Good regulation enables and protects

June 8, 2019 7:32 AM

The first steps towards creating the internet were taken in the 1960s. Originally, the internet was established to serve a common good. The idea of the pioneers of the internet was to connect people all around the world, regardless of their location. Within these years, it has taken on new dimensions. Therefore, the internet has to be analysed from different perspectives, taking into consideration the long-term futuristic view but also recognising the risks.
posted by hugbucket (10 comments total)

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." --- Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I wonder if Finland is the right country to be leading this effort. By all accounts, the Finnish people are pretty great. Perhaps they assume that everyone else is pretty great, a view that contrasts sharply with typical Youtube comments.
posted by SPrintF at 8:02 AM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]

Regulations are always there I guess. It's about following it strictly. There should be some bodies to ensure it. It's up to every country t act together to make it safe.
posted by PhotographyAxis at 8:54 AM on June 8, 2019

Mod note: Couple comments deleted; let's not instantly derail onto WWII?
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:08 AM on June 8, 2019

Yeah...scratch the surface in northern Europe and you will find as much blatant racism as you do here in 'Murica. Also, zero mention in the article about race, intersectionality, accessibility, populism, a rising right wing, or propaganda...all MAJOR problems with the internet today. But maybe that's not really a priority for a vastly white country that got away with barely a hand-slap for being, yes, on the wrong side of ww2. As for time machines, there's a whole lot of folks in their 70s and 80s who have been saying it's been like stepping out of one these days, in that things these days are so similar to Germany in the mid/late 30s.
posted by sexyrobot at 9:09 AM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]

zero mention in the article about race, intersectionality, accessibility, populism, a rising right wing, or propaganda...all MAJOR problems with the internet today.

Those are not problems with the Internet. Those are problems with humanity, as the usual comparison to events of the last century makes clear enough. I'm not sure why so many people lately think e.g. racism can be abated by simply flipping the switch that shuts all the racists out of the conversation. The whole reason that the net seems more racist than it used to is that everyone, including the racists (and various other categories of crazies) are now connected to it. Changing that in any significant way would effectively mean going back to the imagined past so many people are nostalgic for, where the dominant mass media was television and right-thinking people could count on the nightly news to tell them everything they needed to know. The racism was not less; ask anyone who was around. It was easier to ignore, less visible at a casual glance at your media environment. Unless, of course, it wasn't, in which case again so much the worse compared to today.

Not that it is surprising that this doesn't come up in a bit of vapid speechifying about how great regulation is, which for the most part could be applied to trying to sell us anything from net neutrality to article 17 of the big Copyright Directive, which is the opposite of net neutrality, and of good regulation.
posted by sfenders at 10:16 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]

Originally, the internet was established to serve a common good. The idea of the pioneers of the internet was to connect people all around the world, regardless of their location.

Well, no. The idea of the pioneers of the internet was to create an American military data network that would continue to function after a nuclear war wiped out a large chunks of it. Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe.

a bit of vapid speechifying

Yeah, this was a bit too much rah-rah go Internet and too few actionable details for my taste.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:24 AM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]

Well, no. The idea of the pioneers of the internet was to create an American military data network that would continue to function after a nuclear war wiped out a large chunks of it.

That came later. The original idea was some nerds saying to one another "how could you hook a bunch of these things up so they could talk to one another?" Which is a natural enough question, if you're a nerd.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 3:27 PM on June 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

All of the funding for the creation of the internet came from ARPA, the (Defense) Advanced Research Projects agency. All ARPA projects were based on military needs. Nerds having fun was just a side effect.
posted by monotreme at 10:51 AM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

And for that matter star topology networks were already getting quite large.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:56 AM on June 9, 2019

Networking came first, a network-of-networks came later. It's right in the word "internet".
posted by JoeZydeco at 2:47 PM on June 9, 2019