We have Abandoned Every Principle of the Free and Open Internet

"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” It was 1968, and J.C.R. Licklider, a director at ARPA, had become convinced that humanity was on the cusp of a computing revolution. 

The social fabric of the internet is built on very specific assumptions, many of which are giving way. Licklider envisioned the internet as a patchwork of decentralized networks, with no sense of how it would work when a handful of companies wrote most of its software and managed most of its traffic. Licklider conceived a level playing field for different networks and protocols, with no sense that the same openness could enable a new kind of monopoly power. Most painfully, this new network was imagined as a forum for the free exchange of ideas, with no sense of how predatory and oppressive that exchange would become. These failures are connected, and they leave us in a difficult place. It’s easy to say this was a bad year for Google or Facebook (it was), but the news is actually worse than that. Companies are falling into crisis because the basic social compact of the internet has reached its limit — and begun to break.