FREE SPEECH IS VERY EXPENSIVE FOUNDATIONS OF INTERNET FREEDOM

"I had once believed that the digital world was inherently free and could never be otherwise. Now I see something very different: the cooperation of government and large-scale private industry to restrict free speech and the free flow of information. Elon Musk made the decision to make Twitter much more like the old internet than the new one but, as a consequence, has lost many billions of dollars in revenue. As he puts it, free speech is very expensive. Truly, this is what it has come to. In other words, advertising dollars themselves are being deployed to restrict rather than expand freedom.The struggle for freedom is not technological but philosophical and religious. That’s where the real battle is,” writes Jeffrey A. Tucker and feels that freedom needs to be defended if we plan to keep it.

- Jeffrey A. Tucker

Twelve years ago, I wrote a book called “A Beautiful Anarchy” which was a celebration of how the internet had evolved until that point in time. It largely operated in a decentralized manner, with businesses thriving within a spontaneous order.

The web browser was invented in 1995. Five years later, the dot-com bust cleansed the market of frenzies and created a template for more long-term projects. Facebook opened to the public in 2005. Google bought YouTube in 2006. The iPhone came out in 2007. The app economy began to emerge in 2008.By 2012, cooperation across digital platforms was remarkable, and advertising had not yet taken over the main portals. There were no omnipotent monopolists but only large industrial players among millions of options. Competition prevailed in most areas. Social media and the app economy were in a boom stage.

What everyone thought would be chaos ended up being very orderly and wonderful, with no direction from the top and no centralized plan. This is why I called it a beautiful anarchy.The book included celebratory essays on a large number of social media sites, explaining their roles in people’s lives and their contribution to making the world a better place.My big theory was that the digital cloud represented a new frontier that brought out the best of the pioneering spirit that built the West and forged generations of explorers, builders, and agents of enterprise and improvement.

Here we sit in 2024 and truly wonder: What happened?

My mistake was in thinking that this new-found freedom could last and last and nothing could ever happen that would change it. This prediction of mine, which of course turns out to be entirely wrong, was based on the idea that national governments could never manage to do to the internet what they had already done to the physical world. I believed that this new form of freedom would last forever and that this ethos of liberation would grow and grow.