If you have been reading my writing for the last few years or so, you’ll know that I have been trying to better understand the workings and innards of the Internet and share that understanding as much as I can in a coherent manner. I fail sometimes, and I get it right other times. That’s okay, and that’s the only way to learn something deeply.

Ever since I first connected to a university terminal and hopped several links to get to the Internet properly, I have been connected and in some way involved with the Internet.

I saw the deep potential back then and naively believed that bringing it to everyone would do some good. How stupid of me and the many others who built the Internet. We owe you an apology.

But that is not what this note is about. This is a note about something I wanted to discuss quickly, something I have previously highlighted and discussed in fairly vague terms. Given my goal to learn and share more, I thought it would be good to do just that today.

The Internet is built on infrastructure, and despite what Internet lore tries to tell you, it has its vulnerabilities. Some technical. Some political and some societal. This is about a technical issue being exploited by societal and political postures.

I’m an engineer by heart and by trade so I automatically latch on to technical aspects, perhaps not fully understanding other facets. I went from pure electrical engineering, where I built industrial-scale electrical distribution panels —I have fond memories of that job, and I always think about the installations that use the panels I built —to industrial air conditioning, then on to programming Building Management Systems and ultimately on to network infrastructure and the consulting that has resulted from that. And as I recently discussed on the ICT Pulse podcast, and here too, tech is no longer a siloed vertical tool and has crept into every aspect of life. And this is the driving factor of modern discussions about the Internet.

Internet governance is no longer, and cannot be, a discussion about protocols, RFCs, and the like. The Internet affects billions of lives, and seemingly innocuous rules and regulations can have unintended consequences for individuals and societies alike.

I should stop waffling and tell you that this is about DNS. The Domain Name System.

DNS is the backbone of the Internet, and as the popular (in technical circles) meme goes:

And it is not just me saying that:

The Domain Name Server (DNS) is the Achilles heel of the Web. The important thing is that it’s managed responsibly. — Tim Berners-Lee

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the governing body responsible for overseeing the management of DNS, but the actual day-to-day management is handled by providers, ISPs (OVH, Hover, etc.) and the RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) dealing with IP address governance.¹ Despite its scope for names (DNS) and numbers (IP addresses), it has spent a considerable amount of time on policy development for DNS, notably the internationalisation of domain names —essentially allowing multilingual domain names and not solely anglicised ones, as is currently the case. It has also worked to push for standards to secure DNS and there are now implementations of secure DNS (DNSSEC) gaining ground. For example, my local router is capable of DNSSEC, as is the outgoing filtering application on my Mac (Little Snitch). ICANN sets out contractual obligations to the DNS providers that mostly focus on the technical aspects of management, security, availability, etc. However, they do not fully cover issues of a more squishy nature, like human rights, privacy, freedom of expression, etc.

This is a clear example of where the Internet has suddenly become confronted with realities of human existence, having been very much isolated from these issues in the past.

We’re seeing more and more targeted efforts by governments and organisations that, without any other recourse, attack the very fundamentals of the Internet through this relatively straightforward path. For example, recently, CANAL+, a billionaire-owned and particularly right-wing leaning group, successfully argued in court to have a number of DNS entries blocked from the DNS servers of a select few providers in France (Orange, SFR, etc). The case was about pirated live streaming of football matches, so there’s some merit to the petition. But what about if it was about restricting a democratic right to protest against said company? It would unlikely win on that basis alone, but the precedent of DNS blocking has now been set, and it is simply a matter of testing where the line lies. Something that billionaires can and do regularly.

Following a 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar and what looks likely to be a major disaster for human life in the country, it was still not possible to use the Internet in a way that could be used to coordinate aid and get news out to those who need it most. The Myanmar firewall was commissioned in 2024 and restricts a whole host of Internet services, giving the military junta unprecedented control over citizens through techniques like DNS censorship and others.

This all leads me to think that the next big battleground for democracy in the US, Europe and Great Britain will play out in large part through DNS and the associated services. As I have explained, if you cripple DNS, you can cripple everything.

Reading

A couple of articles that I have been reading:

“Meta has stolen books”: authors to protest in London against AI trained using ‘shadow library’

The title says it all. And it is just as bad as you think it is. There’s an odd thought experiment going on in the minds of some of the Internet pioneers. Something about data being free and that free flow of data will create a better world. I’d say, take a look around you and tell me if the world is currently a better place from where you’re standing. Some of you will say yes. But that will be because you’re standing in an extremely privileged position. More on this in the future.

The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes

Some of the major media organisations are starting to understand the real impact of what absolutely shouldn’t be called AI. Other factors, such as the phenomenally wasteful nature of the big models, are also starting to be called into question. Even Microsoft has just cancelled a number of major datacenter building projects, presumably because they see the numbers, and they’re not quite as “number go up” as they led us all to believe.

Trump administration’s blockchain plan for USAID is a real head-scratcher

The systematic dismantling of USAID, an organisation I have fond memories of working with, is such a shame. Sure, it wasn’t a perfect organisation, but the people I worked with were there for genuine reasons. This, unsurprisingly from DT, is just baffling.

Wishing you a great week.

I was recently invited to participate as a regular contributor to two podcasts last week. I recorded for the ICT-Pulse Podcast (English) and Innovation, Agilité & Excellence (French). I’ll post the links as soon as they’re published.

One topic that came up, admittedly from me, is an idea and reflexion I’ve been having about digital platforms, more specifically social media digital platforms, lately.

The other topic that was the focus of discussion on the ICT Pulse podcast was about digital agency over digital sovereignty. It’s a fairly new idea and one that isn’t well-formed. I’m not quite sure how I stand either, but I felt it was a discussion worth having to help clarify, if not resolve some thoughts about Internet governance and the future of the internet.

I know some of the topics I’ve been writing about here have been pretty dark recently, I’m sorry. But I felt I needed to get them down on something, if not for you, but for me to at least state my position on the shenanigans.

At the time of writing this introduction, I think this one should be a bit more pedestrian. We’ll see. I hope you enjoy it anyway, and please feel free to reach out.

Digital agency

To get the discussion started, I think it is necessary to have a quick rundown about digital sovereignty. It is something that governments around the world have been discussing and even pursuing for a while now. Some longer than others. What it boils down to is essentially regulating and controlling the Internet to ensure that the country remains in control of what happens on it in the confines of its own state. It often manifests itself in ways that are imperceptible to many, or totally draconian like we see in states like Russia, North Korea and China, generally in the name of autonomy and self-reliance.

Digital agency, however, is thought to be more of an idea closer to the ideals of the Internet’s beginnings, an open universe for the use of all equally. But we have observed that those ideals have come up against cold hard realities of political difference, power brokering and all sorts of levers being placed on countries, businesses, institutions, and people. The internet today is not an open universe, and it is certainly not free for use equitably for all. Just the numbers of people without meaningful access to the Internet show that it is still very much a privileged few that benefit the most from the Internet.

Agency, in psychology, is having the ability to use strategies and actions that bring us what we want. Without it, we are powerless to decide our destiny.

The ideals put forward by digital agency try to address this by attempting to wrestle control back through three principles: multi-stakeholderism, realising the potential of technology and promoting collaboration. Of the three principles, I can only see one, possibly two, that are realistic and achievable. TLDR; the first one. (I’ve briefly discussed here before, so I won’t go over old ground here).

Where I think that these ideals will fall down is with the other two. Although, if I’m honest, I do think that at some point we might be able to better realise the potential of technology. However, it is not in its current guise, or under the stewardship of the goons that are currently in power over tech and our tech lives.

The third, collaboration, for me is the achilles heel of the entire endeavour. History has shown time and time again, and it will keep repeating itself ad infinitum, that we are incapable of collaborating on a global scale. It will start off with good intentions, but at som point, politics, power struggles, egos, and all the things that make us human will enter the room and suck out any opportunity for meaningful collaboration on projects like this.

I think it is a reality that we just have to get used to, and it is an inevitable consequence of technology becoming horizontally embedded in every aspect of life. Tech is essentially political now, and it will take an enormous shift for it not to be.

I’m sure I’ll be developing this topic in the future. For now, I’m keeping up on the discussion and developments.

The digital (social media) plantation economy

This is a thought that came to me a while back that I didn’t really expand upon, despite subtly touching upon, in over the last few months. I’m drawing a parallel between the mechanisms and organisational systems, not the people involved, past or present. Bear that in mind while you’re reading this.

This is a story about digital platforms and how they extract everything out of them for themselves, without regard to anyone or anything. And you should never forget that today’s digital platforms exist solely to sit in-between the supplier and the demander and extract, extract, extract. Their only service is arbitration of supply and demand and to skim off a profit, harming everything else.

The big question for me is whether mediation is necessary in the first place? In many instances, it is absolutely not necessary and only hinders the exchange, resulting in worse outcomes for both the supplier and demander. This is often represented in the way many artists eventually go solo and start selling their goods directly to their customers, at both a lower cost to demanders and better profits for suppliers.

Of course, this isn’t a path available to everyone and frequently relies on the fact that said artists are already renown and can therefore “afford” to do so. This could be construed as an argument for platforms, in that they provide a valuable service getting customers in front of sellers. And for many that’s precisely what they used to achieve, and as a service, it had value for people and the service providers were rightly paid for it. But something has changed over the last few years, and it is not to the benefit of suppliers or demanders.

Digital platforms have steadily eroded the value they provide to their customers (suppliers and demanders), extracting the last drops of any value and diverting them to their balance sheets. This has been done by their accumulation of power over the arbitration process, whereby they control both the supplier’s price and costs, and the demanders they promote to and the eventual cost to the demanders. This has been done by rigging the game to a point where they are the only winners. The tool to achieve this is two-fold; Adtech and a Plantation Economy.

I’ve discussed today’s adtech industry already, and I will no doubt expand upon that in the future. TLDR; it should all be burnt to the ground and rebuilt to be fairer, private, voluntary, and more equitable for its participants. (See Reading section: Facebook to stop targeting ads at UK woman after legal fight)

The plantation economy is an economy built on scale and scalability. Already that should sound familiar, thinking about the previous paragraphs. It is an economy built as a platform to drive production to an absolute extreme without totally breaking it (although it frequently does), to the detriment of those subjected to it. Sounding more familiar, it should be. And it is an economy that profits one organisation or person without any regard for the welfare of those that did the actual work to valorise the products or services. It is basically theft.

Social Media is a digital plantation where you work for little or no remuneration, for a system where there is generally one owner that has total power to do whatever, whenever, however he or she feels. One major difference between the old and new plantations is that you are ostensibly free to leave at any time, but because of the network effects of these platforms, exercising that right is neither possible nor practical. The trick then is for the owners to dupe you into staying on the platform, but more importantly, spending as much time as you can and for as much of your lifetime as you can for them to monetise your participation. Monetise is Silicon Valley doublespeak for wealth extraction and theft in this context.

This is why the Internet needs to be re-wilded and corporate social media needs to decay and whither way to make way for a better model where we all benefit.

Distributed multi-stakeholder and federated services are the start of this, but they too will be subject to forces that will pollute them and entice them away from what they should be. But it is a start, and the more of us that try to built something on good foundations, the more chance we have to accomplish and Internet for the good. It won’t be perfect, I’m not that naive, and it’ll still be inhabited by criminals and scammers, liars, thieves, etc. But it’ll be more like the real world and not some digital dystopia that it is fast becoming.

The one thing I know, is that humans generally follow the pattern of the Hemingway quote: slowly, then all at once. The cracks will appear and the online mobilisation will start slowly, then suddenly, without warning, the empires will be burnt to the ground.

I’m already seeing a massive wave of interest on the federated services networks in support of ditching US services, and “Big Tech” as a whole. Several governments have even voted to ban the use of them and will start shortly replacing those services with European alternatives.

And this is where Agency is important and why I am still undecided with my feelings about the digital agency movement and the so-called splinternet. They cross over and are contradictory in some places and totally rational in others.

To be continued…

Reading

A few things that caught my interest recently.

Careless People - NYT No. 1 Bestseller

Last week I mentioned a book that looked like it would be an instant bestseller, not because it is worth it (it might be, I haven’t finished reading it yet), but because its subject tried to have it shut down, thus invoking the Streisand Effect. Well, it is now top o’ the charts.

Facebook to stop targeting ads at UK woman after legal fight

In a first of its kind, a U.K. woman has won a legal fight with Meta preventing the latter from using targeted advertising. Meta, characteristically, was disingenuous and specious in its response, first by lying that it couldn’t achieve the request, which it can miraculously do now, and secondly trying to use a straw man argument suggesting that the sanction meant the company had to give aways its services for free. This is a lie and they know it. The ruling is specifically and only about targeted ads. Meta is still free to place non-targeted privacy respecting ads to O’Carroll. It’s just that they can’t rip off both sides with these types of ads, so they will try everything to avoid it.

We should all follow suit, and I am actively seeking how to go about this.

The USAID report I co-wrote is still offline, until now

That report is still offline, so I thought I’d make it available until I get a takedown notice. If you want it, it is here.

Think your democratic government won’t block the Internet? Think again.

“Italy is using its Piracy Shield law to go after Google, with a court ordering the Internet giant to immediately begin poisoning its public DNS servers. This is just the latest phase of a campaign that has also targeted Italian ISPs and other international firms like Cloudflare.”

Have a great week.

“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men” is what Robert Burns wrote in a poem entitled “To a Mouse, On Turning Her up in Her Nest with the Plough”, November 1785.

The quote has been paraphrased and used, attributed and mis-attributed thousands and thousands of times, but its meaning is essentially still the same:

No matter how well we’ve planned or pre-planned, there is always something that will disrupt that plan

And so it was for me over the last couple of weeks.

In a how-the-sausage-is-made moment, how I write this and other writings is not a simple process of sitting in front of a computer opening Ulysses (my preferred app for writing), bashing away on the keyboard for fifteen minutes or so. Not at all.

It starts with me spending horrendous hours scanning news, reading articles, papers, and books. Filling my mind with millions of seemingly inconsequential details, anecdotes, thoughts, feelings, the reading usually prescribes some kind of idea of a topic to write about. Then comes the hard work. I generally try to read around the subject, getting as much as I can in a limited amount of time, parallel to all the other reading that is going on. Because the world doesn’t stand still and there is always new stuff to read. Once I’ve compiled some material, I try to work it into some kind of coherent article that is more of an opinion piece than an academic discussion. This sometimes works well and sometimes, er, less so. An article idea can have been born weeks ago, but stayed in an embryonic state until I get the urge to write something. Which doesn’t come as often as that. The article is then written, edited, and eventually posted, with the actual writing process taking a couple of hours or so. Think 3 to 4 hours.

That was essentially what I’d hoped to have done last week, but my body had other plans. I seem to have picked up a god awful cold (flu?) and have been suffering for about a week now. And yes, if you’re reading this, or more accurately, if I’m writing this, it is because I am feeling much better, and I am the current vainqueur in this war against the virus that is trying to kill me. I say current, as it has not completely surrendered yet, but just like the Battle of Little Bighorn, Custer (the virus) is surrounded and will ultimately lose, and die.

In fact, while I think of it —and this is just brain dumping as I write— I watched the two finals at Indian Wells this Sunday and thoroughly enjoyed them both. But a stand-out moment for me was the winner’s address to the public in the Women’s final. Mirra Andreeva decided to thank herself, her belief, her determination, her doubts, her fears, etc. “I’d like to thank me” is what she said. I think she’s right. It is not born of arrogance. It is born of thanking all of those that go to make a Master’s Champion, which is a big team, and herself!

So, I’ll forgive myself, and acknowledge that I was ill, and I couldn’t function at all for three days, and the rest of time was a fog and time passing by. And that not writing to a schedule is fine, and I can take a break when needed.

This week is probably going to be scrappy as I haven’t had the opportunity to do what I usually do (see above).

If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that I’m not the biggest fan of online advertising, or more precisely, the current form of online advertising.

I am not the only one, and there are a number of people and organisations around the world working to reign in the abuses of the adtech world, that has become so toxic that people have died as direct consequences of their reckless business practices.

I’ve discussed what the problem is. TLDR; wonky moral compasses and incentives that are aligned to put people in danger to make a quick profit.

I’ve even discussed how. TLDR; mass surveillance technologies that track absolutely everything you do online. And I mean EVERYTHING. Hoarding of information that is both consensual and non-consensual to produce questionably reliant “profiles” and even more questionably predict behaviours.

I’ve discussed how we can go about doing something to prevent, setback, or otherwise disrupt the flow of this information. TLDR; install ad-blockers and use them liberally. File GDPR requests liberally, using the tools to largely automate that. And lobby for non-invasive and non-surveillance-tech-based advertising models that have been shown to perform about as well as the “profiled” ads do, but with little to no personal information leaked in exchange.

If you think I’m being over-dramatic, have a read of the third article in the reading list and then reach out to me. I’d be happy to discuss.

Reading

If you’re not familiar with the Streisand Effect, you’re going to love this. If you are, you can skip over this bit.

Sometime between 2002 and 2003, a California Coastal Records project was measuring the coastal erosion in a well healed area of the Californian coastline. Malibu was being photographed in detail to see how much the sea had encroached on the land and its data used to help identify properties that might need remedial action or evacuation to save the occupants from major loss or even loss of life.

Barbra Streisand, a resident in the area, objected to her house being identified in one of the publicly available photographs. So she set about correcting that, and I, unlike many, feel that she did this from a good place and not from the privileged arsehole perspective. In trying to rectify the breach of privacy, she instructed a lawyer to help her do something about this. Said lawyer proceeded to sue the photographer, a government contractor, for 50 million USD.

What that eventually did is rock the ears of many a newspaper and journalist, thus blowing the story into proportions beyond anyone’s control, ultimately bringing the private information to the masses in a spectacular own goal. More ordinary people knew the property than before the lawsuit, and thus the term was coined by a well-known online writer, Mike Masnic. You can read more here.

The top book on the reading list, is going through the same situation.

It’s like the tech dudes read a lot of stuff but don’t actually understand the message or learn from previous events, or in fact, history as a whole. And a case in point is the first link on the list today.

Meta stops ex-director from promoting critical memoir

I don’t know how many times we need to keep hearing Meta disgraceful record of playing fast and loose with human mental health before we conclude that it is a fundamentally immoral organisation akin to the tobacco companies of yesterday. If you work there, you should probably reconsider (if you can) your part in the machine and perhaps find a way out.

Their actions on this book will propel it to a bestseller in no time. Stupid, and immoral, are Meta.

Meta mocked for raising “Bob Dylan defense” of torrenting in AI copyright fight

In a follow-up to the article I wrote where it was shown that Meta wilfully torrented nearly 82 TB of data, including previously known pirated material, they have now pulled out a stupid defence ploy. OpenAI is just as bad, lobbying for free access to everything to train its mediocre models. That might backfire on them in the not too distant future.

Data Broker Brags About Having Highly Detailed Personal Information on Nearly All Internet Users

I’ve been on a roll criticising adtech lately and for good reason. I am not convinced that many have even an inkling of the amount and depth of data that is being collected and weaponised against us. We’ve built the Stasi’s wet dream, and we have absolutely no idea where it is going to lead us. TLDR; somewhere you would rather not be.

It’s time for the European Union to rethink personal social networking

I’m torn, really torn about what is happening on the Internet lately. On the one hand I see the need for a certain amount of sovereignty, on the other hand, I absolutely detest and react negatively to nationalistic tendencies. Nationalism —not to be confused with pride of one’s nation— is a destructive force, because it relies on deliberate strategies to denigrate others to appear better. It doesn’t work with me and I seem to have a very sensitive sensor and spot it a mile off. This discussion gives me a lot to think about.

I’ve a busy week, catching up on time lost and to make the days go even faster, I’m recording two podcasts this weeK. The first is with my friend Jean-François Nantel on the Innovation, Agilité & Excellence podcast, and the second with another friend, Michele Marius on the ICT Pulse Podcast.

I’ll let you know when they’re out.

Have a fantastic week.

I really did fall out of the habit of writing these things! I realised that I messed up the dates of the last post I made, suggesting that it was the previous week rather than the week it really was. Oops. I’ve corrected it now.

I guess it is a bit of a symptom of what I was discussing in that writing. How I felt a little tired and overwhelmed by events around the world. Sadly, things haven’t slowed down and, if anything, have become even more urgent and critical.

I order not to make this a weekly moan, I will endeavour to write a few positive things too, but I don’t think it is appropriate to ignore and shy away from the very real issues in the digital world.

That’s pretty much the structure that I wanted to explore today…

I mentioned Caribbean Digital Compass, a joint adventure I have embarked upon with Michele Marius from ICT Pulse. We soft launched a couple of articles over the last few days.

I’d be grateful if you’d have a read, share and subscribe to the newsletter. It will become a paid newsletter at some point, but for the moment it is going to stay free to read until we get the momentum going, so take advantage now of the free access and enjoy.

It’s more focused on businesses in the region that need reliable, factual and helpful analysis of the digital world, rather than these longer opinion pieces. We’re trying to keep them at about 800 to a 1000 words or so.

The first two articles cover Generative AI and the Auditing, and an analysis of 5G.

More to come!

https://caribbeandigitalcompass.com/

Geopolitics and the Internet

When Grateful Dead musician, John Perry Barlow, wrote what has become a universally recognised treatise for the Internet (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace), he rather foolishly didn’t factor in that governments would eventually impose themselves upon the governance of a tool that became the plumbing for much of what we do in our lives today. The Global Digital Compact and the discussions leading up to that have shown a remarkable difference in attitude and attention to the Internet since his writing. Governments were largely hands-off until recently, now the strategic importance of the Internet has been laid bare in many ways.

The basic premise of the text was to say to the governments of the world, stay out of Internet business, this is the digital world, and it has nothing to do with the physical world. That turned out to be not only false, but highly immature, given the fact that more and more of physical life is being integrated with digital life, from online communications to filing government taxes and any number of private and public services.

This is such an issue, that we even have whole NGOs dedicated to bringing the Internet have-nots online and closing the “digital divide”. Locally, I see more and more businesses digitalising operations and providing public-facing interfaces mediated through digital tools and less and less through human interaction. To hell with those that don’t have smartphones seems to become the norm. Those, being the handicapped, the poor and many others that can’t or won’t have digital tools.

Which brings me to where we are today. At a crossroads is how I’d put it. A crossroads that could lead us to a better online existence, but more likely a crossroads that will lead us to a more fractured and divided Internet.

I’m particularly concerned about the currant administration in the United States of America that has spared no time dismantling important institutions, that, despite their expense, provide real value for money when you look at the results in their whole. Institutions like USAID that I have previously mentioned and worked for in the past, to things that should set off alarm bells around the world. This administration recently called on the U.S. Cyber Command to stand down, signalling to the world that they are now a soft target. Whether or not that is objectively true, the signal is significant. Coupled with its stance on reneging on aid for foreign countries, leaving a vacuum in the Caribbean that will almost certainly be filled by actors that might be less favourable to the region now that they have no competition or pushback, one has to consider whether the USA is now a rogue state or not. Not the kind of question I had on my bingo card for 2025!

But here’s the real issue when I think about the Internet. Many of the organisations that are responsible for the inner workings are located in the US. I’m seriously asking myself the question about their independence being maintained or how they might be affected going forward, if the current administration continues down this path of destruction. If I were part of the leadership, I’d be keeping a very close eye on what’s happening and starting to think about mitigation strategies to protect the Internet as we know it.

Again, I’m not trying to be melodramatic, simply facing up to what could be a very real possibility of a whole scale attack on the very inner institution of the Internet and what the repercussions could be.

Sorry. It was all doom and gloom in the end. 😵‍💫

I promise to find something positive to write next time.

Reading

A couple of articles that caught my attention this week.

Analysts Warn of AI Cooling with Microsoft Cancellation of AI Datacenter Leases

This may or may not be a turning point in the hype surrounding generative AI. Expenditure on datacenters, model training and deploying half-baked apps to users is starting to add up, with little return seen on that investment. The fact that every single prompt costs Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and any number of companies in this business should be a worry.

You’re getting it free or at less-than-cost because it is being subsidised.

That won’t last forever.

Inside the Taliban’s surveillance network monitoring millions

Is this what we can expect from our own democratic governments?

I think it is worth asking that question.

If I’m honest, I’m not completely resolved on where I stand on surveillance and legitimate access to private communications. Total secrecy for individuals or total openness for the police seem to me to be two extremes that I am not comfortable with.

I’m still working this out.

The impact on the African continent of Meta scrapping its fact-checking program

The collapse of fact-checking by Meta and other online platforms has real-world consequences.

People will die as a direct result of this handwashing. It is time for something to be done.

I’m sure it’ll be fine in the end. Have a lovely week.

One week turned into two. Taking a short break is a good thing.

But, if I’m honest, I’m rather drained about the state of tech at the moment. It’s one bad story followed by another. From the obsequiousness, the knee-bending, and the sycophantic brown-nosing on display, the tech oligarchs have shown us in no uncertain terms that they are more about themselves than they are about their customers. It won’t last. It never does. That’s the story of the world. But the question is about what damage is being caused, and how long will it take to repair it?

The potential consequences are extremely dangerous, and I don’t feel as though this is hyperbole or over-egging what is at stake. I give you permission to laugh at me to my face if I’m wrong. I’d rather be laughed at than be even half correct.

We have never before been in a situation where almost every aspect of our daily lives is a simple SQL query away from abuse. Abuse from our governments that have gone rogue. Abuse from other governments that want to influence the enemy’s population, and on a more pedestrian note, abuse from unscrupulous companies hellbent on selling you something whether you need it or not, giving zero fucks about the state of the planet.

This is not a Disney good vs evil story. There are real consequences, real lives, and real people being hurt.

The real spyware

I’ve never been a fan of Facebook, and I’ve never held an account in any meaningful way. Quite the opposite. I created a family account a long time ago to see what the fuss was about, but this was many years into its domination of the public space of the Internet.

I was horrified by what greeted me.

No sooner had I created the account than there were a number of pre-created connections and associations that I would never have chosen had I had been given the choice.

The vibe was creepy from the outset, in only what I could describe at the time as a sociopath’s wet dream, the origins of the application were laid bare for me to see. Perhaps you don’t know or remember the original purpose for Facebook (the hint is in the name). It was an application designed to creepily and surreptitiously “rate” how “hot” college girls (female university students) were.

I felt I was being spied on from all directions at all times. From people I only fleetingly knew, or had passed in the Boulangerie, to the people who obsessively wanted to know what was going on in my life and the lives of others.

I felt nauseous and deeply uncomfortable about what the Internet of the masses was being turned into, even then. I hated it, and I shut it down as soon as I could, deeply regretting the fact that I had created the account in the first place.

I’ve subsequently exercised my rights as a European citizen to have all data about me removed, but I doubt that Meta has fully complied. With them refusing to comply with numerous laws globally, why would my tiny profile be any different?

Ads: Meta wants to be ‘less illegal’ - but much more annoying…

Unbeknownst to many, too, is that Meta has been exposed creating fake and shadow profiles, essentially giving itself the same functionality for targeted advertising, without the explicit consent of the users concerned.

And to anyone who hasn’t understood how the Internet actually functions, it boils down to one thing. Advertising. Or to be specific, the highly targeted digital advertising.

I’ve written before about how this is all smoke and mirrors and how the incentives are only aligned to the companies doing this, namely Google and Meta. There are thousands of other advertisers, but between those two they own the vast majority of the advertising spend on the planet, well into the 90s in terms of percentage points.

To combat this, we all need to earnestly expose these companies and change the narrative on ad companies like Goole and Meta. And no, they’re not tech companies, they’re ad agencies, and thieving ad agencies at that. They have been shown to falsely inflate prices through their biding systems that control both the supply and the demand, thus making businesses pay more for nothing extra.

Tech is a means to an end, and their actions clearly show this. The tools are a by-product of them getting their creepy stats about your last urine sample, or what you last looked at on a random website. That means we need to publicly call them out for the creeps they are and constantly until they behave differently. Do you know the origins of Chrome, the browser of choice for most? Let’s just say it wasn’t to provide you with the best browsing experience. That’s not fair. It was to provide the best browsing experience, to onboard the world so that the tool could be used to spy on you even more closely than you had been up to then and once captured, you would not be able to leave.

Users using other browsers frustrated Google because they could get to constantly spy on you whilst you went about your day on the Internet. So Chrome was born to centralise web usage on a platform designed from the ground up to collect data about your online habits, without them specifically or materially disclosing such. In fact, they specifically lied about that, too. Until they were caught.

How deep will this go?

Source: https://www.imperva.com/learn/application-security/osi-model/

Much like the OSI network model, to get more data about the packets being flung around networks, you need to go deeper and deeper into the stack. Which is precisely why Android exists. And the likes of Apple, who previously provided tools for computing with a good computing experience, have fundamentally changed and are now providing tools for advertising, that also happen to provide a good computing experience that is slowly being eroded.

Which leads me onto recent news about Meta’s other big projects that fly largely under the radar in the public arena.

Meta is BIG on Infrastructure. It has just announced that it will build a globe-spanning undersea cable to transport data between five continents. And this is just part of a decade-long plan to control and surveil you at every level of the OSI stack. The following animated GIF, gives you an idea of their expansion in global infrastructure control.

Source: https://fairinternetreport.com/research/facebook-meta-submarine-cable-ownership#map-header

I can’t know what you think about this, but it makes me deeply uncomfortable that more and more of the Internet, the system the world relies on for much of life itself, is being centralised and controlled by an ever-decreasing group of companies that have shown time and time again their self-serving intentions without regard for the rest of us.

This is both undemocratic and unbelievably dangerous at the same time.

These developments in internet infrastructure are tempting governments around the world to succumb to authoritarian tendencies. And the ubiquitous nature of tech, finding itself ever deeper in our lives, has done nothing to curb the authoritarian ambitions of governments around the world. Quite the opposite. Even those governments that fight against what they call ‘repressive and authoritarian regimes’ have found the centralisation of control of internet data from the deepest levels of networking to the applications and operating systems web use all the time, too tempting to leave alone. They are and will continue to be abused indiscriminately, harming the world as a whole. With the help of Meta and Google, governments with ambitions to snoop on the most private aspects of the life of every individual under their jurisdiction. And sometimes beyond. Yes, U.K., I’m looking at you! (More on that in the future when things have settled a little).

From 1950 to 1990, the East German secret police, the Stasi, controlled the population of the country through mass surveillance and a large network of informants that were used and dumped when they were no longer useful. What has been constructed in the 21st century Internet is a vast set of tools with powers the Stasi could only dream about. A network that doesn’t need any human compliance for information to flow back to central command. Your telephone, your television, your car, your fridge, everything you do is known to the companies that have just shown that they are not only willing to work with authoritarians, but will actively support and develop new tools for them to operate their surveillance.

This is not the Internet I want.

What I’ve tried to do here, perhaps a little clumsily, is make the link between tech and democracy, outlining some of the dots that make up the web of deceit and manipulation exercised now.

It also provides a hint about what you can do to disrupt this and the way only we as a mass can. Individually, our actions are worthless. Collectively, however, it’s an entirely different story. You should do two things. Participate in limiting your exposure to online advertising, blocking ads, ‘local-hosting’ (127.0.0.1) or otherwise limiting the flow of data from your devices to these companies. Secondly, you should make it known that you are not in agreement and that there are already many non-invasive solutions for businesses to advertise, for example, Contextual Advertising, which is based on content analysis and not privacy-invading attributes.

Remember, there is only ONE metric that is of value to you as a business, and that is if your ads provide more sales. Period. If you need to know my age, my sex, the colour of my skin, my income, where I live, and literally hundreds of thousands of other data points, you don’t deserve my business, and you have a serious problem morally.

And yes, as I’ve discussed before, distributed and decentralised systems should play a part too. And no, they are not the only solution.

There. That feels better. Have a great week.