CompPhi

The Internet’s ego inflated by orders of magnitude over the past couple of weeks as the valiant assault on SOPA and PIPA seemingly steered us towards a free and open future. The internet would continue the unbiased exchange of ideas – we can tear down oppressive regimes with our tweets, find ‘liberated’ copyrighted content with a simple search of the Google, and utterly ignore congressional shenanigans that threaten to suppress free speech.

Right. We accomplished none of that.

Sure, SOPA got sidelined, but the sentiment is still there. And I’m not talking about ACTA or any other congressional bill. You see we assumed that, should the internet be left to its own devices, it would foster an open-idea Valhalla. Every internet company, so we thought, would pull its weight to keep things fair, open, and impartial. And the state of the web?

Twitter took $300 million in investment from a Saudi prince. Yay free-market capitalism! One month later, right after SOPA gets washed away (puns!), they have put in place infrastructure to censor tweets if so required by law.

Don't Be Evil (snooping your wifi apparently doesn't count)

Google, long a bastion of ‘openness’, decreed that search results would be combined with… your world? I have a feeling my world is about to become far more sponsored. That in itself isn’t a bad thing – the advertising dollars from Google leveraging my personal data (reading my email, tracking my search history, perusing my {lack of} Google+ posts) allow me to use Google services for free, as well as funding future projects. But despite Larry Page’s demand that employees (and users by extension) accept SPYW or GTFO, this doesn’t seem to be the direction many hoped a 21st century Google would head. Oh yeah, and those myriad privacy policies protecting you? They’ve combined 60 into 1, but don’t expect your life to get more private.

Facebook can barely hold steady with a UI for more than a few months, and is desperately seeking to justify its absurd valuations with, you know, actual revenue. They’ve found that selling your life to advertisers is surprisingly profitable and fully intend on skewing development towards corporation-friendly ‘advancements’, even if it means spamming the fuck out of your news feed with Washington Post articles and Spotify listens.

Congressional understanding of DNS

So sure, Congress has no clue how the internet works and shouldn’t be controlling its fate. And yes, we’ve shown that the web is a powerful medium for changing real world events. Arab Spring and SOPA showed us that, but to think that the only enemies are on the outside is naive. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many others have reached a point where their sheer size dictates there motives. If powering millions of servers and providing a solid ROI for shareholders becomes incompatible with “Don’t be evil”, something’s gotta give. Just don’t expect it to be the bottom line.