Ben Tarnoff was recently featured on the Reimagining the Internet Podcast, a podcast I would recommend in general for those who enjoy exploring the possibilities of how our experience on the web *could* be, in stark contrast to how it is. I decided that, being interested in a non-capitalist hellscape vision of the web, that his book would likely be worth reading. So I picked it up.

In general, the book is broken up into three major sections.

In his recounting of the history of the internet, Tarnoff makes sure not to idealize its publicly funded origins, clearly outlining its initial military origins and design intent. ARPANET was conceived in order to increase the mobility of American imperalism and hegemony, a task which took several decades to materialize into the advanced systems we see today. Crucially, this mobility would arise from the internetworking (read: internet) of computers, so that information could be sent and received across the globe to give the military up to date intelligence, and perform computer based calculations that would be impractical to conduct in the field. Due to this premise, millions upon millions of dollars were funneled into the project in order to help extended and fortify American interests against it's main enemy at the time, the Soviet Union. Private institutions using private cash would not have been able to spend capital so freely on an experiment that required so many expensive iterations, and decades of work to come together. It was not created with the intent to serve the profit motive, but to provide a infrastructure to build services off of. I found it intriguing how ARPANET explicitly banned commercial traffic from using its internet backbone, leaving education and research its primary uses in the early days.

In order to get these networks to talk together, a means to ensure interoperability was created. TCP/IP is the common language that *is* the internet, which in itself can be described as a stack of different interlinked protocol and protocol suites. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), UDP/IP (User Datagram Protocol/Internet Protocol), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol), among others, are the backbone of how we are able to experience the place that is the Internet. By design, these standards must be open in order to ensure broad compatibility, which prevents the monopolization that more proprietary standards could invite. Could you imagine a web where internet providers could fundamentally restrict and deny access to portions of the web in a sort of forced inoperability? Open and common standards ensure the flow of information remains operational at the broadest possible level.

The discussion then proceeds to possible solutions, moving "up the stack" from the pipes of the internet to the application layer. Past examples of legislation brought up include a "public lane" mandated for ISPs, sort of a PBS for the internet, which would ensure minority groups and lower income areas are given affordable access to the internet. While this has not manifested in the land of monopoly, I was fascinated that there do exist publicly owned internet service providers, that allow residents to get fiber speeds at very low prices.

One example given is, The Gig, a local community funded and publicly owned electric company that decided to go into the ISP market. Other examples exist, including one in Detroit which in addition to providing free internet through a mesh network, providing a local intranet for the neighborhoods. Small, local communities discussing small local issues through the power of networking can be a powerful tool in organizing and the dissemination of critical information. In regards to local intranets, I thought one of the more novel ideas was to use librarians, the original collectors and contextualizers of information to the public, and integrate them into thee internet and more localized intranets as curators. This also included a discussion of what it means to be a common carrier, the history of the term, and the implications of the internet no longer falling under that classification. Common carriers must treat all traffic the same, the telephone company cannot make your call slower or faster because of who you are, but due to information traffic being classified differently, Comcast could implement "fast lanes", for preferred traffic, or put competitors in slower lanes. It would be absurd to translate this logic to other utilities and essential services, though we do clearly see evidence of this in the underdevelopment of rural and urban communities in the United States, where it is not profitable to maintain the infrastructure for these utilities. The internet has become a utility which has become as vital as electricity, sewer and water. A neighborhood should not have less access to information because of it its geographical location, demographics, or median income. Our internet service providers have squandered untold millions given to them by our government in the name of proliferating broadband speed internet to underrepresented and minority communities, and it has by all metrics, failed. In effect, this contributes to the compartmentalization and walled gardens that corporations are continually building. If they can keep you within defined boundaries, it is easier to track you and sell your data. The declassification of the internet infrastructure as a common carrier is just one in a long line of developments resulting from the privatization of the internet, all serving the profit motive and the marketplace.

Tarnoff presents possible solutions to the monopolization of the pipes of the internet as having more easily defined options and objectives, with solutions becoming hazier as you work your way up the stack. Tarnoff used examples of federated communities such as Mastodon as an example of how things may be done differently, though I personally haven't used these services much. It would require disruption of currently existing social media companies by legislation or other means to create enough flow out of the platform to popularize other services.

I find the use of the term "Online Mall" to describe out current relationship with our online spaces to be an accurate on. Tarnoff begins the chapter of that name with a recollection of a prediction,

"Back in 1993, the activist Jeffrey Chester had warned that the information superhighway would become “a virtual electronic shopping mall” if corporate interests had their way."

Facebook, Instagram, and so on are are akin to malls. They are enclosed spaces that throw products at us, and allow us to mingle and socially interact between our purchases. The ultimate goal in the building of this space however, remains the profit motive, and it is fundamentally designed to separate you from your money, and in an unique invention by so called online malls, your data. Data is the primary commodity, with physical goods often being the secondary, least lucrative product. This is seen by Amazon redefining itself as a data company, as opposed to just being an online marketplace for consumer goods. Tarnoff summarizes, "the online mall is a middleman, a sovereign, and a maker of network effects." It connects user to services, and advertisers to user data (a middleman), it arbitrates what can and cannot be posted on its platform (despite trying to appear as a neutral entity), and builds in mechanics which predatorily exploit user psychology to feed positive feedback loops, the more a user interacts, the more feedback they get, and the more data is collected from them.

What is important in all of this, is that the same open source and free protocols that have been hijacked by the market and the profit motive, would allow for the creation of alternatives. The same interoperability that Meta, Alphabet, and so on need for their data collection regimes to function, contains within it the means by which they can be weakened. As always, analysis must be thought of in terms of contradictions, there exists a contradiction between the open protocols and the closed spaces that are being forced upon us. We saw evidence of these contradictions as the public infrastructure setup by NSFNET and ARPANET was given over to commercial industries, the mode of production was not yet matched with the social relations imposed by the corporations, and thus we saw the resulting implosion when the dot com bubble burst. Capitalism transforms, and the infrastructure of the internet as been changed to be more accepting of the profit motive and be in sync with the social relations it reproduces, that of exploited and exploiter. The internet is a political entity and exhibits its own political economy, the fundamental contradictions of capitalism are echoed, the profit motive relies on the exploitation of the very users which keeps it afloat.

As it relates to my own first post on this blog, my "Hello World", the epilogue of the book manages to put into words my thoughts far more concisely than I did, and even manages to paint it with a more optimistic brush. It is true, many have decried the death of the internet since it's inception, the internet, as is everything in our world, is always in flux. Our nostalgia gives us a gift, our idealized past is a mirror by which we may hold up to the present, and by its negative contrast we imagine a reality in which the internet is constructed primarily for the people. We must imagine a better future by analyzing our past.

You can buy "Internet for the People" directly from it's publisher, Verso Books - or perhaps check your local library.