Building A Better Internet, With Good Government

THE INTERNET, most would agree, is still, if not in its "infancy", then certainly in early childhood, perhaps a toddler. It has grown and changed much since the early nineties, and its growth and rate of change are only accelerating. Internet culture is in its raw neophyte phase, crude, rough, with little organization or regulation. Its been compared to the lawless American wild west of the nineteenth century. And we know that will change. The wild wild world of the internet will be tamed, regulated, controlled, soon enough. The future internet will not resemble the current one. In America, and probably in the rest of the world, we seem to have two choices in internet regulation: corporate control, or government tyranny. Take your pick. A third option might be some combination of the two, with the United nations and the world's cartels having a voice, and both responding to the wishes and ideas of the world's over two billion internet users. Friendly, cooperative internet anarchy might be the ultimate answer, on and off line, with citizen control and limited central governments and corporations, but we're not ready for that, and we're a long ways from it. Believe it or not, there is, in political science theory, a type of government called "socialistic anarchy", and there is a huge body of literature discussing it. Famed M.I.T. professor and scholar Noam Chomsky advocates this form of government. We do not want a small elite handful of huge corporations owning and controlling the internet. Nor do we want any national government or group of national governments controlling it. We want the people of the world to democratically own and control it, do we not? Well, that's socialistic anarchy. Its a grossly inefficient way to govern, this mass democracy, as we in America know only too well. But to us Americans, its worth it, the chaos, the confusion, the anarchy - if that's the price we have to pay to keep both the government and the corporate establishment off our backs and out of our lives and pockets.