What happened to the fight for the Internet? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
What happened to the fight for the Internet?<br>By Christine Lemmer-Webber on Tue 30 June 2026<br>At the moment I am writing this, bad internet bills are being proposed<br>across the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK. They're using the usual<br>tactics: they claim they're fighting for kids or fighting security<br>risks, but in general, that's what surveillance and censorship bills<br>have always claimed.<br>But something feels different. There's so much happening at once, for<br>one thing, it feels like there's a massive coordinated attack on<br>internet freedoms. But it also feels like the wind is out of the sails<br>of these fights, which is alarming, because the stakes have never been<br>higher. Who's coordinating all these? What money is pushing it?<br>Palantir? Heritage Foundation types? Large, centralization-enthused<br>orgs like Meta? All of the above? It's hard to tell. But there's<br>certainly a lot of money flowing underfoot.<br>But it's not just the coordinated attack. The fight itself feels<br>deflated, in ways the fight for the internet hasn't been before. Sure,<br>we have orgs like the ACLU, the Open Rights Group, the EFF, Fight for<br>the Freedom, the usual suspects all fighting for the rights of the<br>internet. And that's great.<br>But there's something else.<br>It feels like people are tired.<br>And it feels like the PR for locking things down has more acceptance<br>publicly than before.<br>This is dramatically different than in my formative days.<br>Net neutrality, SOPA... these battles for internet freedom had massive<br>buy-in across the internet. 2012's<br>Wikipedia blackout<br>was especially memorable. It wasn't just the tech engineers of the<br>world in that fight; family and friends who had never thought about<br>the technical underpinnings of the internet were asking me questions,<br>saying they were worried that we were going to lose our digital rights<br>and asking what could be done.<br>Now we are facing an international swell of legal movements to<br>age-gate and thus surveil the entire internet, lock down operating<br>systems and hardware in the process, and generally crush the internet<br>into an even more centralized shape than it's already been going.<br>And so it's with great irony that I believe it is actually<br>because the internet got so centralized that we are facing the<br>greatest amount of centralization and backdoor threats we've ever<br>faced.<br>Because there's a difference between now and 2012. The internet feels<br>a lot less like an "our thing" than it used to.<br>There are exceptions, of course. If you're a regular reader of my<br>blog, you know the history of<br>my life work on decentralizing internet<br>communication. The fediverse and decentralized social networks in<br>general are a counter-point to centralization. The thing is, when<br>working on decentralized tech, I always believed it was important<br>because we had serious risks from centralization, surveillance, etc<br>from governments and corporations, potentially co-conspiring. But what<br>I hadn't anticipated is that as things became more centralized, the<br>will to fight for the internet as something in the public interest<br>too would evaporate.<br>When I have conversations with family members and friends who haven't<br>yet thought much about the age verification and similar bills and<br>their consequences, they've said "well, someone has to hold<br>corporations like Meta" responsible. To which I say, "but what about<br>all the smaller, non-corporate parts of the internet?" To which, many<br>people are surprised, because they've simply forgotten about those<br>things.<br>When the internet and computing becomes five corporations to most<br>people, they begin to treat it as the concerns of reigning in five<br>corporations.<br>But.<br>We can't let that be what this is.<br>Because I believe, and I believe firmly, that we are in for the fights<br>of our lives right now. As fascism creeps across the globe, as queer<br>people get squeezed out of public life (which I believe is A LARGE<br>PORTION of the reasons all of this is being pushed, the fear of queer<br>kids using the internet to discover things about themselves), as all<br>of media gets consolidated and filtered to the views of the powerful<br>keeping themselves in power, decentralized and encrypted<br>communication is increasingly all we have left to fight for<br>ourselves.<br>We have to fight for our rights.<br>For ourselves.<br>For our children.<br>For the future.<br>Get active. Call your representatives.<br>Sign up for a fediverse cooperative. Explore p2p tech. Install a<br>non-Google, non-Apple operating system on your phone. Start your blog<br>back up. SPEAK OUT!<br>Because the internet is ours, if we make it so.<br>And if we don't...<br>... well I'm too worried about that to finish that sentence.<br>If the internet feels decreasingly like it's ours, then by god, let's<br>make it ours.
Tags: internet privacy censorship
by Christine Lemmer-Webber. Powered by Haunt! [source]