Daniel Greenfield Internet

Daniel Greenfield: Why free speech on the web – as we once knew it – will be over within a decade…….


 

A literal iron curtain is descending upon our information conduit, and it’s happening right before our eyes…

 

A DIGITAL IRON CURTAIN DESCENDS OVER THE INTERNET

Why free speech on the web – as we once knew it – will be over within a decade.

Daniel Greenfield

A generation of economic pressure failed to regulate the internet. Outraged movie studios and record companies managed to cripple some file sharing pioneers, but broke their teeth on Google’s YouTube. Dot coms like Amazon, Google, Cragislist, eBay and Netflix casually wiped out entire retail industries from the local paper to the video rental place, costing tens of thousands of jobs. And nothing.

 

No amount of pressure from business interests could close down the internet. Politicians were still too invested in a vision of progress fueled by the growth of something that they did not understand.

 

“An iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” Winston Churchill once warned. A digital iron curtain is now descending over the internet. Free speech as we once knew it will be over in a decade. The internet will still be a noisy place, but it will be a managed noise of echo chambers, a moderated system in which dissenting views will be treated as trolling and purged as quickly as they are identified.

 

The political causes of both curtain falls are the same. The Soviet Union and the American Left had both triumphed and inherited a large chaotic region that they had to consolidate under their control. The Soviet Union’s triumph had been a military one over physical territories while the American Left had conquered the messaging territories of the old cultural realm, media, entertainment and advertising.

 

Having won those, it’s expanding its control over big corporations and big government. And to do that, it has to eliminate the independent voices on the internet that pose a threat to its messaging monopoly.

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