Who Controls the Internet?

China. And France, and Australia, and the United State, etc… That’s the idea behind this book by Jack Goldstein and Columbia Law Prof. Tim Wu. I don’t normally make book pitches on this site (actually, I don’t ever make book pitches on this site), but I think this book will go a long way towards dispelling the myths of the internet spun by Tom Friedman and Nicholas Kristoff (don’t take that as an insult against Kristoff, he’s still amazing. Friedman? Eh.) Goldstein and Wu explain that the web is increasingly controlled by national governments, regulated by police forces, and censored by dictatorships and anti-defamation laws. But what’s so interesting is that all this is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, almost no one would want an internet with no government regulation.

The web is really no different from earlier communication breakthroughs: the telgraph, the telephone, radio, and TV. All these international forms of communication respect national law, and continue to prosper in spite of, or more likely because of, these regulations. The internet 10 years from now will probably be very different from the internet of 10 years ago, but that’s progress. Read the book, and support a really cool professor.