’s web traffic, is somehow sincerely interested in the privacy or even security of their citizens. I can wholeheartedly believe that European governments are very concerned about their own security from the public, Big Tech, and foreign entities alike. As cyberwars escalate moves are required to innovate not just their own systems, but to make changes to the systems that their citizens use as well. The following quote is from the Next Generation Internet Policy Summit in 2020, I find it exemplary of the kind of spirit that animates the initiative. In the name of resolving a wide variety of issues created by the US Government and American Tech companies, Europe is working to consolidate information control over the Internet. In hindsight, it appears that the laissez-faire approach governments took with large tech companies was to merely buy time while more sophisticated digital surveillance techniques were built up. Hence the desire for rapid regulatory and technological innovation emphasized in the above quote. In late 2019 Aral Balkan spoke with the European Parliament. Raising many important points, he pleaded with them to kill ‘surveillance capitalism’. The video is absolutely worth watching to get an understanding of how where we are bridges to where the European Union would like to go. [Regarding citing Facebook] If this is the presumption under which you are regulating the Internet, I despair about the future of human rights and about the future of our democracy. … You’re going blindly towards a Silicon Valley model, I don’t know why you’re doing this. In short, Aral seems unconvinced that the EU will actually go far enough to radically support citizen’s digital autonomy and is instead trying to import aspects of the big tech control regime under state control. It’s hard to disagree with that perspective, and he exemplifies what actual opposition to these problems looks like. As frustrating as some aspects of the Next Generation Internet vision are, it is to the EU’s credit that this is a massive transparent undertaking. Much of it is not only open public knowledge, but features initiatives in which open participation is encouraged. This appears to be the case largely because the concerns around censorship and paternalism seem to be more broadly socially accepted in Europe, a critical sign that social acceptance of censorship is what entrenches it. The way in which the Next Generation Internet is being rolled out is very effective at neutralizing any outright opposition, to the degree it is even possible. It is easy to see how such sweeping and extreme transformations made in other domains would use a similar model. It is a foolish and dangerous mistake to fall into the trap of thinking governments are entirely comprised of out-of-touch bureaucrats with no understanding of technology. In fact, these reforms are being drawn up by people with an incredibly high level of understanding that is quite difficult to match, independent reformers (if there truly are any) are at a serious disadvantage. Fully Embracing Open Source One of the advantages the European Union has, is that they have recognized the immense opportunity of actually leaning into the open source development model. While North America bickers about remote work and commercial office space, the EU is harnessing the power of efficient decentralized work. By taking the “build it and they will come” approach, they are entirely out-maneuvering competitors with a treasure-trove of opportunity that has been laying dormant in people’s apathy and defeatism for over a decade. The NLnet Foundation funds a wide variety of Open Source projects and tools that fit within the Next Generation Internet vision. This is good in some ways, notably that many of these projects are Free Software, which means that if things do go wrong, at least people can modify the projects for their own needs. One does have to wonder what the exact terms of… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gaberocks.substack.com/subscribe