Who controls the internet? - Reprise

I received the book I ordered from Amazon - entitled "Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World" - it's an interesting read, if a little heavy on the apposite anecdote and consequently light on penetrating analysis. It is also - sotto voce - not all that well written - don't think it's in Pulitzer Prize territory. Some of it reads like snatches of conversation that have been recorded and then transcribed as spoken. Perhaps that is why I get the strong feeling - and, please note, I haven't finished it yet, so I may yet discover that I am doing the writers a disservice - that, while it rightly takes the more hippyish and utopian commentators on all-things-Net to task, it somehow manages to miss a significant point in the process of proving their hypothesis. Yes, there are powerful reasons to do with national and international politics, with local, national and international economies and with the reality of social interaction on the Web that mean that the idyll of a completely borderless Internet has been left far behind in the wake of developments over the past few years, for instance in geo-identification. But, Goldsmith and Wu seem to take this a little too far and appear hugely to underplay the real power of the Web to permit borders to be crossed in multifarious ways. It was probably inevitable that governments around the world would find ways to ensure that their territorial dominion could be extended to the Web (China's softening up of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others is just the most conspicuous and overt example of this - there are many more). But, while we should take every chance we can to decry the misuse and abuse of power or territoriality on the Web, we should also give due recognition to the capacity of the Web to permit far-reaching changes (literally and metaphorically) to our capacity for collaboration across borders, for a deepening and a broadening of the nature of social cooperation, and for giving everyone who wants or needs them the tools to become publishers in their own right. If I change my mind about the book by the time I have finished it, I will redress the balance in favour of the authors.

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© John Connell
The views expressed in this weblog are entirely my own and are not intended to reflect the views of any other individuals or organizations. All sources will be fully acknowledged.