The New American The Web began in freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of intellectual diversity, freedom of information, freedom of expression. In the decades since its creation, the Web has undergone a shift at the hands of Big Tech. The current iteration is increasingly less free. But that may soon be changing.
It is a fact beyond dispute that “Big Tech” is nearly — if not completely — synonymous with “liberal.” The evidence of the past few years has clearly demonstrated that liberals have used Big Tech as a tool to push the world closer and closer to their vision for it — a world where liberalism is the only view, all others having been demolished. Both the Internet and the Web have played pivotal roles in that push.
As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, there is a growing movement to steal the Web back from the tech giants who have hijacked it for their own purposes. To understand this, it is helpful to understand how the Web was hijacked to begin with.
While it is true that no one company or service has control of either the Internet or the Web, it is also true that a handful of Big Tech companies and services maintain a disproportionate control of the way people access them. Far from the origins of the Internet as a place where freedom of speech, freedom of intellectual diversity, freedom of information, and freedom of expression were the norm, the experience of the average user today is one of restriction where those freedoms are concerned. That shift is the result of most Web companies’ move to control the flow of as much data as possible.
That control does not take the form most people probably imagine when they think of control. While some of it — as has been the case with companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google — is about blocking access to certain information (or at least making it difficult to find) while promoting other information, the control we are discussing here is one of distilling user data down to its most powerful and then using that data against those users.
That imbalance of power — heavily weighted in favor of a few Big Tech companies at the cost of the privacy and liberty of the vast majority of users — is unacceptable to those who recognize the need of a free and unhindered Web. Perhaps first among those who envision — and are working toward that free and unhindered Web — is the Godfather of the Web, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, who besides his other many and varied accomplishments, invented the Web 30 years ago.