I wrote about “free” in the previous post. Now free has more meanings, it can also mean free of charge, “gratis”. Maybe that’s what keeping the internet free means? Keeping it free of charge. For sure, a lot of successful internet companies have built their fortune on free services. And a lot of us users are used to getting a lot  for free: news, search, e-mail… you name it. Sure, we pay a lot to get online in terms of hardware and subscription fees, but once we’re there, we really like to get what we can for free. In most cases we can get almost everything for free, just as long as we are prepared to spend some time looking. Don’t get me wrong, free of charge is great. I’d much rather pay zero than plenty for the same thing. But it’s not real freedom. It’s not worth dying for. Somewhere along the line, it seems these two meanings of the word free got mixed up. The internet should be free, but it should be free as in freedom, that it is free of charge is not nearly as important. Actually, there is an old joke from Silicon Valley that explains this a lot better, we should remind ourselves of it: “Free as in Speech, or Free as in Beer?”

Free. Such a beautiful word. We all want freedom. Some people risk their lives for it, even die for it. Who can be against free? The word free is also used about the internet a lot. “Information wants to be free” was the maxim for the early days of the world wide web, back in the Nineties. These days we are told it’s important to keep the internet free. But what does that really mean? “Keep the internet free”. Some will tell you it means keeping it unregulated, that policy-makers and state institutions should not get involved with what happens in the fiber cables and mobile networks. That the government should stay out. Not such a bad idea, is it? I mean, we don’t want the government to monitor us – online or offline – at least not more than necessary. We don’t want it to read our e-mails or know who we meet. But is that really freedom? In all other parts of society, we like to think that the law and public institutions – at least in democratic countries – are there to protect the individual, sometimes against the government. To protect our rights. The justice systems guarantees a right to fair trial, for example. The right to an attorney. That’s regulation, government intervention, but its purpose is our freedom. Without it we would be less free, not more. The absence of government is not freedom, it’s anarchy. We would not accept that anywhere else, why should that be the norm online? Would it not be better to use the lessons learned from history to develop laws and institutions that function online? Not the exact same laws and institutions (circumstances are different), but with the same purpose: to protect the individuals’ rights. If freedom equals the absence of rule of law and democracy, I don’t think it means the same anymore.

Welcome,
dear Netopia-reader! The Internet has been around since the Seventies, the World Wide Web since the early Nineties. We all use it every day, in fact it is almost impossible to get by without (try for a day, it’s a lot more difficult than you may think!). We carry phones in our pockets that can access the Internet in an instant. It’s all around us, it touches everything we do: work-life, money, friends, news, entertainment, housing, shopping, travel, banking, education, insurance, government institutions… even our love-life. And yet, we almost always talk about it in the future tense. How many times have you heard that the internet will change our lives? But it’s here. And it’s been here for quite some time now. And it will keep evolving, but we can learn a lot from what it already is. And we built it. Our tax money provided the basic research, many of the inventors worked in public institutions, our elected policy-makers passed the laws that made it happen. Sure, it’s complex and maybe no-one completely understands it, but it is our creation. It is about time we talk about what we want from it and how that can happen. We are not slaves to technological development or abstract markets, we are humans with free will and the responsibility and power to build our society the way we think it should be. Netopia’s mission is to be part of that conversation – not the “if”, but the “what” and the “how”. You are welcome to join!