“Digital Freedom”

I just had a flashback to a day gone bye. It was back around 1985 or so, the Internet was barely a thought and people who wanted to put information online had to do things their own way. In fact the term online was not even used at this point as nothing had yet been defined. Computers had devices called modems that allowed them to transfer data to just one other computer across phone lines at not very fast speeds, but we were in control of what we shared, who we shared it with, and even when we shared it. You see the only way someone could access data on your computer was if you setup your computer to answer a call from their computer, and then you told your computer which files it could share.

There were no controls over what was put online, there were not regulations and anybody with the knowledge could post any documents, photos, or images that they wanted. It wasn’t long before large corporations saw a profit in online content and a few small startups began to market the Internet. The two that I can remember the most were CompuServe and America Online (AOL). CompuServe was one of the first Internet companies founded in 1969 as a time-sharing service for mainframe computer access, and later spun off a text based system with real-time chat, e-mail, and later invented digital graphics in 1987. You might think of them as Facebook without images and videos.

In the early 1990 America Online (AOL) took the market by storm, with what would probably be considered illegal practices by today’s standards. The packaged a free 30-day trial disk with every new computer sold. As they took over a majority of the market CompuServe began to suffer and eventually sold to WorldCom, which was eventually sold to AOL AOL discontinued their Internet Service Provider (ISP) service in 2017, as the market shifted from dial-up internet to people having constant connections in the home. AOL and CompuServe both still exist today on a much lesser market share than they had at the start. Even in these early days of the Internet individuals started to lose freedom online. Like it or not the big ISPs had control over what you could put online, how it was formatted and even who could read it.

As we move forward to today you can all begin to see that there are only a couple of main entry points to the Internet, just like the ISPs of old. You can search for content on one of few search engines listed in order of popularity: Google (90%), Microsoft Bing (5%), Yahoo! (1.5%) DuckDuckGo (<1%) and Baidu (<1%) . You can communicate with friends and family through social media platforms the top five being nearly tied in the total number of users, and likely they are all the same users, as they each have different purposes: Facebook, YouTube, WhatsAoo, Instagram, and TikTok. Google is the parent company of two of them and Meta is the parent company of two others, while TikTok stands alone. What this u;timately means is that our presence on the once free Internet is controlled by three main companies (Google, Meta, and Microsoft).

The really crazy part is that in the last few months our government has become involved in controlling some important aspects of freedom in computing when it has begun to place export restrictions on certain technologies. Not that we didn’t have this in place already for matters of national security when it comes to encryption technologies, but in the last few weeks they have halted export of services from top AI companies. When Anthropic was approached and told they were not allowed to export their latest AI models and that this ban included allowing use by foreign nationals Anthropic was left with no choice but to pull the model offline completely.

I find it sad to say, but I think we have reached a point in our country and the world where the freedoms we once had online are no longer there, when our content is controlled by a few companies and even those companies are controlled by our government, it is just a matter of time before our freedom of speech, at least on social media, will no longer exist and it’s coming faster than you think. They already flag articles as misinformation and many of those turn out to be true. I would not be surprised to see this article flagged when it goes online next week. You see these companies only have their own interests in mind and don’t really care about you, your freedoms, or you happiness, they only care about your information, which to them is equal to money. Until next week stay safe and learn something new.

Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to shamilton@techshepherd.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.