the Internet (the digital world) ... brief past, present and future ... will it be a space of enslavement or empowerment???

[Gurumurthy K]

Dear teachers,

Happy Republic day ... As we celebrates the  68th Republic Day, we should think to what extent the goals of 'justice,liberty, equality and fraternity' that the preamble to the constitution  (http://www.constitution.org/cons/india/preamble.html) spoke of, are being promoted or compromised by the advance of the Internet ....

The recent focus on digitalization, smart cities, cashless economies etc should be explored in this light ... 

As the mail says in the end, "Let’s not assume history has any inevitable direction.  If you want things to move in a particular way, you have to do things to make it happen.  History is made by people – that’s us."

Let us all think, discuss and deliberate in what direction we would like our country to move towards .... Some of the digital advances may make our lives more comfortable and efficient, but, as the mail suggests, some advances clearly dilute our liberty and increase the inequities and injustice in our society... Gandhi's ideal of 'antyodaya' meant that our decisions should be guided by the impact on the most marginalized sections of our society and our digital society should also be a just and equitable one....

Comments welcome...

regards,
Guru
Guru, IT for Change, Bengaluru
www.ITforChange.net


From: InternetPolicy [mailto:internetpol...@elists.isoc.org] On Behalf Of Brandt Dainow
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2017 14:15
To: 'David Sarokin'; 'Kave Salamatian'
Cc: 'ISOC Internet Policy'
Subject: Re: [Internet Policy] WEBCAST Jan 24: Will The Internet Always Be American?
 
History shows us that there is nothing inevitable about things getting either better or worse.  Sometimes people unite to create a better world, and sometimes powerful elites make things truly horrible for ordinary people.  And either can continue for centuries.  Historically most of the human race has been living under the domination of elites who enforced their power with ideology and physical violence.  Think the Middle Ages in Europe (1,000 years), monarchical China (2,000 years), the Roman Empire (1,000 years), etc etc.  Generally, improving things for ordinary people takes many decades of tough work.
 
The internet started as both a military system and as an academic information exchange network.  Trends for both liberation and connection between people co-existed with trends towards domination and walled gardens.  IBM’s business model in the 1960’s – 1980’s was based on innovation which locked customers in and prevented interoperability with alternative suppliers.  Microsoft, Lotus and others followed this model.  I was a technical manager in Microsoft in the 1980’s and we were formally taught this model as the key to success.  We all knew the internet was coming, and we all thought it would be totally owned by whoever created the best tech.  I was alerted to the rise of the web in 1992 when Bill Gates made a speech announcing the web was the next big thing and that “Microsoft was going to own it.”  The idea of an open platform was heresy.  Tim Berners-Lee cites this in his autobiography as a key reason why he did not patent or sell HTML, but gave it to everyone.  In the 1990’s I watched the same attempts to own the web via control of HTML standards, especially implementation of new features by people like Netscape and Microsoft before these features were standardised, on the basis that if everyone used them, that company would “own” the standard (look at the history of HTML 4.0).
 
Companies like Google then demonstrated the economic value of owning search as the gateway to the web, and user-analytics driven advertising.  Facebook copied this model – own the environment, prevent interoperability, surveil the user, sell that data.  Both rely for their domination on the fact you cannot go to a competitor and interoperate with their users.  If these systems were open, or at least had open API-based interoperability, we would be seeing an entire competitive market of social networks, search systems etc.  Those who believe free markets are best for innovation or economic development should therefore see lack of interoperability and walled gardens as anti-capitalist.  This lack of choice, when combined with hidden data analytics, meets the Marxist criteria of coercion and economic exploitation.  Marxists should therefore see this same situation as anti-liberatory.  It doesn’t matter what your perspective, as I see it, there is no justification for domination of entire categories of online activity by monopolies like this.
 
There is no historical evidence this situation will improve of its own accord.  It could get better, or it could get worse.  Perhaps one day not having a Facebook account will be grounds for police investigation.  Could someone argue the best way to kill fake news is to ban all search engines except Google?  In the 1980’s the US government changed the world of email systems by laying down minimum security standards any supplier had to meet in order to tender for government contracts.  Security features which had been resisted for years were added to systems like MS Mail and Lotus Notes in months.  Similar moves could be made today on current issues, and I expect the effect would be the same.
 
These matters will only become more urgent as IoT and smart cities evolve.  In the longer term we will all end up embedded in a pervasive digital environment, becoming known as a “digital fog” (Bonomi, Flavio, Rodolfo Milito, Jiang Zhu, and Sateesh Addepalli. ‘Fog Computing and Its Role in the Internet of Things’. In Proceedings of the First Edition of the MCC Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing, 13–16. ACM, 2012.).  Google clearly wants to own that entire environment, hence their purchase of IoT systems, deals with car makers (Bedigian, Louis. ‘TU Automotive Detroit 2016 Conference Report’. Detroit: TU-Automotive Ltd (Penton), 2016.), moves into smart city technologies, voice and facial recognition, work on affective computing (to read your emotions), etc.
 
Let’s not assume history has any inevitable direction.  If you want things to move in a particular way, you have to do things to make it happen.  History is made by people – that’s us.
 
Regards,
Brandt Dainow
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Brandt_Dainow