Nathan Diebenow
Raw Story Exclusive
Author: If Americans want a truly free network, ‘we’ve got to build it from scratch’
Secrets outlet WikiLeaks’ continuing struggle to remain online in the face of corporate and government censorship is a striking example of something few truly realize: that the Internet is not and never has been democratically controlled, a media studies professor commented to Raw Story.
“[T]he stuff that goes on on the Internet does not go on because the authorties can’t stop it,” Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age and Life, Inc.: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How to Take it Back“, said. “It goes on because the authorities are choosing what to stop and what not to stop.”
Rushkoff told Raw Story that the authorities have the ability to quash cyber dissent due to the Internet’s original design, as a top-down, authoritarian device with a centralized indexing system.
Essentially, all one needs to halt a rogue site is to delete its address from the domain name system registry.
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