The Internet is shedding its exclusivist character.
The internet evangelist Jeffery Barlow says that the Internet is the ultimate democracy. Others agree that it will take on the autocrats of the world. The beauty of the internet, they all tell us, is that nobody owns it. In all the hype about the Internet, this perhaps is the hardest to stomach.
The Internet is no ethereal medium that flows ubiquitously through our universe. Physically it consists of computers, telephone lines, modems, satellites, and cables – all things that somebody owns. It is peopled by providers, users and regulators. The people who command what you see and read are almost entirely from the North, mostly from the USA. This is also true of much of the physical embodiments of the Internet.
The US is trying to pass laws that prevent users from encoding their information in a manner whereby it cannot be decoded by the government. There are bodies that determine who should be allowed to own top-level domains of entire nations. The language etiquette developed for the Internet is an entirely Western construct, and the lingua franca for the Net is, of course, English. The ownership of the information content on the Net is almost exclusively Northern, and even the few websites that are developed by organisations in the South are generally located physically in servers in the USA. The information flow on the Net, is as yet almost entirely North to South.