0s to the mid-1980s developing the core technologies of the internet. Through entities such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the Defense Communications Agency, defence investments played major roles in the creation of the digital infrastructure that we use to browse the web. Congress and the White House – yes, including congressman and later vice president Al Gore – passed legislation and set policies to support the development of the commercial internet and ecommerce. And of course many icons of the web’s history are American: Yahoo, AOL, Google and others.
But the web’s origins are distinctly European, and even the American contributions were infused with international collaboration. Berners-Lee, an Englishman, created some of the web’s key technologies while working as a software consultant alongside Cailliau, a Belgian engineer, at a Swiss lab. The American protagonists of internet development at ARPA, Cerf and Kahn, worked closely with European researchers and built on the concepts of French computer scientist Louis Pouzin. And when Gore promoted the “information superhighway”, he did so within the context of an explicitly globalist vision, such as in a famous 1994 speech at the International Telecommunications Union.
Myth No 3: Government power is obsolete on the internet The web came of age in an era of globalisation, so people writing about it picked up some of the same dizzying enthusiasm about what the future might hold. The best example is John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, which he wrote in Davos, Switzerland, in 1996. Barlow, a libertarian rancher from Wyoming and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, included some beautiful lines in his manifesto: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind … You have no sovereignty where we gather … Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.”
Experience suggests that Barlow’s enthusiasm got the better of him. Over the past three decades, governments at all levels – local, state, national and international – have claimed and exercised jurisdiction over behaviour online. Examples include filtering and censorship regimes such as China’s Great Firewall, court rulings that forced Yahoo to remove Nazi memorabilia from its online auction service in France and international treaties to protect intellectual property – implemented in the United States via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – to say nothing of vast systems of espionage like those exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Barlow’s essay also embodied some deeper flaws in “cyberlibertarian” arguments, which obscure the formative role of government in the creation and maintenance of network technologies. In his scolding of “Governments of the Industrial World”, Barlow wrote, “You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces.” In doing so, he ignored the ingenuity and investment of the government employees who created the internet and the web.
Myth No 4: The gatekeepers are dead; everything is disrupted! Another example of breathless futurism is Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book The World is Flat. Friedman and others saw the web and the internet as a “sudden revolution in connectivity” that “constituted a major flattening force” and would provide equal opportunity for all competitors. The obvious factual error in the book’s title should have alerted readers that Friedman’s other metaphors – such as the “level playing field” – might also be flawed.
The notion that the web hurt “gatekeepers” is not entirely wrong. Plenty of musicians, including Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, got record deals after they went viral on YouTube. A similar phenomenon has reshaped academia, where researchers can post their work on their own websites, bypassing the slow and costly apparatus of academic publishing.
But in music, a