J.R.McHale

“It’s an imperfect analogy, but, given this extraordinary control over the means of global communication, Silicon Valley giants at this point are more akin to public utilities such as telephone companies than they are ordinary private companies when it comes to the dangers of suppressing ideas, groups and opinions. It’s not hard to understand the dangers of allowing, say, AT&T or Verizon to decree that its phone lines may not be used by certain groups or to transmit certain ideas, and the dangers of allowing tech companies to do so are similar. In the digital age, we are nearing the point where an idea banished by Twitter, Facebook and Google all but vanishes from public discourse entirely, and that is only going to become more true as those companies grow even further.” – Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept

“We need, as web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has urged, to re-decentralize the Internet, and restore its promise as a medium where the action takes place at the edges of networks—where we wouldn’t need permission to communicate and innovate. The first way we users of Internet services can re-decentralize is to create—and make use of—our own home base online. In practical terms, this means getting your own domain name and creating, at a minimum, a blog where you establish your own identity. The page you think is yours at LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram (Facebook), or any of the other centralized services is emphatically not truly your own; it’s theirs.” – Dan Gillmor at The Atlantic