Politicians are terrified - that's why they're so keen on regulating the web

Politicians are terrified. Really they are and it explain a great deal about today's politics. And also why those politicians are so keen to regulate content online:

We’ve all been watching this develop for years now: the internet is being slow-choked, not by rapacious ISPs forcing users to pay for “fast lanes,” but by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic who want to have a bigger role in what we’re allowed to do and say online.

"You're really publishers," say those politicians to platforms filled with user generated content. This is, until heavy hints changed things, a complete fiction. A publisher controls - from start to finish - the content of the publication, nothing arrives in front of the reader's eyes or the listener's ears without having been subject to editorial control. So when I post a Tweet, I'm the publisher not Twitter.

And this is why politicians are so scared. They thought they knew where they were with the media - it was limited, they knew the editors and journalists, saw them most days, took them out for dinner, even shagged them. Now it's not like that- there are literally millions of micro-publishers all with the potential power to take one of those politicians down. The game has changed, power has shifted and the politicians want it shifting back.

As some folk point out, some of the big tech oligarchs - Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook - are keen to work with politicians in a ghastly Faustian pact to allow regulatory control but not enough to really damage the tech businesses, just enough to make it really hard for new competitors to challenge the market position of Facebook and Apple. But then, especially in the USA (Europe essentially has no tech industry worth mentioning unless you like legacy corporate IT architecture), these tech moguls are political players - their money, their platforms, their influence will be a big part in who challenges Trump.

Plenty of justifications are rolled out for regulation - trolls, children, fake news, anonymity, racism, misogyny and homophobia. But these things, for all their shock factor, are convenient handholds for the politicians to latch onto in justifying regulation intended to sustain the current political structures, to protect existing politicians, and to make it harder for challenger ideas to get purchase and exercise influence.

I don't think the bureaucrats, legacy media, and establishment politicians will win this - at least in the long run, but the push for regulation will damage the economy, will restrict free speech and will make it harder to do what the web has done best, speak truth to power. You all should resist.

.....