The Post-American Internet

Summary

Today's links The Post-American Internet (permalink) On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled "A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet" for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech. Many of you know that I'm an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation – EFF. I'm about to start my 25th year there. I know that I'm hardly unbiased, but as far as I'm concerned, there's no group anywhere on Earth that does the work of defending our digital rights better than EFF. I'm an activist there, and for the past quarter-century, I've been embroiled in something I call "The War on General Purpose Computing." If you were at 28C3, 14 years ago, you may have heard me give a talk with that title. Those are the trenches I've been in since my very first day on the job at EFF, when I flew to Los Angeles to crash the inaugural meeting of something called the "Broadcast Protection Discussion Group," an unholy alliance of tech companies, media companies, broadcasters and cable operators. They'd gathered because this lavishly corrupt American congressman, Billy Tauzin, had promised them a new regulation – a rule banning the manufacture and sale of digital computers, unless they had been backdoored to specifications set by that group, specifications for technical measures to block computers from performing operations that were dispreferred by these companies' shareholders. That rule was called "the Broadcast Flag," and it actually passed through the American telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission. So we sued the FCC in federal court, and overturned the rule. We won that skirmish, but friends, I have bad news, news that will not surprise you. Despite wins like that one, we have been losing the war on the general purpose computer for the past 25 years. Which is why I've come to Hamburg today. Because, after decades of throwing myself against a locked door, the door that leads to a new, g...