...and Then They Cast The Net

The internet’s expansion in the 1990s across the world was no accident. It was part of a policy pushed by the Clinton administration to privatise internet operations. Almost a year down—on August 15, 1995—internet access was officially launched by the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) in India. In the ’90s, globalisation and neoliberal policies were at their peak—the general ethos was to let the market participate in and determine public activities hitherto controlled by nation-states. No one knew then how this decision to allow the market to shape the internet would play out: there were both critics and proponents. After two decades of this American policy, it is clear that American companies have taken over the internet.

There was a touch of scripted inevitability to it: the internet was fundamentally shaped by America. By its companies, its laws. No other nation can claim that author’s role. The early internet was promoted and owned by scientists, academics, hobbyists. The birth of cyberspace soon allowed common people to explore knowledge that had been locked up behind physical barriers; the laws policing physical spaces did not apply. The communities who then owned the internet, promoted it and contributed to its development took the absence of government control for granted—indeed, almost mandated it. The ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ by John Perry Barlow was a warning to governments to stay away, to allow cyberspace to be developed into a civilisation of the mind, more humane and fair.

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The rise of dotcom companies, popping up in every sector that wanted to trade in cyberspace, set the internet on a completely different path though. Easy access to venture capital created that boom—India’s IT revolution was an auxiliary boom, a subwoofer. The discovery of the Y2K bug in 1998 required a lot of IT programmers who could resolve it and the Indian software industry was ready with the manpower. The Indian government created a Rs 700-crore corpus to tackle the Y2K bug and a National Task Force on IT and Software to promote the industry.

The web ecology was thus shaped by the market in ways that were not imagined before. Before long, new-age internet monopolies were born that relied on advertising revenue while offering free services. This new model required the tracking of consumers online—the little cues they left behind of their interests and behaviour helped advertisers target them with automated precision. Shorn of niceties, this was surveillance-based capitalism, and it was allowed to grow unimpeded with US geopolitical interests aligning with it post 9/11. The old liberal interest in having a sheath of privacy laws between governments and the people died after 9/11. The old national borders were anyway meaningless now: it was digital Pax Americana across the world.

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India reproduced that story flawlessly, like how we reproduce pharmaceutical formulations. Our surveillance capitalism set in as policy after 26/11. India’s push to create large databases of citizens post the Mumbai attacks was not only about direct surveillance; it was soon spinning off into the far more ambitious venture of building a data economy. The stories of Aadhaar and IndiaStack—both serving to aggregate and distribute data on a mass scale—blend surveillance usage by the state and use for profits by the private sector. The rise of surveillance capitalism with big tech platforms also enabled the datafication of employment, along with every other aspect of life; the endless manhours of contract labour dawned.

The rise of smartphones and cheaper data access has led to a feeding frenzy among internet firms for user data. India’s billion-plus population, going increasingly digital, is a gigantic herd of wildebeest migrating right into the maw of the machine. Foreign firms are of course at hand. Not only are they omnipresent, they even seek to be keepers of the game park. India resisted Facebook’s Free Basics campaign against Net Neutrality to safeguard its economic interests, but Free Basics has taken in at least 60 other nations in the form of Internet dot org.

The ongoing battle for the control of cyberspace by nation-states in lockstep with big tech giants is almost identical to the birth of colonial empires during the first industrial revolution. Digital colonialism, this phenomenon of private companies colonising cyberspace for profits, is being promoted and challenged all at once. The battle is both economic and geopolitical, with nation-states pushing for data localisation norms and banning competitors. The restrictions on Chinese apps in the US and India are just a start in this new race for monetising citizens’ data.

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With patronage from governments, big tech platforms have become simply too big to be controlled, often claiming immunity from intermediary liability for the actions of users on their platforms. From innocuous distractions, they have become instruments to influence elections and promote enmity between ethnic groups. These platforms are not ready to spend resources to sort out the problems caused by their algorithmic amplification of unverified news and hate speech. Powered by algorithms designed to maximise profit, these giant information structures have disrupted the normal flow of democratic life.

It is not easy to resist these new colonial structures of surveillance capitalism, with their near-monopolistic nature. A failed but important experiment that came as a protest against these platforms was when Twitter users started migrating to Mastodon in India, only to return to Twitter. This was sparked by Twitter’s arbitrary implementation of platform rules that were censoring minority voices in India, while promoting the majority. Fighting predatory big tech needs newer strategies; building alternate platforms is not enough.

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Firstly, they are everywhere, like ether. And yet they wall up their services into closed, galactic gardens. As omniscient gatekeepers, they do not allow users to move away from their ecosystems. Imagine trying to leave Google, for instance. You can’t: it’s like Hotel California. You simply live with the restrictions that force you to always agree to the changing terms and conditions that only make sense to them. Secondly, the standards and protocols that power the web are set at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is controlled by a vice-like grip by big tech. They have used these standards to become monopolies, making it harder for smaller firms to operate.

One way to take back the web is to force interoperability that would allow anyone using Mastodon to talk to someone on Twitter and vice versa. This helps hedge against centralisation of information. India wants to push changes for its own economic interests against US and Chinese big tech, but not all these changes are in the interest of an average user from other countries. These would push us towards a more balkanised internet, with restrictions on accessing apps from geopolitical adversaries.

The new Biden administration looks heavily composed of executives from big tech platforms; key policies over the next four years could shape the internet forever. It may start virtuously enough, with an immediate and important reversal of the Trump administration’s anti-Net Neutrality policies. While one can be optimistic about the digital rights of citizens, we are already at a point in this cycle where what you get online is determined by how much digital tax you can pay in the form of your personal data. In all of this, that early vision of the internet as a knowledge democracy remains in a limbo—a suspended Eden.