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Adults Broke The Internet, And They’re Trying To Fix It By Kicking Kids Off
(www.techdirt.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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that's already 'the internet' under one (more technically correct) definition of the word 'internet'
the "control" you mention is mostly the applications (the article is about "social media platforms")
The trick is that they are thinking about outlawing any “platform” that doesn’t send a personal bribe to the current administration.
That's my point.... it's the applications (so-called "platforms") that are the point of centralisation and control
the internet itself is very decentralised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
"platforms" don't really add a lot of value, just some nice-too-have things like the ability to upload without using FTP (which CMSs can also do), and easing content discovery
Problem is, this control will extend further. If GAFAM gets its way, it won't stop at "you need digital ID to browse adult sites", or "no kids in social media"; eventually kids will be locked out anything "suspicious" (i.e. not controlled by GAFAM), and even adults will be only able to access those sites if they go through a thousand bureaucratic loops, proving why they need the info on first place, and if you don't play along you'll be assumed to be a [terrorist | potential murderer | child predator | etc.].
Because the issue was never protecting children. Social media bans are about knowing who access what. It's about violating your online privacy. With governments and GAFAM shaking hands, because both have a deep hatred against privacy — for one it means lack of direct control over the citizens ("those are MY citizens! My property!"), and for the other it's a leash to prevent those users, "too dumb to obey simple orders", from straying off walled gardens.
And the internet has been "broken" since the beginning. Social media control only works because the internet is a bit too easy to centralise, and it has been already centralised (guess in which hands? GAFAM's).
@schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de pointed ToR out. ToR is not enough, structurally speaking; it has a discovery issue, it relies on the codebase of a GAFAM vassal (Mozilla Firefox), and while your ISP doesn't know what you're accessing, it's pretty likely it knows you're using ToR. Sites are completely unreliable, too.
Then there's the Fediverse. A step in the right direction, as it's more headless than GAFAM alternatives; you can't really lock someone out of the Fediverse like you can lock them out Facebook or Twitter. But we ooze our private data every time we access the Fediverse.
Torrents, eMule, they're great for sharing files, not so for navigating or interacting with content.
I genuinely think the problem in the article — and so many other problems in the "new" internet — will be only solved by ditching the current "new" internet and building another in parallel. One that even kids can access.
[Sorry if this sounds like disorganised rambling.]