From Devil to Deep Sea. The story of how the Internet Mega Corps compromise our liberty and life

When communism bit the dust, the world saw the failure of an economic and political experimentation that germinated from the thoughts of intellectuals such as Marx and Angels. While communism had its own glorious moments, its fall is attributed to the indulgences of individual autocrats it produced in various parts of the world who ran the governments.

From a bipolar world, in the nineties of the last century, planet Earth turned into a unipolar one. The shift took away the level of balance being maintained between the nations of the world. Capitalism took control of the world and   governmental/regulatory interferences started coming down. Lack of regulatory control led to huge monopolistic growth of corporations and they started spreading the tentacles over every resource available on the planet; be it men, money or material. The result is that of select few trusts/families and corporations controlling the wealth of the world. These behemoths progressed every year higher than the growth of the nations thus growing into extreme higher riches, going beyond the control of the governments of the world.

Here ends the traditional Industrial revolution. That was where we were at the turn of the century.

Enter technology....

Internet started impacting the world of commerce and business in a big way. Thing started moving from brick and mortar to the online 'click' world. With Web 2.0 arriving, the world moved into social networking that completely changed the behavioural pattern of humanity. Today an in individual is all alone physically but dwells in the crowd of the cyberspace. Relationships and social orders are going thru massive paradigm shift.

Add to that the online commerce. Something that had started as a referral purchase from small online companies had come to be established as big time ‘e-Commerce’ now. This Business is moving into trillions of dollars. Online technology companies grew to become Industrial behemoths. Google, Amazon, Alibaba, eBay there goes the endless list, multibillion dollar businesses having huge market capitalisation.

As it is, at the time of the plateauing of traditional industrial revolution, all major assets of planet Earth had come to be owned by business conglomerates. With the online companies invading further, it had completely become so. With scant respect for the governments around, these industrial and online companies flourish with the laws made by themselves for their own operations!  It is almost like the thief keeping the keys. Has anyone bothered to think of a future where humanity will be completely controlled by the corporates? Time and again, these corporates come out with technological innovations that would enslaven the masses and then everything is simple. Just let them do a little arm twist; you are in their hand, forever.....

It is not only wealth but it is the individual liberties that we are compromising now. In the age of cyberspace that we are now, we are at the mercy of technology which is acting as the regulator. Technology may be considered neutral but the corporate that owns it is not. The intent of the corporate owning the technology will be monetize the technology and amass wealth, thru the regulation that it brings forth thru the technology.  This regulator threatens liberty. Our preoccupation with the idea that liberty means "freedom from government" makes us not see the regulation in the new space.

This regulator is code, the software and firmware that the cyberspace is made of. This code and the architecture; set the terms on which life in cyberspace is experienced. Our privacy protection is determined by the code. This code can censor speech. The code decides whether access to information is general or specific in nature. It also decides who sees what and what needs monitoring.  It is a sort of slow poisoning effect.  We take our sweet time to realize that we had compromised many of our liberties in order to use the technology. In effect it is the technology and companies that own them that is regulating us now.

This regulation will soon change the cyberspace from a place that protects anonymity, free speech, and individual control; to a place that makes anonymity difficult, speech less free, and the user at the mercy of technology experts.

As mentioned already, for the technology and software companies, code is the law and architecture, the policy. Both are made by them. Amply protected by Intellectual regimes, the Internet corporations march the monopolistic way in order to monetize the technology. The pattern is similar to the mega corps of the industrial era in Pharma sector amassing huge wealth through patented medicines. This is just an example.  Human being will be restricted to the area designed by the Internet mega corps, at the beat of the technology. For example remember the attempt made by Facebook Corporation to take control of Indian Internet space through the freebees (www.internet.org) in tandem with a leading business conglomerate of India, with the National government abetting the process. What will all these lead to? Liberty will be lost forever; you will be the pawns at the hands of the mega corps.

What are the governments of the world doing about it? Dictated by the mega corporates, these governments stand as mute spectators with no teeth. Also, most of the governments of the rich nations are headed by the rich guys from the corporate world and thus, crony capitalism has come to stay here.

 There isn't much to govern, leave alone enacting regulations. Most of the governments are part of the plunder. Planet Earth is now fast being annihilated.

Technology which we considered neutral has now come to regulate us.  It is time to wake up and start thinking. Is this a world you and I have envisaged that technology would help us reaching our aspirations? We are slowly moving from the devil of Industrial Corporations to the deep sea of Internet Mega corps.

So the question is, what does future hold for you dear?