INDEX	Saturday January 9, 2021
How corporations exercise control
I first used the internet before there was an internet. To explain: what we now call the internet is the world wide web, built on a combination of university and military computer link ups. But there were modems long before there was an internet. In fact, my father (who worked for the British telephone company, the GPO, in the 1940s) claims there were modems as far back as the end of the Second World War. I have my doubts about that. But there were certainly modems at the beginning of the 1980s because I had one. The first ones worked at an impressive 8kbs. I never had one of those. My first was a 16kbs connection. Gradually the speed increased 32kbs, 64kbs and eventually 128kbs. That last one was thought, at the time, to be the technical upper limit for a telephone based system. Hence the need to dig a cable network covering the entire country: broadband. Before Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW in 1989 those modems were put to use doing a variety of things. First there was email, a weird thing. You sent a message to a holding post in your own country. That message was transferred to the next adjoining country once every 24 hours. And then went onto the following one (if necessary) 24 hours later. And so on. I think it took two or three weeks to send an email to Australia; slower than airmail. There were also rather wonderful bulletin boards. If you logged onto one you could download all sorts of exciting freeware. Anyway, the system existed even if it creaked. At that time we (those pioneers) were convinced that the internet was going to change the world: breaking down national borders and making the exchange of information (and even software) free and (eventually when the technical problems were sorted out) instant. We believed this would remove the poisonous control that corporations like the newspaper publishing empires had over our national discourse and thought. Since it was impossible to control the internet (we thought) no one would own or dominate it; no one could fence it off. How wrong we were. It turned out that the internet was a natural monopoly producer, creating behemoths of a scale and ability to control, that we could not even imagine. These new corporations (like Apple and Microsoft) grew bigger and more dominant than even the oil companies had been. But still information was free. The internet frowns on pay per view systems unless you are selling a specialised service like games or porn. As long as it was free surely we could say what we liked? Aparently not. As we found when anti-terrorism legislation was used to crack down on trade unionists and civil rights campaigners, the internet is increasingly becoming a no go area for people who do not share the neo con agenda of the American Republican party (and much of the Democrat party). The latest horror is that Parler, a sort of quirky version of Twitter, is effectively being driven to the margins. There's no reason why you should care about this. It doesn't effect you or your everyday life. But if you ever want to sit and meditate about something just consider: how come Trump got the second highest popular vote in American history (more than Hilary Clinton got last time). Is it because information is free or is it because money talks and the corporations run the world?
	Posted by Jonathan Brind.
INDEX
Saturday January 9, 2021