ter 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, academic publishing and elsewhere, these shifts have not generated the predicted revolutions. Major music labels eventually adjusted to web-based distribution and revenue models, as did the old giants of academic and popular publishing. Other ideas that promised to “disrupt” this or that have fallen flat, such as the massive open online course (MOOC) craze that led some pundits to predict “the end of college as we know it”.
The best example, of course, was the dot-com crash. Entrepreneurs and starry-eyed investors had fuelled the bubble, eager to believe that the web’s rise changed all the rules. But by 2000, everyone had learned the harsh reality: Sound business practices were not fundamentally disrupted by the “get big fast” ethos of web entrepreneurship. And despite predictions that the web portends a new economic era of commons-based peer production, old-fashioned industrial capitalism has proved quite resilient. Even companies that lead the “sharing economy”, such as Uber and Airbnb, have massive capital expenditures and valuations that rival those of industrial giants such as Ford and General Motors.
Myth No 5: A massive cyberattack is coming One constant in the web’s history has been the expectation that a major event will come along and change everything. Political figures often issue warnings about a “digital Pearl Harbor” or a “cyber Pearl Harbor”. In Elon University’s fascinating “Imagining the Internet” survey from 2004, two-thirds of web experts agreed with the statement that “At least one devastating attack will occur in the next 10 years on the networked information infrastructure or the country’s power grid”. But so far, we’ve seen nothing of the sort.
Even though a large-scale attack hasn’t materialised, experts continue to use the threat of one to try to shake the web out of some bad habits and inferior technologies. Neither the web nor the internet was designed with unshakeable commitments to security or privacy, and efforts to update them have, for the most part, failed. There have been plenty 