The Internet’s distributed structure contributes to the impact it has had on speech, assembly, and politics—it has lowered economic barriers to entry for publishers and activists alike, and it has enabled peer-to-peer or many-to-many audience strategies that seem to favor bottom-up political activity.
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This is not to suggest that political command and control of the Internet is impossible, only that it is harder than, say, control of a national broadcast television network.
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The question at home and abroad, then, is whether the decentralized, redundant, distributed shape of the Internet will tip that balance further in favor of centralized powers by yielding to the Cycle—the consolidating patterns of monopoly and state control that shaped radio and television—or whether the Internet will remain a radically open system, biased toward users over authorities.
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Ultimately, the preservation of an open Internet, and of the empowerment of individuals it promises—the preservation of virtual public spaces—will require its beneficiaries to fight to keep it. It will require “the cultivation of a popular ethic concerning our society’s relation to information, an ethic consistent with the importance of information in our individual and collective lives,” one that is grounded in “awareness of the imminent perils of a closed system.” Whether sufficient numbers of people will acquire such awareness and act on it is not at all clear.
The greatest single contribution that Western societies can make to the Internet’s potential to empower repressed populations abroad would be to preserve at home the very openness of social media that has inspired the likes of Wael Ghonim. More here.