Internet

Addressing The Historic Gap In Internet Access On US Tribal Lands

July 26, 2024 Kavish Harjai, Associated Press. Create! Indigenous Nations, Internet, Municipal Broadband, Technology

Tribal nations have struggled to connect to the web for a variety of reasons ranging from living in remote locations to lack of investment by internet service providers. The lack of service has hampered every aspect of 21st century life, from health care and education access to the ability to start a business and stay in touch with friends and family. “A lot of tribal communities, they’re probably decades behind a lot of urban areas in terms of internet connectivity,” said E.J. John, a Navajo Nation member and policy analyst at the American Indian Policy Institute. “Connectivity rates are very low.”

CrowdStrike Further Tainted By Worldwide Crash

July 20, 2024 Ray McGovern, Consortium News. Educate! Computers, Congress, Crowdstrike, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Internet, RussiaGate

House Intelligence Committee documents released Thursday reveal that the committee was told two and half years ago that the F.B.I. had no concrete evidence that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee computers to filch the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks in July 2016. The until-now-buried, closed-door testimony came on Dec. 5, 2017 from Shawn Henry, a protege of former F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller (from 2001 to 2012), for whom Henry served as head of the Bureau’s cyber crime investigations unit. Henry retired in 2012 and took a senior position at CrowdStrike, the cyber security firm hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to investigate the cyber intrusions that occurred before the 2016 presidential election.

Internet Service Providers Plan To Subvert Net Neutrality

April 20, 2024 Chao Liu and Cooper Quintin, Electronic Frontier Foundation. Resist! FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality, Telecommunications

In the absence of strong net neutrality protections, internet service providers (ISPs) have made all sorts of plans that would allow them to capitalize on something called "network slicing." While this technology has all sorts of promise, what the ISPs have planned would subvert net neutrality—the principle that all data be treated equally by your service provider—by allowing them to recreate the kinds of “fast lanes” we've already agreed should not be allowed. If their plans succeed, then the new proposed net neutrality protections will end up doing far less for consumers than the old rules did.

Building Democratic Governance On The Internet

April 5, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Democracy, Internet, Media, Media Democracy, The Commons

The default form of governance on Internet platforms is "implicit feudalism," Nathan Schneider provocatively declares in his new book Governance Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life. Implicit feudalism is "a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms," in which founders become "benevolent dictators for life," he argues. Unfortunately, authoritarian governance is not confined to social media platforms. The same tendencies bleed into the "real world," too, if only because the lines between online and "real life" have become quite blurry these days.

Press Freedom Is Slipping Away In Canada

October 7, 2023 Marc Edge, Canadian Dimension. Educate! Canada, Internet, Journalism, Media, Press Freedom

Press freedom is increasingly under assault worldwide by governments that are finding the Internet much easier to control than the press ever was. While dictators everywhere suppress dissent by throttling the chokepoint of Internet access, Canada unfortunately leads the so-called “free” world in regulating online communication. First it was the Online Streaming Act, which was passed in April and expands the Broadcasting Act to cover not just online video but now also podcasts and even (shudder) online porn. It got back into the news recently with a requirement issued by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) that podcasters, adult websites and even social media services that earn $10 million or more in annual revenues must register with it by November 28.

Hannes Gerhardt: From Capital To Commons

September 1, 2023 David Bollier. Create! Book Review, Capitalism, Commons, History, Internet

Gerhardt has a firm grasp of the extensive literature on Internet culture over the past fifty years – the critiques, histories, and technical controversies. What distinguishes his book from many others about the Internet is his political acuity in assessing the challenges. He offers chapters on “democratizing infrastructure” such as the electric grid and the Internet itself, as well as on how to support “design global, manufacture local” production. Unlike many techies, Gerhardt is also mindful of the limits of the natural world, so he devotes space to localism, urban waste, and agriculture as a renewable resource.

Why Was Oakland Cut Out Of State Plan For High-Speed Internet?

September 1, 2023 Shomik Mukherjee, The Mercury News. Educate! California, Internet, Oakland, Red Lining

Oakland, California — The mission was supposed to be simple: At a moment when millions of students were being educated exclusively online, California’s leaders decided that high-speed internet should be available everywhere, even in places where residents struggle to afford it. So in 2021 the state directed millions in federal pandemic relief dollars and other funding– a total of $3.87 billion — to bridge the “digital divide” by installing fiber-optic cables that would bring high-speed internet to neighborhoods where it did not exist. Two years later, those ambitious plans appear to have been slashed disproportionately, threatening to leave some urban communities, including East Oakland and South Central Los Angeles, further behind.

How Elon Musk Is Aiding The US’ Regime Change Operation In Iran

January 18, 2023 Alan MacLeod, Mintpress News. Educate! Elon Musk, Internet, Iran, Regime Change

Elon Musk has announced that he is helping to smuggle hundreds of Starlink satellite communications devices into Iran. The South African-born billionaire made the admission on December 26, replying to a tweet lauding female Iranian protesters for refusing to cover their hair. “Approaching 100 Starlinks active in Iran”, he tweeted, clearly implying a political motivation to his work. That Musk is involved in Washington’s attempts to weaken or overthrow the administration in Tehran has been clear for some months now. In September – at the height of the demonstrations following the suspicious death of 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini – Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the U.S. was “taking action” “to advance Internet freedom and the free flow of information for the Iranian people” and “to counter the Iranian government’s censorship,” to which Musk replied, “Activating Starlink…”

A Tribute To Activist And Programmer Aaron Swartz 10 Years After His Death

January 12, 2023 Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network. Educate! Aaron Swartz, Internet, Internet Freedom

Jan. 11, 2023 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Aaron Swartz. Swartz had a prolific career as a computer programmer: At the age of 12 he created The Info Network, a user-generated encyclopedia widely credited as a precursor to Wikipedia. Swartz’s later work would transform the internet as we know it. He helped co-found Reddit, developed the RSS web feed format, and helped lay the technical foundations of Creative Commons, “a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools.” In 2011, Swartz was arrested and indicted on federal charges after downloading a large number of academic articles from the website JSTOR through the MIT network. A year later, prosecutors added an additional nine felony counts against Swartz, ultimately threatening him with a million dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison.

Community Broadband’s Broad Appeal

December 19, 2022 Luke Gannon and Reggie Rucker, Institute For Local Self-Reliance. Create! Communities, Community Broadband, Internet, Internet Access

Fairlawn, Ohio - There is a recent story out of Fairlawn, Ohio that perfectly illustrates the future of Internet access in this country. For years, the small town was at the whims of large, incumbent Internet providers. The Internet was so slow and unreliable that businesses threatened to relocate, jeopardizing the economic vitality of the area. The mayor, alongside city leaders and council members, realized that the various incumbent providers were not going to cooperate, and to save their city, they would need to build their own city-wide fiber-to-the-home network. On this episode of Building Local Power, Christopher Mitchell, Director of ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative, and Sean Gonsalves, Senior Reporter and Editor, explain how, in the 5-plus years since the deployment of its city-wide network, “Fairlawn is doing so well [that] they are now boosting speeds and slashing prices.”

The Internet Is Not Facebook

November 11, 2022 Corynne McSherry and Jillian C. York, Electronic Frontier Foundation. Educate! Content Policing, Internet, Media, Net Neutrality

Cloudflare’s recent headline-making decision to refuse its services to KiwiFarms—a site notorious for allowing its users to wage harassment campaigns against trans people—is likely to lead to more calls for infrastructure companies to police online speech. Although EFF would shed no tears at the loss of KiwiFarms (which is still online as of this writing), Cloudflare’s decision re-raises fundamental, and still unanswered, questions about the role of such companies in shaping who can, and cannot, speak online. The deplatforming followed a campaign demanding that Cloudflare boot the site from its services. At first the company refused, but then, just 48 hours later, Cloudflare removed KiwiFarms from its services and issued a statement outlining their justifications for doing so.

2022 Brings Hope For State And Local Broadband Progress

January 9, 2022 Jed Pressgrove, Governing. Create! Broadband, Internet, Internet Access, State Initiatives

If 2020 convinced the country that broadband for all Americans is essential, then 2021 underscored a reality of life: Goals often require longer timelines than we’d prefer. To put it another way, a worldwide emergency helped the U.S. recognize the importance of having ubiquitous high-speed Internet, and now we’re playing catch-up. There’s no quick and clean fix, which is a clunky pill to swallow for millions of people who contend with substandard or nonexistent connectivity as a new world of hybrid education, remote work, online services and telehealth takes over. The urgency for wider access to high-speed Internet has been palpable this year. The federal government has ramped up its focus on the issue.

Re-Lighting The Night After The City Repossessed Their Streetlights

July 8, 2021 Tia Graham, Next City. Create! Infrastructure, Internet, Michigan, Solar

The City of Highland Park, a predominantly Black city surrounded by Detroit, Michigan, has had most of its residential streets in the dark for the last 10 years. In 2011, the city owed $4 million to utility company DTE Energy. An agreement was made between DTE and city officials to remove roughly 1,200 streetlights to settle the debt. Reports suggest the repossessed lights were sold for scrap. Since then, Highland Park remained in the dark figuratively and literally. Residents had no clue what happened. “And it was just really a sad day actually seeing the poles, the trucks came to take the poles out, and it just left these stumps,” says Shamayin Harris, a lifelong Highland Park resident. “So they’re basically all around our city right now. It just looks like a graveyard of cement stubs where lights used to be on the residential street.

How To Unlearn Capitalism Through Cooperative Ownership

February 27, 2021 Willa Köerner, Pioneer Works. Create! Cooperatives, Internet, New Economy, Platform Coops

In the context of user-generated content platforms, the coop model is just such a natural fit. One of the principle questions that made a cooperative model feel relevant is this idea of, “Who's generating value, and who's capturing it?” Under capitalism, it’s people with ownership who end up capturing most of the value. So at a base level, sharing ownership with a company’s users and creators can align incentives. And that can dramatically affect the decisions that a platform makes, and steer it in a way that is to the benefit of the people who actually use it and rely on it. What's Spotify valued at, a billion or more? And they’re completely dependent on musicians to make their platform’s content. Lately though, there has been more awareness that this model is not serving its creators. So where coops pop up naturally is when people are like, "I'm not being served."

Ajit Pai’s Broadband Legacy: Haste And Waste

January 21, 2021 S. Derek Turner, Free Press. Educate! Ajit Pai, FCC, Internet, Privatization

As we documented in our previous three posts, the $9.2-billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) — FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s supposed crowning achievement toward closing the broadband digital divide — is looking more and more like one of the most wasteful projects in FCC history. Our first post gave some examples of questionable funding in urban areas that we stumbled upon after spending just a few minutes with the map of winning bidders. This included ridiculous examples of “rural” subsidies awarded to major ISPs to offer broadband in gated urban communities where they already offer service, and awards to bring broadband to a posh resort that is already well-connected.

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