How the Internet was Stolen

foreign this is a story of Deceit manipulation lots of money political lobbying lawsuits and ultimately covert theft the history of the internet has been one of big Capital pilfering from public investment and National infrastructure the expropriation of academic research of democratic open source Alternatives being forced illegally from the market of devices to steal our privacy for profit being quickly snuck into our homes our cars our watches glasses and phones it's a story of unethical business practices of Monopoly power a story that could have been different and in the end a story of competing dreams hopes for the future [Music] it's a big history one that needs to be told properly and one in which that verb to steal will be returned to stealing can happen in many ways through Force through dispossession through tricks power and cash of physical infrastructure and ideas attention and privacy can be stolen as much as hardware and physical Goods we'll see how this story has some striking parallels throughout history this is the story of the ideologies the battles the court cases the Innovations the Lost hopes from Microsoft to Uber from eBay to Google from the US Department of Defense to dimly lit University Laboratories in basements from Napster to 911 this is the story of the internet foreign all of this can be fed into the computer through these magnetic tapes at a rate of 12 000 numbers or letters per second the web as we've come to know it is a great ocean we know that we only swim paddle on its surface never diving beyond the first few pages of search results rarely interacting outside of our own social network swimming out occasionally to find a few new journalists or creators to follow a few new products to buy but its depth what it's made of how it was made the history that gave shape to it what lurks under its surface what might be possible remain like the ocean surprisingly unknown to us the internet was meant to be a new Utopia a tool of Liberty fraternity equality of radical democracy and freedom and it might have had its moment but has a tool celebrated for its openness turned into a bit of a cage to understand this we have to look at the values of those who built it ask why and how it was designed what motivated its pioneers and look at what they came up against look at what changed them because the history of the internet maybe more than any other histories of our present moment is the history of the future [Music] today a new moon is in the sky a 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket our satellite program has never been conducted as a race with other nations [Music] the internet is a complicated system even when Charles Babbage designed the first computer or mechanical calculator in 1819 it was far too complicated for Babbage to fund on his own he received a 17 000 pound Grant a fortune at the time from the British government to fund his project which ultimately for a long time still failed throughout the Industrial Revolution single innovators could design and build machines that were the most complicated devices ever envisaged and they could do it alone but with computers this was no longer true Source message transmitter Channel message destination the first two modern computers were built at the University of Illinois Center of innovation in 1951 and were funded by the Department of Defense and the U.S army just 18 years later in 1969 at the height of the counterculture Revolution four computer terminals were connected remotely for the first time at universities across the U.S from California to Utah the project was the continued result of Department of Defense financing through DARPA the defense Advanced research projects agency investment that would cost the U.S taxpayer 124 million dollars almost a billion in today's money the result of the work was a network called arpanet the advanced research projects agency Network why was so much money spent from its Inception arpanat was the culmination of two visions the first was to find a way for academics to exchange data across institutions and importantly to share computing power which at the time was expensive slow and valuable to researchers at universities arpa director Charles M hertzfield remembered that arpanet came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large powerful research computers in the country and that many research investigators who should have access to them were geographically separated from them it was as historian Brian McCullough puts it a researcher's dream of a scholarly Utopia but it was also the product of the Cold War and the deputy director Stephen lukasik has challenged how hertzfield remembers its development he said that the goal was to exploit new computer Technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats achieve survivable control of U.S nuclear forces and improve military tactical and management decision-making to protect the future of America the defense techniques of Tomorrow had to be discovered now they were discovered in electronics that is how sage and pristine computers into military service as the Cold War developed the U.S spent more and more on its growing military industrial complex working not just with industry but with academics and universities too the lightning ships of Air Battle the Air Force requested from IBM a computer capable of translating volumes of changing data into a continuous flow of interpretations open your eyes what can you see around wind of the Open Sky over the siren sounds this is a dream get in the Royal scar holding a diamond blade throwing it far air defense required split second presentation as well as Split Second calculations many academics wanted arpanets to be open to all all researchers funded by the taxpayer or by universities should be able to access it because of this they believed there had to be a common universal language that would underpin how the new communication Network operated Steve Crocker the inventor of some of the early protocols that the internet runs on said that they were looking for ways to make the procedures open so that they could be added to and changed and updated democratically importantly no single institution should be in charge when administrators at MIT started locking doors or putting passwords on computers that until then anyone could book a slot to use and experiment on students and researchers would fight back they started calling themselves hackers a young Enthusiast called Richard stallman recalls that anyone who dared to lock a terminal in his office say because he was a professor and thought he was more important than other people would likely find his door left open until the next morning I would just climb over the ceiling or under the floor move the terminal out or leave the door open with a note saying what a big inconvenience it is to have to go under the floor so please do not inconvenience people by locking the door any longer there is a big wrench at the AI lab entitled the seventh floor master key to be used in case anyone dares to lock up one of the more fancy terminals As arpanet proved useful other government agencies wanted in the NSF the National Science Foundation created NSF net in 1985 and eventually linked more universities across the country in 1977 the first Transmissions were made wirelessly around the world Under the Sea into space and then back to where they started and by the early 80s the NSF was investing heavily in infrastructure they built a backbone across the U.S that could connect universities with other research institutions today the NSF website states that throughout its existence NSF net carried at no cost to institutions any U.S research and education traffic that could reach it at the same time the number of Internet connected computers Grew From 2000 in 1985 to more than 2 million in 1993 to handle the increasing data traffic the NSF net backbone became the first national 45 megabits per second internet Network in 1991. any school could apply for a grant from the NSF to connect to the network but its popularity was to become its undoing by the 90s the infrastructure was becoming overburdened and there wasn't much appetite to increase funding at the height of the neoliberal period the NSF continued to upgrade but it couldn't keep up with demand data was and is measured in packets and in 1988 a million packets of traffic were sent across the network by 1992 just four years later this had increased to 150 billion commercial use was banned the network was to be used for research and education only a 1982 MIT handbook states that personal messages to other arpanet subscribers for example to arrange a get-together or check and say a friendly hello again generally not considered harmful sending electronic mail over the arpanet for commercial profit or political purposes is both anti-social and illegal by sending such messages you can offend many people at the same time small commercial operators began to provide Alternatives using the same protocols as nsfnet and often hiring DARPA researchers pressure to change how the network operated towards increasing as more and more people and more and more institutions wanted to join [Music] the day is gone sometimes [Music] in 1991 Democratic senator Al Gore began working on a high performance Computing and Communications act in it arguing that of course the market should have access to this new information super highway but a Middle Road was important Senator Daniel Inouye argued that legislation should preserve 20 of the infrastructure for public use to provide quote libraries education non-profits government agencies museums to provide educational informational cultural Civic or charitable Services directly to the public without charge this would be modeled on the public broadcasting act to complement private media with publicly funded advertisement-free programs for television and radio to provide an alternative like roads the information superhighway was after all public property a group called the Telecommunications policy Round Table was formed its co-founder Jeffrey Chester told the New York Times in 1993 there should be a national debate about what kind of media system we should have the debate has been framed so far by a handful of communications Giants who have been working overtime to convince the American people that the data Highway will be little more than a virtual electronic shopping mall it looked to most like a public private partnership was inevitable and Gore with his support for a public internet became Bill Clinton's running mate for president but when Clinton won the election in 1993 chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan visited him and convinced him that the new computer network in Industries and banking's hands could revolutionize the economy by using vast stores of data and super calculation to hedge against Investments the U.S could enter into a new era of prosperity in which the economy would be perfectly balanced and everyone prospered leaving behind a period of boom and bust meanwhile Clinton Gore and the Democratic party received a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in contributions from a Consortium of telecommunications Giants suddenly Gore changed his mind about the public private partnership telecommunications should be deregulated the NSF Nat infrastructure should be sold off and all left to the whims of the market American consumers want the choices that competition provides Communications Act of 1995 will give them those choices the mitigations act of 1995 will promote competition and practically all telecommunication markets as this was happening the NSF had subcontracted the running of the network to a Consortium called Merit Merit was made up of representatives from universities research institutions and important Computing businesses like IBM in 1991 Merit began selling access to the network for the first time to more and more businesses they were accused of backroom dealing and profiting from the network so many were outraged that Congressional hearings were called in 1992 businessman William Schrader testified that it was like giving a federal Park to Kmart but it was too late it was decided that NSF Nat would be carved up and transferred to the corporations with the infrastructure handed over it was officially decommissioned in 1995 with hardly a whimper of protest a couple of years later in 1998 The Washington Post reported that the nation's local long-distance wireless phone 66 million dollars on legislative and Regulatory lobbying since 1996 more than the tobacco Aerospace and gambling lobbies combined top donors during the 1997 to 1998 political year were at T with almost 2 million Bell Atlantic with just over one and a half million Bell South with the same CBC with 1.2 million and MCI with almost a million the money was donated to candidates across both parties Democratic Edward J Markey who was heavily involved in telecommunications legislation received 124 000 in donations but Clinton himself was the top recipient receiving 169 thousand dollars with that at least a billion dollars in today's money of public investment in the networks have been transferred with little Fanfare to the private sector [Music] the internet is part of a long history of computing that's relied on public money and public investment from that first computer to the father of modern Computing Alan Turing working on World War II government projects in Britain and the first IBM digital computer being the result of a Department of Defense contract during the Korean War furthermore California's economy more broadly rests on government defense investment of planes and missiles and Military Electronics as well as irrigation systems highways and universities the Pentagon has had a big hand in helping corporations invest in r d in everything from jet engines to transistors circuits lasers and fiber optics today the Pentagon works with and funds at least 600 Laboratories across the U.S as scientific America explains in truth no private company would have been capable of developing a project like the internet which required years of r d effort spread out over scores of far-flung agencies and which began to take off only after Decades of investment [Music] [Music] [Music] meanwhile in California a pair of young computer hobbyists have been working on the first easy to use programming language Bill Gates and Paul Allen agreed a deal with the electronics company mits to distribute their new basic language with the outer 8800 in 1978 the outer was one of the first new affordable microcomputers mostly advertised to computer enthusiasts tinkerers and hobbyists through Electronics magazines by mail order this informal network of hobbyists were sparking a new home Computing Revolution they joined clubs and shared ideas and software that they'd received with the mail order Hardware Gates was infuriated he believed that the only way to further popularize and innovate in Computing was if programmers were paid for their software and for their time he wrote a widely cited letter called an open-lettered hobbyists in 1976. in it Gates reported that less than 10 percent of users had actually purchased basic themselves and that added up this reduced his and Alan's hourly compensation to less than two dollars per hour he likened sharing to stealing one respondent to the letter made the counter argument that this two dollar per hour figure was actually the result of poor negotiating with alter there was nothing wrong with selling software with computers but there was also nothing wrong with sharing it after and despite their two dollar hourly wage Microsoft quickly became the largest company in the world by the year 2000 they'd have a 97 share of the personal Computing market and despite Gates's argument for strong intellectual property rights by the 80s Microsoft Apple and Xerox were in a race to build the first graphical interface for computers and they were borrowing and stealing ideas from each other with such frequency that they all became embroiled in lawsuits and counter claims against the other Apple argued that my Microsoft had stolen the Kuwait look and feel of its operating system and Xerox had argued that Steve Jobs had copied their own work specifically the design for a maze on a visit to their headquarters the judge decided that out of the 189 claims that Microsoft Apple and Xerox were making only 10 could be upheld in court with a deal to install Microsoft DOS then Microsoft Windows on IBM computers a graphical user interface taken from apple and a strong disdain of free open source or shareware software Microsoft quickly dominated the market foreign [Music] a computer scientist called Tim berners-lee had come up with an idea that combined the infrastructure of the internet developed by arpa which focused on sharing files and computing power with a simple text-based delivery system he wrote an announcement post that said the World Wide Web project was started to allow high-energy physicists to share data news and documentation we are very interested in spreading the web to other areas and having Gateway servers for other data collaborators welcome the World Wide Web was launched unceremoniously with a few dozen servers communicating with one another around the globe one of those servers was at the University of Illinois's National Center for supercomputing applications a research Department funded by the U.S government the World Wide Web servers discussed how the project would function they needed a programming language which turned into HTML the code of the internet and an application to translate that code what would become known as a web browser berners-lee worked on the first very basic web browser but a 21 year old graduate at that National Center for supercomputing applications nsca Mark Andreessen decided to work on a browser that would be easy to use Andresen recalls that among academics there was a definite element of not wanting to make it easier of actually wanting to keep the riffraff out he and his colleague Eric thought that the World Wide Web should be simple to use and have the ability to include Graphics berners-lee disagreed thinking they should only include text and maybe some diagrams all that would be needed to share things like scientific papers but at the University and Drayson and his colleagues worked hard on a brazzer that they'd release in 1993 ex mosaic berners-lee posted an exciting new worldwide web browser has come out written by Mark Andreessen of NCSA as Mosaic was released there were a few hundred websites up and running around the world two years later in 1994 there were already tens of thousands in the first 18 months three million people installed the new browser Fortune Magazine included Mosaic as its product of the Year writing this software is transforming the internet into a workable web instead of an intimidating domain of nerds the NCSA began taking notice of what had until now been a small project and in 1994 andreyson left to work on a commercial version of Mosaic Riser he took the same team with him and with the help of investors started on what they called Mozilla the Mosaic killer the world's very first internet startup People magazine named Andresen one of the year's most intriguing people Fortune included them in the 25 coolest companies the company they eventually named Netscape was private but they adopted the open practices that were dominant in computer science at the time instead of patenting the features of their browser they wanted others to be able to copy and use those features in the hope that they would become standard SSL for example this security information was a Netscape Innovation but anyone was welcome to use it it's now used everywhere they wanted users to be able to add features plugins like Microsoft they wanted to be the platform that other developers would see as standard and build their own software for for these reasons they decided on a new commercial model the browser would be free for public use in the hope of achieving dominance and because it aligned with the existing computer culture of share and share alike technology writer Glenn Moody writes that this new logic introduced the idea of capturing market share by giving away free software and then generating profits in other ways from the resulting installed base in other words the Mosaic Netscape release signaled the first instance of the new internet economics that have since come to dominate the software world and Beyond and you can get into again Pages just by pressing the the usual buttons like next and back and glossary and all that kind of thing and here we are now with the The Familiar sort of Windows Graphics of various Pages tiling on each other that's right yes of the Netscape which is the browser used right for uh with the best known browser right well it's really Mozilla brazer was downloaded six million times in a few months they quickly achieved a 90 percent user share while also selling a corporate version with technical support for 39 when the University of Illinois found out about Mozilla they threatened to sue claiming that andreasen and his team had stolen the University's code John mittelhauser one of the developers replied we didn't want to take any of the old Mosaic code that's the thing we wanted to start from scratch we wanted to do it right however Mozilla ended up paying the university 2.2 million dollars in Damages and agreed to change the name from Mozilla to Netscape when the company ipo'd in 1995 its Share value quickly tripled and Drayson featured on the cover of Time Magazine and the Wall Street Journal wrote it took General Dynamics Corp 43 years to become a corporation worth 2.7 billion dollars it took Netscape Communications Corp about a minute within 18 months it had 38 million users and had hit 533 million dollars in Revenue by 1997. meanwhile Bill Gates was skeptical about the internet he knew that eventually technology would be Advanced enough to play video and to interact in some way between households but he didn't think that anyone would want to sit around at their computer at a desk thinking instead that the television set would be the medium at the center of the shift when he saw how popular Netscape had become he quickly u-turned he licensed the original Mosaic source code from the University of Illinois copied it and quickly rolled out the first version of Microsoft's own browser internet explorer in 1995. the difference it was completely free gate said one thing to remember about Microsoft we don't need to make any revenue from internet software the launch of Windows 1995 was huge the Empire State Building was lit up in Windows logo colors the commercial featured the Rolling Stones this happened in the new operating system came pre-loaded with Internet Explorer Steve Jobs said that if Microsoft's competitors couldn't keep up in the next two years Microsoft will own the web and that will be the end of it Microsoft increased its efforts their browser Department grew from six to a thousand employees by 1999 they required manufacturers to install internet explorer if it wasn't already installed and included a line in their contract Banning quote modifying or deleting any part of Windows 95 including Internet Explorer prior to shipment in a desperate bid for survival Netscape tried to deal directly with computer manufacturers like Compact and Microsoft responded by threatening compact with the lawsuit and the ban from using Windows Compact immediately backed down in 1995 90 of netscape's Revenue came from licensing its browser by 97 squeezed out by Microsoft's Monopoly position that was below 20 percent foreign [Music] Netscape wrote a letter to the U.S Department of Justice complaining that Microsoft was using its position to push Netscape out of the market by preventing them from dealing with manufacturers in the first quarter of 1998 Netscape reported a loss for the first time and Internet Explorer took over the top spot in user share in May of that year 20 States and the Department of Justice filed Anti-Trust lawsuits against Microsoft trial went on for several years and in 2001 Microsoft was found guilty of monopolistic practices Judge Thomas Jackson said that Microsoft had maintained its Monopoly Power by anti-competitive means and attempted to monopolize the web browser Market an allergy towards Monopoly had always been Central to the philosophic culture of the US early settlers had been fleeing the twin monopolies of church and state in England government granted monopolies were the norm Thomas Payne had said that England was cut up into monopolies historian Christopher Hill writes that a 17th century Englishman was living in a house built with Monopoly bricks with Windows if any of Monopoly glass heated by Monopoly coal in Ireland Monopoly Timber burning in a grape made of Monopoly iron he slept on Monopoly feathers did his hair with Monopoly brushes and Monopoly Combs he washed himself with Monopoly soap his clothes in Monopoly starch he dressed in Monopoly lace Monopoly linen Monopoly leather Monopoly gold thread and his trousers were held up by Monopoly belts Monopoly buttons Monopoly pins food was seasoned with Monopoly salt Monopoly pepper Monopoly vinegar and mice were caught in Monopoly mouse traps as far back as 1641 Massachusetts law declared that no monopolies shall be granted or allowed amongst us but of such new inventions that are profitable to the country and that for a short time the American Revolution had begun as a revolt against the Monopoly power of the East India Company as protesters through their tea into Boston Harbor Maryland's first constitution in 1776 said that monopolies are odious contrary to the spirit of a free government and the principles of Commerce and ought not to be suffered Carolinas was similar this anti-monopolistic culture continued into the 19th century when the robber barons were attempting to monopolize the oil Railroad and Telegraph Industries while repressing strikes and unions reducing wages and art artificially inflating prices in response the Sherman Act was introduced in 1890 the first section prohibits every contract combination or conspiracy in Restraint of trade or Commerce and the second makes it illegal for any person or form to monopolize any part of the trade or Commerce among the several States or with foreign Nations my name is Richard urowski and I represent Microsoft these are appeals from a final judgment finding Microsoft libel under sections one and two of the Sherman Act and ordering a breakup of the company as well as other extreme relief judge Jackson decided that the first section was violated by Microsoft by forcing manufacturers to include Internet Explorer the second part by using its market dominance to force a monopoly the judge concluded that Microsoft used incentives and threats to push manufacturers to adopt distributional Promotional and Technical efforts that would favor Internet Explorer at the expense of Netscape Navigator he suggested that Microsoft be broken up into two companies one that would run its operating systems and another its software of course this never happened when the Bush Administration took office in 2001 the verdict was appealed and reversed instead Microsoft made a deal that required them to open their apis that's their application processing interfaces and also to refrain from monopolistic practices opening their apis means that third-party developers could more effectively design software that would work with the nuts and bolts of Windows effectively opening the Bonnet and allowing applications to interface with all the components with the intention of opening up Microsoft and allowing greater competition and Innovation they also had to agree to consent decrees that prohibited them from retaliating against manufacturers who might develop distribute promote use cell or license any non-microsoft software on the one hand this was a win for Microsoft but on the other Microsoft was distracted slightly while new and unexpected competitors grew to challenge their dominance and the appeal still meant that Microsoft had to play none ice giving ammunition to its Rivals that could be used against the company it meant Microsoft had to consider legal repercussions before they acted in the future without the trial the internet could have gone a different way dominated by Microsoft it could have developed into a kind of Walled AOL Garden an internet built into the architecture of Windows itself run on some kind of grotesque Microsoft software and forcing Microsoft to open those apis what's called interoperability is something that could be useful to some challenges will come to today [Music] while Microsoft was distracted America Online was staging a coup it had found success offering a service that dialed in to the privatized internet infrastructure you entered a web portal on doing so its users entered a web portal that acted as a directory of sites news chats email weather and other similar categories just before their trial Gates had approached aolceo Steve case he said I can buy 20 of you or I can buy all of you or I can go into this business myself and bury you AOL chose to fight like Netscape they knew that market saturation was key the company spent a quarter of a million on AOL trial discs to give out in magazines it worked the conversion rate was an unheard of 10 percent and suddenly AOL was everywhere marketing Mogul Yan Brandt who worked on the campaign said taking the disc putting it into the computer signing up and giving us a credit card when I saw that honestly it was better than sex in his history McCullough writes AOL discs began arriving in Americans mailboxes seemingly daily almost every computer maker shipped an AOL disc with a new computer there were AOL discs given away with movie rentals at Blockbuster there were AOL discs left on seats at football games at one point Brandt even tested whether or not discs could survive flash freezing so she could give away AOL discs with Omaha Stakes incredibly half of CDs manufactured at the time were for AOL their customers tripled in a year Microsoft countered with its own web portal called MSN the Microsoft network but AOL dominated it was the internet like Microsoft AOL used its dominance to squeeze out or buy out its competitors it was so lucrative to be in aol's web portal that companies were handing over millions of dollars Health Website Dr Coop ipo'd and raised 85 million dollars spending all of it on a four-year contract with AOL to provide its users with health content Tel save paid them a hundred million dollars Barnes and Noble 40 million Amazon 19 million eBay 75 million ought to be on their home portal the most coveted position on the net High Street a shop in the digital Times Square One business person recalled that AOL had demanded 30 of her company and then for good measure they tell us these are our terms you have 24 hours to respond and if you don't screw you will go to your competitor AOL share price rocketed by 80 000 throughout the 90s but even at its height cable companies were starting to develop faster and cheaper ways of connecting to the internet AOL and Microsoft imagine themselves as walled Gardens in control and Masters over their own cyberspace desperate to keep the hordes of Invaders and competitors at Bay it wasn't to last [Music] like the settlers arriving in America many imagined cyberspace as empty a blank canvas a state of nature an ethereal region where civilization could start again unencumbered by corrosive power corporate domination corrupt politics where a new type of democracy of Freedom could flourish as a blank slate it was imagined by many as Lawless but like pre-colonial America that was theorized as a good thing because knew better ideas could be written into it in 1995 two media Scholars Richard barbrook and Andy Cameron wrote an influential article about what they saw emerging in Silicon Valley they called it the Californian ideology Barbara can Cameron argued that this new ideology was the product of a loose Alliance of writers hackers capitalists and artists from the west coast of the USA it was they said a bizarre Fusion of cultural bohemianism with high-tech industry the combination of the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial Zeal of the yuppies the Californian ideologists imagined a new world made possible through computers where everyone would be both hip and Rich and free the computer Revolution is often compared with the famous Industrial Revolution importance and scope the Industrial Revolution effectively Freed Man from being a beast of burden the computer Revolution Will suddenly free him from dull repetitive routine the computer Revolution is however perhaps better compared with the copernican or the darwinian revolution both of which greatly change man's idea of himself in the world to which he lives this best of all worlds ideology arose from two places a liberal Progressive one that rejected the narrow confines of conformist post-war corporate American values this place celebrated difference in all things gay rights feminism literature music and recreational drug use they despised the old forms of power and the repression that kept the inner true self locked away they believed that the internet could bring about a new radical democracy where people were free to organize and express themselves in new ways directly voting on the issues that affected them they shared software and computer parts in Homebrew computer clubs they were a new class a virtual class but as they built businesses and joined companies they came into contact with traditional businessmen with Venture capitalists and financiers through them they adopted the idea that they should be left alone free from all regulation free from interfering governments to impress their Vision on that blank canvas of cyberspace regulated only by the Invisible Hand of the market Barbara can Cameron asked well the Advent of hypermedia realized the Utopias of either the new left or the new rape is a hybrid Faith the Californian ideology happily answers this conundrum by believing in both Visions at the same time and by not criticizing either of them left and right ideology combined into a support for a new type of Jeffersonian democracy small direct democracies where everyone would own property and everyone would vote and each is involved in the running of their own lives their own affairs the problem and this was a fundamental line from their 1995 article was that the hippies cannot challenge the Primacy of the marketplace over their lives but they said hidden away from Silicon Valley in Chinese factories in the mining of the materials needed in developing countries in right-wing politics hostile to unions in the weakening of welfare and Social Security a new underclass was emerging they said the deprived only participate in the information age by providing cheap non-unionized labor for the unhealthy factories of the Silicon Valley chip manufacturers and they warned that the Technologies of Freedom are turning into the machines of dominance [Music] one of the Believers in this new digital Utopia was a man called Pierre omada in the early years of Silicon Valley omadar co-founded an e-pen startup that was sold to Microsoft for 50 million dollars in 1996. omada began working on a new libertarian platform that he believed would revolutionize Commerce allowing people to find exactly what they desired and letting the Invisible Hand of the market perfectly calibrate the price all without the need for third-party interference he believed that if you removed any interference you could create the perfect Marketplace online his idea was for an auction website and he said if there's more than one person interested in an item Let them fight it out the seller would by definition get the market price for the item whatever that might be on a particular day he launched auctionweb which he later renamed eBay and initially it was completely free from interference there was nothing no payment function no ratings no regulatory infrastructure just buyers connected to sellers who would complete the details of the transaction on their own from the beginning the site was a success but investors were wary what did auctionweb even do it had no Goods provided no real service one investor said they don't own anything they don't have any buildings they don't have any trucks this of course is exactly what omadar wanted he wanted the community to be self-regulating on its own he encouraged users to talk to one another share advice and eventually leave reviews many of the companies that were soon to go bust in the.com Crash of the early 2000s were traditional bricks and mortar businesses pets.com sofa companies even early grocery delivery services and at the turn of the New Millennium hundreds of these companies went bankrupt but eBay continued to grow it was a new type of service a pure middleman a simple platform a groundwork for a community of buyers and sellers without any real content of its own no stock no warehouses but the idea that it didn't have any of its own content that it didn't have to do any regulating was turning out to be a McCullough writes that the market turned out to be imperfect he writes disputes broke out between buyers and sellers and omidar was frequently called upon to adjudicate he didn't want to have to play referee so he came up with a way to help users work it out themselves a forum people would leave feedback on one another creating a kind of scoring system give praise where it's due he said in a letter posted to the site make complaints where appropriate omadar had come across a strange new dynamic eBay was only possible because of the contributions of its users but without some kind of adjudication without some kind of organizing the platform would collapse under its own weight in his book internet for the people technology writer Ben tarnoff writes that auction web was not only a middleman it was also a legislator and an architect writing the rules for how people could interact and designing the spaces where they did so this wasn't in omadar's plan he initially wanted a market run by its members an ideal formed by his libertarian beliefs anyone taking notice of eBay might have predicted that being a platform was both the future and that the Californian ideology was founded on faulty logic Google Schmidt and Cohen's words that the online world is not truly Bound by terrestrial laws it's the world's largest ungoverned space turned out to be a misconception there was no blank canvas the problems of the offline world were being shifted online and new issues were emerging with it commenting on later platforms like uber Airbnb and Facebook which we'll turn to soon political scientist James Muldoon writes that platform owners claim their products in neutral spaces and that they merely provide an intermediary service to connect parties this is only half true through the design and architecture of the platform software developers play an active role not only in connecting parties but in shaping the conditions in which they operate [Music] the first advert on the internet may have been this one from 1994 on hotwired.com for atnt it had an enormous click-through rate people clicked it just to see where it went ads that you could click on were a novelty AOL and eBay had proven something online business was not about selling but connecting and it was Yahoo that first realized that capturing more audiences and keeping their attention so that you could serve them more ads was key Central to Growing Revenue Yahoo started as two Stanford students project Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web they included their favorite websites and it became the most popular homepage of the internet homegrown but Jerry and David had no way of making money surely no one would accept ads polluting this little directory with no other way of financing their project they decided tentatively to try when the first ads went live Chief product officer Tim Brady recalls that the email box was immediately flooded with people bad-minding us and telling us to take it off what are you doing you're ruining the net but traffic to the site remained stable the ads were begrudgingly accepted and Yahoo started adding sections to attract more interests stocks horoscopes film television travel weather the key was to match subgroups with ad groups one executive described it as a land grab Jerry Yang said that we began with simple searching and that's still a big hit our Seinfeld if you will but we've also tried to develop a must-see TV lineup Yahoo finance Yahoo chat Yahoo mail we think of ourselves as a media Network these days one Wall Street analyst told businessweek you have to look at Yahoo as the New Media company of the 21st Century [Music] meanwhile looking at Yahoo's increasingly complicated directory two computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin were realizing that there had to be a better way to organize the net instead of humans deciding which websites would sit in which categories and in which order as AOL and Yahoo were doing an algorithm should do it the algorithm they designed was deceivingly simple any website that linked to another website was counted as a vote for that site the more links to it a website had the more popular it was and the higher up the search rankings it was placed it was straightforward but Innovative journalist David Kirkpatrick wrote an article in Fortune Magazine in 1999. he typed New York Yankees 1990 29 playoffs into both Google and Alta Vista he said that the first listing at Google took me directly to data about that night's game the first two at Alta Vista linked to info about the 1998 World Series on out of Vista he had to click on the third link down then click another link to find the results of the game he wrote Google really works but like Yahoo Google struggled to devise a business plan Paige and Brynn hated advertising and instead decided on a licensing model they signed deals with Yahoo and AOL to be powered by Google while Yahoo saw the power of Google's Innovation they insisted it was a small part of their service the main directory would always be human curated as humans were of course more trustworthy than algorithms when they realized that Google was the future Yahoo tried to buy them out for three billion dollars Google rejected the offer Yahoo canceled their license and Google went to work on a new model realizing that they had no choice but to make their search engine work on its own [Music] but Paige and Brynn were academics they still believed in the online world not truly Bound by terrestrial rules and they thought their search engine should be scientific not influenced by offline money at a conference in 1998 Bryn and Page delivered a paper that noted that we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers this type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market we believe that the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it's crucial to have a competitive search engine that's transparent and in the academic realm Paige and Brynn were beginning to realize that markets could distort the utopian vision of early cyberspace foreign [Music] the same time as Google was taking off Sean Fanning a young student programmer and hacker became fascinated by a new type of sound file small compressed and quick to download it was called an MP3 and college students were sharing them on Usenet news groups across campuses a 19 year old student Justin Frankl had designed a program called Winamp that let you organize and play your MP3s but Fanning wanted an easier way to share them between friends came up with a file sharing application called Napster when he released it in 1999 it was downloaded 10 million times in less than a year 73 percent of college students were using it Napster was on the cover of Rolling Stone and time but some including Metallica's last Ulrich were outraged that their music could be shared for free Ulrich went to napster's office and hand delivered a list of 300 000 usernames of people who had pirated their music Napster organized a counter protest for the same day and protesters shouted you Lars it's our music too Fanning argued that Napster was just a middleman like eBay but the recording industry Association of America filed a lawsuit it doesn't go through the Napster system you don't even have their hands their fingerprints you can't find them on those things can you the fingerprints you can't find because Napster doesn't want you they don't touch them they never have anything to do with it they have my fellow in New Jersey and my fellow in Guam will have a direct connection on the internet right but that's how the music is transmitted it is transmitted on the internet and we are not trying to stop the internet certainly but the only way so you concede that even on a copyrighted piece of material one user can transmit from New Jersey to Guam through the internet and it's not a infringement the publicity led to a surge of interest in Napster the courts decided though that Napster had to block copyrighted material or shut down and Fanning tried to implement a system to do that but it failed and after just a few years the company went bankrupt in 2002. in reality Fanning claimed he never wanted to give away music for free he believed artists needed to be paid but he wanted an app store to grow quickly to prove the concept and then to make a deal with the record companies mccullo writes that in retrospect there's no shortage of people even inside the music industry who imagine how different the world would be if it had worked out that way if the music companies had partnered with Napster and accepted the inevitability of Technology Sean Parker napster's co-founder predicted at the time that music will be ubiquitous and we believe you'll be able to get it on your cell phone you'll be able to get it on your stereo you'll be able to get it on whatever the device of the future is and I think people are willing to pay for convenience LimeWire Basha and others tried to take napsa's place but forced underground none were as successful the music industry for their part were at the peak of their power having spent decades reissuing old vinyl albums on expensive new CDs and making use of New Media anklets like MTV to promote new artists early eBay Google and Napster had something in common they all thought that it was possible to create a platform that was self-balancing where supply of information perfectly met demand a self-sustaining rational system that importantly was free from the interference of the offline world but inevitably they all came up against pressure from the physical world back at the Googleplex investors were starting to demand profits after the.com crash no one was thought to be safe it seemed like you could have a winning model one day and you could disappear the next Google wondered whether Google could turn its Innovation into a profitable company and so Paige and Brynn acquiesced to the advertising model and the results were unheard of in 2003 Google made 500 million dollars in Revenue within 10 years Google had revenues of over 50 billion dollars with Google Adwords McCullough writes Google was able to achieve something amazing it made the internet profitable at scale for the first time between 2002 and 2006 the amount U.S advertisers spent online tripled [Music] [Music] the idea of privacy has had a checkered history but in the modern period it has often been thought of as sacrosanct that an englishman's home was his castle the idea of Rights Grew From the notion that some parts of us were inviable off limits private [Music] some theorists have argued that having a private place a private space off limits to infringement is crucial to thinking through formulating and debating the ideas necessary to have a functioning deliberative democracy that's good [Music] early radio stations shunned the idea not only of advertising but even of talking on air surely no one would accept the naked invasion of privacy a stranger talking in their own home people would surely prefer to talk amongst themselves anyway [Music] in the year 2000 a group of scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology worked on a project called a warehome it aimed to study something they called ubiquitous Computing a home full of different types of sensors designed to predict the needs of the inhabitants and make their lives easier but the researchers naturally assumed the data would belong only to the people who lived in the house the purpose of the data was to make their lives easier meanwhile Google was also realizing it was in the data industry if their job was to predict what people wanted the more data they had about people the more effective they'd be Google's mission statement was to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful this applied to organic search and to advertising to match companies to Consumers to make advertising more efficient and relevant Google needed to expand how they capture data Google's Chief Economist how Varian explained that the Google model was based on what they called Data extraction and Analysis through better monitoring personalization customization and continuous experiments this was the key to Big Data and better prediction wrap up Larry Page had said that the problem with Google was that you had to ask it questions it should already know what you're going to ask Varian said that each user left behind them a trail of breadcrumbs that Google euphemistically called Data exhaust he wrote that every action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system in 2001 page had said that sensors are really cheap storage is cheap cameras are cheap people will generate enormous amounts of data everything you've ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable your whole life will be searchable search Google's primary product they realized was about predicting what a person wanted at any given moment before they searched for it and the clues to what the user wanted were often found away from what they were typing in a search box Google wanted to know what users wanted before they knew what they wanted and what they wanted might vary between Geographic locations with the weather depending on who they were talking to what their past searches were what mood they were in what they were doing at the time and so Google began investing in collecting all of this data exhaust they invested in email mapping street view cameras built-free word processors and spreadsheets calendars travel and photo storage home speakers and thermostats anything that could tell them something about their users interactions with the world they started placing cookies on users computers that could track them across third-party websites in 2015 one study found that if you visit the 100 most popular websites on the internet you would collect 6 000 cookies tracking your online Journey Google had cookies on 92 of those 100 sites a 923 on the top 1000 sites the study concluded that Google's ability to track users on popular websites is unparalleled and it approaches the level of surveillance that only an internet service provider can achieve they use hundreds of signals to predict what a user wants to see at any given moment one study found that a single Google Nest device connected with so many other services and products that a user would have to read through almost 1 000 terms and conditions and privacy policies another found that it would take 76 days to read through each policy that affects us every year Google purchased a satellite imagery company called Skybox that could capture such detailed images that if outside it could see exactly what was on your desk they started investing in Street View Camera technology that went on backpacks and snowmobiles and boats to capture places that couldn't be reached by car they started a project called Ground truth that analyzed through deep mapping what they called a logic of places tracking the paths people would take the ponds people would sit at what the traffic was like which Parks people used which buildings were entered at which times and which areas were busier than others the street view cars collected data from open Wi-Fi networks as they went around the world including data from people's homes a long list of countries from the UK to Japan complained in Germany residents could require that their homes be blurred out Harvard Professor shoshana zuboff has argued that we live in a new economic order that claims human experiences free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction prediction and sales this is the foundation of a new surveillance economy in which our privacy is progressively invaded through a flood of new and smaller sensors cameras microphones and devices attached to dishwashers and ovens smart speakers and doorbells in shopping malls and shops restaurants and stadiums tarnoff Compares data in the 21st century to coal in the 19th century it Powers a revolutionary change in the economy data becomes the raw material that can be transformed into an asset to sell to advertisers smart beds that track sleep positions and sells us different bed sheets new running shoes after a slow run vacations after a stressful day bad news when we're angry and celebrity got it when we're bored click patterns are measured microphones listen to the most minuscule of details and food choices are used to predict Health patterns zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism is always searching for new supply routes new devices and new ways of collecting new types of data about our lives she says that this manifests in a logic of extension ankwards into as many areas of life as possible your fridge blender dishwasher bloodstream and a logic of depth downwards into richer more accurate to more detailed measurements about your emotions personality sweat levels temperature hormone levels through digestible sensors or correlations between things like mood and music and film choices or the inflection and decibel levels of your voice while having certain conversations with certain people at certain times all of this is to measure in order to predict how we might act in the future and when combined with advertising or the delivery of news or information to click on is about subtly nudging us into action our present state is unceasingly measured so that future attention can be grabbed stolen surveillance assets act as the raw material for digital fortune telling according to zuboff the tentacles of surveillance capitalism nudge coax tune and herd Behavior targeting our desires is like casting a net leaving a hook in the right place with just enough bait with the right wording the right photo at the right time in the right location while under the influence of the right emotion to nudge us towards the highest bidder for our attention zuboff says that users were no longer ends in themselves but rather became the means to others ends [Music] you may remember we launched our video Nico in into cyberspace which is obviously where he is now with an internet diary on the hugely popular Myspace site [Music] in your arms [Music] when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook he quickly realized that the social graph was a trove for useful data he became obsessed with measuring it he saw something that Myspace hadn't and that Friendster hadn't been able to capitalize on that we were fascinated by those closest to us Zuckerberg carefully studied what students called the Facebook trans The Addictive state of endlessly clicking through your friend's profiles students were obsessed with finding out what was new but had to click on each profile to find out Facebook designed an Innovative solution the news feed instead of clicking on each profile the changes or updates would be delivered in one long continuous unending feed on the home page the task was complex they had to program elaborate code to pull a unique news feed for each person depending on their list of contacts and Facebook quickly realized that having the feed ordered chronologically wasn't optimal instead a person should be shown the updates their most interested in the friends they actually interacted with the people that were most popular or the ones they didn't look at but might be interested in in just a few years the news feed would be so ubiquitous that in retrospect it looks obvious and inevitable but at the time of release it was hated as McCullough recounts Facebook employees were deluged with messages of pure outrage with only one in a hundred posts about it being positive and most complaining about privacy a group called students against Facebook news feed quickly attracted seven hundred thousand members one complaint read few of us want everyone automatically knowing what we update news feed is just too creepy too stalker-esque and a feature that has to go College newspapers had headlines like Facebook is watching you furious with Facebook and Facebook fumbles with changes an online petition quickly attracted thousands of signatures Facebook was worried Zuckerberg replied personally saying calm down breathe we hear you and moments like this had killed multiple sites that seemed Invincible dig lost its users to Reddit and soon disappeared after it made an unpopular algorithm change Facebook almost took the feature down but Zuckerberg realized something was happening foreign ly outraged in private they were still using the feed and they were using it more and more he decided to keep it and it gave them more new data to analyze but they still needed to expand their supply routes in 2010 Zuckerberg added a simple method to harvest even more data the first ever like button almost immediately millions of people were sending millions of data points of information about what they liked and by a mission what they disliked to Silicon Valley soon Facebook users were liking over 4 million posts each minute even in 2012 Zuckerberg was bragging about what Facebook could predict about its users I mean you kind of want to figure out the strength of a lot of those relationships and how um and what actually matters to each person on a more granular level and one of the things that one of my friends and I were messing around with the other night was seeing if we could use the information that we had to compute who we thought were going to be in relationships so we tested this about a week later and we realized that we had over a third chance of predicting whether two people were going to be in a relationship a week from now so we can use stuff like that to filter out bad weeds like Google they began buying and investing in anything that could Harvest data through the logic of extension and the logic of depth and began using it to sell more advertising Facebook bought Instagram WhatsApp and now if the Oculus headset can track even your facial expressions Amazon Microsoft and many others all followed Google and Facebook's lead Microsoft picked up Skype for 8.5 billion dollars and Linkedin for 26 billion they started tracking more data in Windows its Sartori program started collecting up 28 000 DVDs worth of data every day the project senior manager said it's mind-blowing how much data we have captured over the last couple of years the line would extend to Venus and you would still have 7 trillion pixels left over Amazon started carefully analyzing all the businesses that listed on their site they decided to carefully record data on sales shipping marketing and monitored which products do well then they'd copy the best sellers and make their own cheaper duplicates FTC chair Lena Khan said that Amazon is a petri dish through which independent firms undertake the initial risks of bringing products to Market and Amazon gets to reap from their insights often at their expense former Amazon executive James Thompson has said Amazon happened to sell products but they are a data company Google Microsoft and Amazon all moved into cloud storage where users could upload any information they needed it was the next Natural Choice for companies looking for more and more data to analyze other smaller surveillance capitalists arrived on the scene too score assured in the UK offers a service that scans your social media accounts for landlords to predict risky tenants and startups like lendup look at your social media to determine your credit worthiness high IQ looks at the social media profiles of job candidates to quite pinpoint with laser-like accuracy the employees that are highest risk there's data everywhere was hoovered up in the pursuit of profit it became a race to the bottom of data this race to uncover and harvest more lines of surveillance data the search for ever more lucrative supply routes of personal information extending outwards into more areas of our lives and deeper into richer measurements of data isn't just a natural progression of Technology it happened in a context in the early 90s the internet was still largely thought of as a space for information one that had grown out of Academia and research but in 1993 the activist Jeffrey Chester was warning that it could become a privately owned public space a virtual electronic shopping mall as corporate interests were circling the old NSF net infrastructure had been decommissioned and throughout the 90s internet through telephone lines then through cable was becoming dominated by the Telecommunications Giants a t spring and Verizon Western Union had dominated Telegraph Communications in the late 19th century buying up over 500 competitors to have the control over a near Monopoly it started to abuse its position using it to keep competitors out of the market and to prioritize its own Associates over others as the Anti-Trust movement grew those fighting the monopolies weren't just concerned about anti-competitive practices but what it meant to have single men like the robber baron J Gould in control of almost the totality of infrastructure that was essential to the security of the country in response Congress passed a non-discrimination law no single company should have a say on the entire network and Telecommunications and Railways must abide by what was called common Carriage they had to treat anyone wanting to access the network equally fast forward to the 1990s and the same rules were applied to the Telecommunications Giants networks had to Grant access and couldn't treat their own Partners or affiliates with favoritism one judge said that assuring that the public has access to a multiplicity of information sources is a governmental purpose of the highest order for it promotes values Central to the First Amendment but throughout the 80s and 90s this changed as the Soviet Union collapsed Market liberalism Triumph neoliberalism was at its peak and government's interference of any kind was challenged in 2002 George Bush repealed the must carry rules and cable Giants began refusing access to smaller internet providers across the country who quickly went out of business and across the U.S telecommunications companies lobbied local government to prevent new networks from springing up Municipal Broadband is banned in 18 states and big Telecom sign agreements with local authorities that often prohibit them from using other internet service providers net neutrality the idea that data sent across networks should be treated equally was being challenged too and corporations began paying to have preferential treatment to send their own data faster than competitors foreign giants like Facebook Google and Microsoft do deals with telecoms giants to send their own traffic at quicker speeds essentially Fast Lanes for the rich this shift towards digital laissez faire coincided with another shift after 9 11 security became more important than privacy the Bush Administration passed the Patriot Act radically expanding the powers of the state to monitor its citizens and to gather data around the world using 911 as a justification the surveillance state grew at the same time that Google was starting to expand its own surveillance practices foreign ER an expert in privacy in the Obama Administration said that with the Attacks of September 11 2001 everything changed the new Focus was overwhelmingly on security rather than privacy NSA Chief John poindaxter proposed a program called total information awareness Tia that could pick out signals that would predict and help stop future terrorist attacks foreign with this change politicians seem to lose interest in regulating the big tech companies Google and the NSA for example announced a partnership for Google to provide a search Appliance capable of searching 15 million documents in 24 languages the director of the NSA wrote that an effective partnership with the private sector must be formed so information can move quickly back and forth from public to private and classified to unclassified to protect the nation's critical infrastructure the new techno industrial military complex was born Google spent more time in Washington spending more money on lobbying the Washington Post called Google the master of Washington influence while the New York Times ran a story saying that Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels and then pulling strings people are so afraid of Google Now the Techno industrial military complex provided the context for corporations to spend vast sums of money expanding their operations and influencing both politicians and the public through PR that claimed that what they were doing was good for the community is the social fabric was being shredded as Margaret Thatcher made her famous claim that there was no such thing as Society increasing numbers became isolated and atomized memberships to churches to unions and even famously bowling clubs declined and big Tech claimed that in their space they were rebuilding that sacred lost notion the public the communal [Music] CEO of Airbnb said that Airbnb started really as a community probably even more than a business it became a business to scale the community but the point is that when it became a business it never stopped becoming a community its slogan was the world's largest Community Driven hospitality company Global head of community Douglas Atkins said that Airbnb and its Community wants to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere but across that world Airbnb were up against Real Community regulations that were often aimed at keeping rents low for locals and keeping our private investors who might leave Apartments empty as Financial assets to appreciate or at least amount to wealthy Travelers in many places in the UK including some of the most beautiful parts of the country like Cornwall and Wales locals are forced out of the property Market as homes are brought up as second homes or to list on sites like Airbnb Airbnb knew that to fight this in so many places around the world they had to mobilize their own Community they couldn't do it alone they began posting jobs like this one looking for candidates with the experience in organizing Community political and government campaigns the premise was simple Airbnb would make sure that their own members fought for their own right to do what they wanted with their own home they wanted to maintain the image that this wasn't landlordism or rentierism but local communities standing up for their local areas despite this image what was being listed on the site was changing it wasn't just individuals or families renting out a spare room in their home or their place while they were away by 2020 hosts with more than one property made up 6 63 percent of hosts between 2017 and 2020 hosts with between 101 and a thousand properties went up by 50 percent and 14 of hosts had more than 21 listings what seemed on the surface like a project for democratizing the vacation Market was fast becoming a means for landlords to consolidate and attract rents from their capital and assets several reports including one from the Centrist Economic Policy Institute to find that Airbnb has a harmful effect on the economy with a fight on their hands Airbnb mobilized a war chest in one campaign in San Francisco they spent eight million dollars on TV ads Billboards and canvassing to Lobby against regulation that restricted the rental market at Airbnb Atkins said mobilization was absolutely instrumental in chain changing the law we got about 250 of our hosts to show up at land use hearings and to give up a day of work meanwhile in 2018 Amsterdam Barcelona Berlin Bordeaux Brussels Krakow Munich Paris Valencia and Vienna all wrote a joint letter to the EU asking them to intervene and what they saw was a growing problem Airbnb had been involved in 11 lawsuits against authorities to try and avoid regulations while many cities have fought back with their own regulation including caps on the number of days a property can be led Muldoon calls this community washing he writes according to the spin of tech CEOs making billions of dollars is almost incidental to or a welcome but unexpected byproduct of their social mission of connecting the world and giving people a sense of belonging in community there's a deep irony in one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs portraying his company as a champion of Grassroots community at a 2017 Facebook Community Summit Zuckerberg took to the stage by saying it's not enough to Simply connect to the world we must also work to bring the world closer together communities give us that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves that we are not alone that we have something better ahead to work for current the mayor in Chicago with all of you where there's so much great work that's going on building communities all of you here today have built some of the strongest communities on Facebook you know you build communities for new moms and dads for helping kids get into college one of the leaders here today Derek hooker runs a community of Locksmiths where are you Derek so we are all here trying to do the most good we can for our communities all right we know how lucky we are to be here and have this opportunity and we know how much we owe it to our communities to give back now today I actually want to share a milestone that we're really close to reaching for the overall Facebook Community with one hand big tech companies support and Lobby for deregulation that allies big Capital to encroach upon Community spaces well on the other they co-opt language and sentiment around the idea of community that gives the impression that they're on the side of community as George Orwell famously raped political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to Pure wind power twists commonly accepted values to make them sound appealing all well continued thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness like Airbnb Uber spends Millions lobbying local governments to repeal regulation that has often been the result of long-fought battles by local taxi drivers certain regulations like limiting the supply of taxis were about risk reduction so that during a downturn drivers could still earn enough money Uber systematically tries to circumvent and replace laws like this meanwhile one study found that half of drivers in Washington DC were living below the poverty line Uber have fiercely resisted classifying Riders as employees insisting they're self-employed so that they don't have to pay them sick leave for a minimum wage or paid vacation the incursion into our political space the theft of the community at a period in history that prioritized glass Affair and surveillance security reminds us that the shape and direction of any change is not natural there's no such thing as empty cyberspace that can be molded with new utopian rules from nowhere the offline world real power real history real politics real economics always intrudes thank you the word Utopia comes from the Greek meaning no place it's an apt description for the Californian ideology that saw cyberspace as a no place an infinite blank sheet upon which completely new rules could be written in some realm that's out there disconnected metaphysical foreign but of course there's no such place as no place big Tech platforms and isps are made up of wires servers hardware and code written by people that thought in a particular way of thinking in a particular historical context with particular rules and rules particular cultures and social realities despite this big Tech platforms often try to absolve themselves of any real world responsibility while having a large hand in shaping what we all see what gets Amplified and how we see it platforms like Facebook aren't treated like real world Publishers they aren't subject to the same libel or copyright laws or other regulations that their users are the 1996 Communications decency act decided that no provider or user of an interactive Computer Service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider this amongst other legislation set the tone for much of how social media platforms were going to be treated in the future yet all of these platforms use mountains of data collected on you and your neighbors to decide what you'll buy and what you'll watch and what you'll read Facebook news what mood you're in whether you're lonely lovesick happy been paid politically disenfranchised and can show you not just what you want because not even we know what we want but what you're most likely to click on the shift towards surveillance in a political context that justified the diminishing of protection and the shrinking of privacy was like entering your home with sweets to tempt you while secretly looking at your likes and dislikes who you live with your pet's name and what you're cooking all for the sake of personalization and subtly modifying behavior and ironically from their utopian no place they've become ubiquitous how we travel eat watch which apps we use what we listen to two-thirds of us get news through social media Facebook and Amazon have acquired almost 100 companies each and Google and Microsoft more than 200 the no place is everywhere zuboff calls it dispossession an incursion into undefended space your laptop your phone or web page the street where you live and email to your friend your walk in the park browsing online for a birthday gift sharing photos of your kids your interests and tastes your digestion your tears your attention your feelings your face they extract more and more information and they suck it like vampires from the corpse of History all while claiming to be from no place and that corpse of history is a long tradition of public investment that's cheaply sold off or surrendered while pretending that only capitalists are capable of innovation the internet touch screen GPS MRI Aviation projects and nanotechnology the first digital computer radar and much much more only exist because of public investment in things that are too risky for individual companies to pursue without public grants Nathan Newman has pointed to how the development of the internet is sometimes compared to the development of Highway systems but he says the internet is much more complex and the comparison doesn't make sense unless the government quite had first imagined the possibility of cars subsidized the invention of the Auto industry funded the technology of concrete and tar and built the whole initial system we have a hangover drunk from neoliberalism we strip regulation that protects local residents and people like taxi drivers let bucket loads of cash into our political lobbies hand over treasure chests full of our personal data and pass off the infrastructure to telecoms Giants who have no incentive to reinvest in Faster broadband and instead pay larger dividends to shareholders they didn't invest in poorer neighborhoods or rural areas who put up with insufferably slow speeds and the US in particular has some of the most expensive Internet fees and the most terrible speeds in 2018 according to Microsoft almost half the country cannot get and does not use broadband and they're low income and Rural in Detroit for example 70 percent of school children have no internet tarnoff writes that the big isps are essentially slumlords their principal function is to fleece their customers and funnel the money upward on top of that the Broadband cartel regularly receives large infusions of public cash [Music] for all this talk of State investment and the rolling back of Regulation and the embracing of laissez-faire markets I'm not suggesting that Facebook or Airbnb or Twitter should be handed over to National governments I think choosing between who should decide how platforms are run capitalists or politicians is a distressing but thankfully false Choice Solutions are difficult trade-offs are necessary real solutions should be multifaceted I think some combination of Regulation cultural awareness and Democratic Alternatives should all be pursued together foreign [Music] points out that before the mid-20th century the idea of what constituted as public interest was much broader we often bear like Banks or energy companies at Great cost and regulation has long protected the weak from the strong in one 1877 case for example Munn versus Illinois the court concluded that a business involved in large quantities of grain was of public interest and so could justifiably be regulated there are lots of reasons something might be in the public interest but the central one is that it's public it's in all of our interests they tend towards Monopoly and so affect all of us and there are clear harms to lots of people and so at least part if not all of how they run should be decided democratically This legal scholar Frank Pasquale has said the decisions at the Googleplex are made behind closed doors the power to include exclude and rank is the power to ensure which public Impressions become permanent and which remain fleeting despite their claims of objectivity and neutrality they are constantly making value Laden controversial decisions they help to create the world they claim to merely show us first let's look at the benefits of being open Democratic transparent of not being run commercially then we'll look at political policy and building alternative spaces in the 70s a group of computer scientists at MIT were working with an operating system called Unix which was owned by the Telecommunications giant at T one programmer and hacker Richard stallman wanted an alternative something that wasn't restricted and was free to work on add to and share stallman published the gnu Manifesto and became a pioneer of what came to be called open source gnu was an acronym for gnu not Unix and he proposed a legal method called copy left instead of copyright creating a terms of service in which anyone could use add to or modify software provided they did so under the same conditions in other words it had to be passed on stalman began working on several pieces of code that would contribute towards the running of an open source operating system that anyone could use through which innovation could be pursued collaboratively he believed that access to the source code of software was a right in the 80s a Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds contributed to the project with a new open source operating system he called it Linux and anyone could download it use it and contribute to its development both Starman and torfield's opposed the position that Bill Gates had outlined in his open letter to hobbyists a few years before the type of software they developed became known as floss free Libra open source software and it developed into such an influential movement that we all rely on floss every day every supercomputer in existence is run on Linux for example including one at the U.S department of energy one on the International Space Station and one on the USS nuzwald the most technologically advanced ship in the world the reason they use Linux is because it's open and can be edited to highly specialized needs the servers that host most of the world's websites run on Linux as do the computers at many government agencies and Google's phone operating system Android is Linux based making it the most used operating system in the world Libra office a free Microsoft Office alternative VLC a great media player Firefox a web browser audacity which I'm using right now to record this and WordPress used by more than 60 million people are all floss open source practices are a challenge to Bill Gates's biggest complaint in his open letter to hobbyists why would anyone build anything if it isn't commercially profitable Studies have found that developers contribute to floss for various reasons that don't fit in with the traditional economic psychological model of humans as self-serving profit maximizing agents contributing to a community or to humanity more broadly the desire to challenge yourself the knowledge that a certain type of status comes from contributing to a project and because a person themself needs the project that they're contributing to have all been cited as reasons for working on something outside the profit motive and floss is almost always developed outside of a conventional worker boss hierarchy legal scholar Yokai benkler writes that floss is radically decentralized collaborative and non-proprietary based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed Loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either Market signals or managerial commands a media scholar Benjamin berkembein argues that floss is an example of an alternative value system a type of digital Commons public open which everyone has a right to use non-private property enter Microsoft as floss proved itself as a viable alternative to proprietary Software Corporations have slowly encroached on open source projects in an attempt to in birkenbind's words capture the value being produced by floss communities after their court case Microsoft has made a dramatic u-turn on its position on sharing software they were forced to adopt interoperability the opening of their apis so that third-party software could more easily interact with the windows ecosystem but it was around that time that floss was taking off as a viable way of producing software in 1998 a supporter of Open Source author Eric Raymond received leaked internal Microsoft documents that became known as the Halloween documents in them Microsoft outlined their new approach to open source they would need to make use of it while also continuing making the case that software Microsoft software in particular was worth the price tag to do this the Halloween documents revealed Microsoft would use what they referred to as fud tactics the sowing of fear uncertainty and diet they broadcast an advert in the UK for example that claimed that while yes initially free Linux was found to be over 10 times more expensive than Windows Server 2003 over the long term but the advertising standards Authority in the UK found the claim to be misleading and banned the ad Microsoft were also found to be funneling money into a group who owned the original Unix operating system who were fighting a legal battle against Linux for property rights infringement but the Halloween documents will say described internal surveys that had found that there was a lot of support for floss within Microsoft so they had to balance between fighting open source and incorporating it into Windows both for their own benefit and to avoid more legal problems today interoperability is an important feature of everyday life that often goes unnoticed and unappreciated simple examples are Railways and airports that have to share the same track gauge or signaling or air traffic control protocols and so on if you've ever used Microsoft Word alternative Libra office it can open and save dot doc files Microsoft file formats and think about screws plugs banking systems and internet protocols interoperability ensures in part that dominant corporations can't dominate the market further by forcing their own interfaces and squeezing out competitors and while the open source Community remains skeptical of Microsoft but combine writes that Microsoft had to embrace open source because it had proven that it worked that collaboration was the direction the industry was heading in and that quite the company's turn to open source may also be viewed as a humble recognition that the commons-based peer production taking place within the floss Community was an efficient and effective model of industrial software production that could supplement its own business practices [Music] Wikipedia is another example of a similar non-commercial alternative the first Wikipedia article ever published was on January the 15th 2001. on the letter U McCullough writes that it was comprehensive it was well written and it was to the surprise of Jimmy Wales and his team of editors accurate a few thousand users who had shown up to test out Wikipedia had through their Collective inputs and edits got in the article polished to near authoritative quality like floss Wikipedia's contributions are voluntary it's free to access there are no advertisements and it doesn't track its users or sell their data and it's based on the premise that each can participate equally it's deliberative rather than hierarchical administrators and stewards are voted for for the most part Dem democratically and admins are nominated and voted for based on familiarity with rules and processes and edits had debated over and voted on two what these examples and others like them have proven is that open collaborative and Democratic alternatives to Big Tech are possible influenced by the sociologist Eric Olin Wright Muldoon argues that we should be building radical Democratic institutions within the cracks of the capitalist system what Olin Wright calls real Utopias modern argues for what he calls platform socialism which he says would involve the organization of the digital economy through the social ownership of digital assets and Democratic control over the infrastructure and systems that govern our digital lives he continues a broad Ecology of social ownership acknowledges the multiple and overlapping associations to which individuals belong and promotes the flourishing of different communities from Mutual societies to platform cooperatives data trusts and international social networks and there are plenty of examples of small platforms trying to challenge big tax dominance up and go was a cleaning Cooperative in New York Airbnb an alternative to Airbnb taxi app and alternative to Uber Mastodon to Twitter diaspora and friendica alternatives to Facebook but if there's one thing they all have in common it's their very clear failure to make much progress against incumbents who are protected by amongst other things what's been described as their Network effect the more people that use a platform like Facebook the bigger they become and the more valuable they are to use this means there's a cost to leaving Twitter to join Mastodon because everyone you want to follow is on Twitter this is a problem and a reason Microsoft is so dominant and how they manage to squeeze Netscape and other companies out of the market but it's also why interoperability May hold the key to how to challenge big Tech monopolies politically sometimes as the anti-monopoly battle against the robber barons has shown alternative Services Aren't Enough only political power can fight the power of corporate incumbents I think many people see regulation too simply regulation and policy choices come in many forms and often we can design policy that empowers Alternatives instead of just restricting or breaking up or hammering big Tech Barcelona city council for example forces Vodafone to make its data open for public use on the council's website Bernie Sanders has suggested billions in Grants for local municipalities to quote build publicly owned and democratically controlled Cooperative or Open Access Broadband networks public media Outlets like PBS and NPR legislated for by Lyndon B Johnson in 1967 and the BBC funded by license fee payers in Britain provide a quasi-political but ideally politically independent space motivated by values that sit outside Market mechanisms and all of these are routinely viewed in polling as the most trusted organizations for news [Music] legislation could be designed to encourage the creation of national or local alternatives to Big Tech that are independent of government or run through existing Library networks say your local councils a government Department could build and provide open source code to provide to councils to run alternatives to platforms like uber and Airbnb that give local drivers or homeowners and citizens a voice in how the apps are run personally I'd like to see an alternative to Twitter that's financed by subscription rather than by advertising revenue for a few dollars a month you would get access to a network which is completely open run by its users who can all vote elect decide on algorithm choices research directions privacy policy and so on in a similar way Wikipedia does and I think this is where interoperability is a smart policy regulation could force Facebook Uber Twitter and so on to a live third-party applications to plug into them interoperability would mean that you could use an alternative to Facebook that still works with Facebook allowing you to keep access to your social network to post to Facebook or Instagram or Twitter while using new platforms at the same time so that they had to interact with one another and you could support a space for experiments in new ways of running platforms Senator Mark Warner suggests legislation that would force platforms with revenues over 100 million dollars to comply with portability rules the Deep contradiction of our age the sociologist Sigmund Bauman wrote in 1999 is the yawning gap between the right of self-assertion and the capacity to control the social settings which render such self-assertion feasible it's from that abysmal Gap that the most poisonous effluvia contaminating the lives of contemporary individuals emanate the question is who has the legitimate power to control those social settings and how do we identify where that poisonous effluvia oozes from in coaxing nudging watching analyzing and sculpting our digital choices in using Monopoly positions to subtly influence our politics and take advantage of our communities should we really only rely on the words of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg that they're not skewing news feeds should we really abandon the concept of the community to Uber and Airbnb it's imperative instead that we engage in more experiments in Alternatives and the politics that supports those experiments as tarnoff says while working to disassemble the online models we must also be assembling a constellation of Alternatives that can lay claim to the space they currently occupy Because unless the platforms we use every day are transparent Democratic can open then it's not us controlling our own social settings and while yes sometimes the decisions big Tech makes can be the right ones it's also the case that however benevolence a ruler may be there are always going to be differences in value systems from person to person place to place group to group and over the long Arc history has proven time and again that moral monopolies of all types turn towards stagnation Decay blunder or corruption it only takes one Mad King one greedy dictator one slimy Pope or one foolish jester to nudge the levers they hover over towards chaos rot and even tyranny [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] okay first of all a huge thank you to everyone who provided their voices for this video we're in Hell radical reviewer Epoch philosophy Tom Nicholas Zoe B unlearning economics and James mode Dune you can check out their channels or their work in the description below Muldoon's platform socialism is a wonderful book that I read in research for this that I recommend and there's a link to all the other sources with that one below thank you to everyone as always for watching especially if you made it this far um if you'd like to support more videos like this especially longer ones that take what this took almost a year of research slowly before I even started writing it to to help make more videos like this you can go to a patreon and Chuck a few dollars my way every month and that goes towards making the channel better making the videos better and hopefully that continues next year if you can't do that honestly liking sharing subscribing hitting the Bell it really really does help but again if you made it this far all I can say is thank you and I hope you enjoyed see you next time

Channel: Then & Now

Views: 1,044,195

Keywords: nsfnet, arpanet, internet, history, surveillance capitalism, netscape, ebay, google, microsoft, antitrust, monopoly, facebook, bill gates, mark zuckerberg, net neutrality

Id: oLLxpAZzy0s

Length: 129min 54sec (7794 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 20 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Muted_Feature1381]

They stole everything!

[u/whnthynvr]

Stole a government funded project planned since the early 1950s? (see the Macy Conferences around cybernetics).

[u/trucorsair]

14 day old account…”agenda”

[u/Shakespurious]

Anybody care to summarize this video? I don't really care to set aside 2 hours to see a bunch of propaganda.

[u/3_of_7]

Anyone looking for technical information on pretty much anything already knew this. You're likely not finding what you needed anymore unless you're willing to pay money or are extremely proficient at digging through huge amounts of crap to find it.

[u/giuband]

Should probably make the documentary 'How people stole the term "capitalism"'

[u/tedemang]

OMG - Was looking for something just like this.

In all seriousness, the 'Net was supposed to be a way to help progress and even-out some unequal factors. ...There have been warnings about consolidation and advertising-driven mechanisms, as well as overt control by bad actors and power systems, but those cautions were ignored totally. Today, it's almost like the 'Net is just social media-owned and operated by surveillance data-harvesting megacorps.

Today, "Predator" drones roam the skies (with new ones called "Reapers" on the way), while Iran is selling more to Russia, all while cyber-enable infowars are leaving the world in a corporate-funded Hellscape. ...**"Welcome to the Desert of the Real..."**

[u/D-redditAvenger]

You act like it wasn't the plan. We are a capitalist society.

[u/SharkMilk44]

Because the internet in China and North Korea is way better.

/s