NC | The goal of the political leadership in the US, the EU, the UK, and other ostensibly liberal democracies is simple: to gain much greater, more granular control over the information being shared on the internet. As Matt Taibbi told Russell Brand in an interview last year, both the EUçs Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Biden Administration’s proposed RESTRICT Act (which Yves dissected in April, 2023) are essentially a “wish list that has been passed around” by the transatlantic elite “for some time,” including at a 2021 gathering at the Aspen Institute.
The same goes for the UK’s Online Safety Bill, which Kier Starmer would like nothing better than to beef up. Likewise, Canada has introduced sweeping new internet regulation through its Online News Act, which includes, among other things, a link tax, and Online Streaming Act. So, too, has Australia through a censorship bill that is strikingly similar to the EU’s DSA and even includes a punitive fine of up to 2% of global profits for social media companies that do not comply.
It’s not hard to see why. With economic conditions deteriorating rapidly across the West, after decades of rampant financialisation, kakistocracy, and corporatisation, to the extent that even the United Nations is now one giant private-public partnership, the social contract is, to all intents and purposes, worthless. Even the WEF admits that corporations, its main constituency, have turbocharged inequality. Populism is on the rise just about everywhere and angry and fragmented protest movements have been growing since at least 2019.
Thanks largely to the countervailing information still available on the internet, governments are rapidly losing control of the narrative on key issues, including the war in Ukraine and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Their stock response has been to clamp down on the ability of citizens to use the internet to generate, consume and share important news, dissenting views and uncomfortable truths.
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