The End Game? Governments and Social Media Networks — Together — Will Govern The World?

You name it, and the Internet is centre stage in the debate around recreating our societies: the rights of privacy against the rights of society to protect itself; the rights of countries to define legal frameworks and control their citizens; the rights of law to define criminal activity; and the rights of individuals to have free speech. Basically, it’s old power structures versus new ones, and the next few years will see a massive struggle between the two.

Internet boot-up

I have grown up with the Internet. For me, it has evolved from screaming modems with AOL/Compuserve dial-up connections to finally take its place in rebuilding our society in a digital way. We have thus had a few decades of it finding its way and for us to fix its fundamental technical flaws. So from RFC (Request For Comment) documents, it is now all grown-up. In computer terms, we could define the time up to now as the boot-up phase. Now that it has booted up, we enter the real phase: the governance and control phase, and where the Internet moves from being a technical infrastructure for routing data packets to actually challenging every existing authority for true power. It has mainly defeated the power print and advertising industries and is now gunning for the legal industry and our…