A declaration of the independence of cyberspace

Text Exploration

In 1996, congress passed the Telecommunications Reform Act. This was one of the first congressional interventions into the internet’s corporate infrastructure, and gave corporations the ability for consolidation and the ability to operate in multiple communication channels at once. The details of the law were viewed with skepticism by advocates for an open internet, but more importantly, the presence of the law was viewed as a new intrusion of the government into what had been largely an open, self-regulating place for intellectual discourse and debate. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, previously established to advocate against government overreach into digital, broadly, responded with a public message in the form of a mini-manifesto. John Perry Barlow, an advocate for digital rights, authored the message as a line of delineation against the reform act, and against the entire idea of government participation in the internet.

The message itself is an open-letter to “governments of the industrial world,” and reads as a libertarian-style demand to leave the constituents of cyberspace alone. The message is not an argument as much as a set of assertions, each aimed at this singular idea of “you”—a foil of all governments, everywhere. These assertions against this global homogenized government include a lack of jurisdiction, a lack of understanding, and a desire to govern grounded in fear of technological advancement as a way of disturbing established legal precedent and norms. A thread throughout the assertions is that the essence of the emergent internet is ungovernable because it is not tangible. Barlow argues that it has no borders, no bodies, no property, and can therefore be only self-governed; if there are problems, it is stated, “we will identify them and address them by our means.” The internet of 1996 is self-organizing, without autocratic ownership, although the author himself states that “I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impost on us.” (emphasis added)

History has shown that this message was largely ignored, and the deregulation opened the door not for governmental overreach but by free market consolidation. The monopoly of Bell was replaced by the monopoly of Meta. The Telecommunications Reform Act, in retrospect, is benign in its impact on self-governance and freedom; instead, it has been a constant push towards advertising, through “social” networks, that has rejected Barlow’s call for a “more humane and fair” cyberspace.