{"id":28282,"date":"2017-11-25T11:19:03","date_gmt":"2017-11-25T16:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28282"},"modified":"2017-11-25T11:20:57","modified_gmt":"2017-11-25T16:20:57","slug":"28282","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28282","title":{"rendered":"From an Open Internet, Back to the Dark Ages\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

From an Open Internet, Back to the Dark Ages<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n
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Photo by Credo Action CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Can anyone still doubt that access to a relatively free and open internet is rapidly coming to an end in the west? In China and other autocratic regimes, leaders have simply bent the internet to their will, censoring content that threatens their rule. But in the \u201cdemocratic\u201d west, it is being done differently. The state does not have to interfere directly \u2013 it outsources its dirty work to corporations.<\/p>\n

As soon as next month, the net could become the exclusive plaything of the biggest such corporations, determined to squeeze as much profit as possible out of bandwith. Meanwhile, the tools to help us engage in critical thinking, dissent and social mobilisation will be taken away as \u201cnet neutrality\u201d becomes a historical footnote, a teething phase, in the \u201cmaturing\u201d of the internet.<\/p>\n

In December the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC)\u00a0plans to repea<\/a>l<\/u>\u00a0already compromised regulations that are in place to maintain a semblance of \u201cnet neutrality\u201d. Its chairman, Ajit Pai, and the corporations that are internet service providers want to sweep away these rules, just like the banking sector got rid of financial regulations so it could inflate our economies into giant ponzi schemes.<\/p>\n

That could serve as the final blow to the left and its ability to make its voice heard in the public square.<\/p>\n

It was political leaders \u2013 aided by the corporate media \u2013 who paved the way to this with their fomenting of a self-serving moral panic about \u201cfake news\u201d. Fake news, they argued, appeared only online, not in the pages of the corporate media \u2013 the same media that sold us the myth of WMD in Iraq, and has so effectively preserved a single party system with two faces. The public, it seems, needs to be protected only from bloggers and websites.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From an Open Internet, Back to the Dark Ages\u00a0 Photo by Credo Action CC BY 2.0 Can anyone still doubt that access to a relatively free and open internet is rapidly coming to an end in the west? In China and other autocratic regimes, leaders have simply bent the internet to their will, censoring content […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5493,1339,17165,3828],"class_list":["post-28282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-counterpunch","tag-internet","tag-jonathan-cook","tag-net-neutrality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28282"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28284,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28282\/revisions\/28284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}