Bogus copyright claims are used to remove or suppress disfavorable news reports of elite rapists, thieves, war criminals and murderers:

pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuk…

You'd be hard pressed to find someone who'd describe the fights over tech governance in 2025 as frivolous or disconnected from "real politics"

9/

This is where the premature antifascist stuff comes in. An emerging revisionist history of internet activism would have you believe that the first generation of tech liberation activists weren't fighting for a free, open internet - we were just shilling for tech companies. The P2P wars weren't about speech, privacy and decentralization - they were just a way to help the tech sector fight the entertainment industry.

10/

DRM fights weren't about preserving your right to repair, to privacy, and to accessibility - they were just about making it easy to upload movies to Kazaa. Fighting for universal access to encryption wasn't about defending everyday people from corporate and state surveillance - it was just a way to help terrorists and child abusers stay out of sight of cops.

11/

Of course, *now* these fights are all about real things. *Now* we need to worry about centralization, interoperability, lock-in, surveillance, speech, and repair. But the people - like me - who've been fighting over this stuff for a quarter-century? We've gone from "unserious fools who mistook tech battles for human rights fights" to "useful idiots for tech companies" in an eyeblink.

"Premature Internet Activists," in other words.

12/

This isn't merely ironic or frustrating - it's dangerous. Approaching tech activism without a historical foundation can lead people badly astray. For example, many modern tech critics think that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which makes internet users liable for illegal speech acts, while immunizing entities that host that speech) is a "giveaway to Big Tech" and want to see it abolished.

13/

Boy is this dangerous. CDA 230 is necessary for *anyone* who wants to offer a place for people to meet and discuss *anything*. Without CDA 230, no one could safely host a Mastodon server, or set up the long-elusive federated Bluesky servers. Hell, you couldn't even host a group-chat or message board:

techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-…

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Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act

Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I apologize if it feels a bit cold and rude to resp…

^Techdirt

Getting rid of CDA 230 won't get rid of Facebook or make it clean up its act. It will just make it impossible for anyone to offer an alternative to Facebook, permanently enshrining Zuck's dominance over our digital future. That's why Mark Zuckerberg wants to kill Section 230:

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/zuc…

Defending policies that make it easier to host speech isn't the same thing as defending tech companies' profits, though these do sometimes overlap.

15/

Zuckerberg calls for changes to tech's Section 230 protections

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will propose that Congress require platforms to have systems in place for identifying and removing unlawful content.

^{Dylan Byers (NBC News)}

When tech platforms have their users' back - even for self-serving reasons - they create legal precedents and strong norms that protect *everyone*. Like when Apple stood up to the FBI on refusing to break its encryption:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2…

If Apple had caved on that one, it would be far harder for, say, Signal to stand up to demands that it weaken its privacy guarantees.

16/

concerns whether and to what extent courts in the United States can compel manufacturers to assist in unlocking cell phones whose data are cryptographically protected

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

I'm no fan of Apple, and I would never mistake Tim Cook - who owes his CEOhood to his role in moving Apple production to Chinese sweatshops that are so brutal they had to install suicide nets - for a human rights defender. But I cheered on Apple in its fight against the FBI, and I will cheer them again, if they stand up to the UK government's demand to break their encryption:

bbc.com/news/articles/c20g288y…

17/

UK government demands access to Apple users' encrypted data

The Home Office served the notice to the tech giant under the Investigatory Powers Act.

^{Zoe Kleinman (BBC News)}

This doesn't make me a shill for Apple. I don't care if Apple makes or loses another dime. I care about Apple's *users* and their privacy. That's why I criticize Apple when they compromise their users' privacy for profit:

pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/you…

The same goes for fights over scraping. I hate AI companies as much as anyone, but boy is it a mistake to support calls to ban scraping in the name of fighting AI:

pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how…

18/

It's scraping that lets us track paid political disinformation on Facebook (Facebook isn't going to tell us about it):

pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/com…

And it's scraping that let us rescue all the CDC and NIH data that Musk's broccoli-hair brownshirts deleted on behalf of DOGE:

cnet.com/tech/services-and-sof…

19/

How to Access Important Health Info That's Been Scrubbed From the CDC Site

The Trump administration removed pages relating to LGBTQ issues, HIV information, racial disparities and more, but you can still find them on the Wayback Machine.

^{Joe Hindy (CNET)}

It's such a huge mistake to assume that anything corporations want is bad for the internet. There are many times when commercial interests dovetail with online human rights. That's not a defense of capitalism, it's a critique of capitalism that acknowledges that profits do sometimes coincide with the public interest, an argument that Marx and Engels devote Chapter One of *The Communist Manifesto* to:

nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/r…

20/

Book Review: ‘A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto,’ by China Miéville

In “A Spectre, Haunting,” the British fantasy writer and political activist China Miéville makes the case for why Marx and Engels’s famous pamphlet remains vital today.

^{Cory Doctorow (The New York Times)}

In the early 1990s, Al Gore led the "National Information Infrastructure" hearings, better known as the "Information Superhighway" hearings. Gore's objective was to transfer control over the internet from the military to civilian institutions. It's true that these institutions were largely (but not exclusively) commercial entities seeking to make a buck on the internet. It's also true much of that transfer *could* have been to public institutions rather than private hands.

21/

But I've lately - and repeatedly - heard this moment described (by my fellow leftists) as the "privatization" of the internet. This is strictly true, but it's even more true to say that it was the *demilitarization* of the internet. In other words, corporations didn't take over functions performed by, say, the FCC - they took over from the *Pentagon*. Leftists have no business pining for the days when the internet was controlled by the Department of Defense.

22/

Caring about the technological dimension of human rights 30 years ago - or hell, *40* years ago - doesn't make you a corporate stooge who wanted to launch a thousand investment bubbles. It makes you someone who understood, from the start, that digital rights are human rights, that cyberspace would inevitably evert into meatspace, and that the rules, norms and infrastructure we built for the net would someday be as consequential as any other political decision.

23/

I'm proud to be a Premature Internet Activist. I just celebrated my 23rd year with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and yesterday, we sued Elon Musk and DOGE:

eff.org/press/releases/eff-sue…

24/

EFF Sues OPM, DOGE and Musk for Endangering the Privacy of Millions

NEW YORK—EFF and a coalition of privacy defenders led by Lex Lumina filed a lawsuit today asking a federal court to stop the U.S.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.

Catch me TOMORROW (Feb 14) for free in Boston at Boskone:

schedule.boskone.org/62/

And on SATURDAY (Feb 15_ for a virtual event with Yanis Varoufakis:

youtube.com/watch?v=xkIDep7Z4L…

More tour dates here:

martinhench.com

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Image:
Felix Winkelnkemper (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…

CC BY-SA 4.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

eof/

File:Acoustic Coupler.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

^{commons.wikimedia.org}