Tag: Internet

Does Google want to nationalize the Internet?

This is pretty damn amazing. At the Personal Democracy Forum, Vint Cerf declared that the government should own and control the Internet: Should the Internet be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways? Vint Cerf, the “father of the Internet” and Google’s Internet evangelist, made this radical suggestion while he was sitting … Continue reading “Does Google want to nationalize the Internet?”

This is pretty damn amazing. At the Personal Democracy Forum, Vint Cerf declared that the government should own and control the Internet:

Should the Internet be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways? Vint Cerf, the “father of the Internet” and Google’s Internet evangelist, made this radical suggestion while he was sitting next to me on a panel yesterday about national tech policy at the Personal Democracy Forum.

This is extremely bizarre at many levels. The net neutrality juggernaut started as a campaign to protect free speech, and now it comes all the way around to ceding control of the Internet to the government? Like the government of China?

For Cerf, this is the greatest of all possible flip-flops. While working for WorldCom in 2002, Cerf wrote RFC 3271, warning of the dangers of government involvement in the Internet:

“Internet is for everyone – but it won’t be if Governments restrict access to it, so we must dedicate ourselves to keeping the network unrestricted, unfettered and unregulated. We must have the freedom to speak and the freedom to hear.”

How quickly they forget.

H/T Jim Harper at TLF.

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