Wikileaks And The End of the Open Internet

Let’s just state the obvious here: we’re seeing the end of the open internet with what is being done to Wikileaks. It’s one thing for Amazon to toss them, it’s another thing entirely to refuse to propagate their domain information. This has been coming for quite some time, and Wikileaks is not the first domain to be shut down in the US, it is merely the highest profile. Combined with the attempt to make NetFlix pay a surcharge or lose access to customers, this spells the end of the free internet.

The absurdity, the sheer Orwellian stupidity of this is epitomized by the State Department telling students at elite colleges not to read the leaks, or they won’t get jobs at State. As if anyone who isn’t curious to read what is in the leaks, who doesn’t want to know how diplomacy actually works, is anyone State should hire. In a sane world, the reaction would be the opposite: no one who hadn’t read them would be hired.

This is reminiscent of the way the old Soviet Union worked, with everyone being forced to pretend they don’t know what they absolutely do know, and blind conformity prized over ability.

Meanwhile a worldwide alert is out for the horrible Julian Assange for rape, aka: not using a condom. I certainly won’t defend not using a condom when your partner wants you to, if that’s what happened, but those guilty of such crimes don’t usually have worldwide manhunts called against them, do they? Meanwhile the squishy left wrings its hands and wails. Let me put it to you this way: no one who was willing to put themselves out there the way Assange did is not a massive risk taker. Going into this he had to know that eventually he would be locked up, discredited, killed or some combination. Prudent men and women who would never do anything stupid (like sleep with groupies) would not have created Wikileaks in the first place and would not have leaked the inflammatory material that Assange has put out there in the second place.

In the spirit of a rambling post, let’s move back to the internet. Leaving aside censorship, which is older than writing, and is banal, boring and predictable, especially from states on auto-pilot to authoritarianism like the US, the economic model to use when thinking about the internet is the old railroads of the 19th and early 20th century. The railroads were the only way to get your products to market if you weren’t on the coast, a major river or canal. They were hated, loathed with a passion, by farmers. Why? Because they took all the surplus value, all the profit. If you weren’t willing to pay, you went out of business. Even if you were willing to pay, you wound up in hock to them. You worked for the railroad, period. All or virtually all of what would have been profit went to them.

When the only way to get your product to market is an unregulated monopoly or oligopoly they will take it all. The result isn’t just unprofitable businesses, it’s failed businesses and businesses that never get off the ground, because they can’t afford to pay the freight, or more accurately, the vig. Oligopolies in between producers and consumers always strangle the economy. Always.

And, on top of p0litical repression of free speech, that’s what’s coming to the internet near you. The essentially free and open internet is dying and it will soon be dead.

(Note: text changed from Hilary Clinton to State department telling students)