Regulating the Internet

Nobody asked but …

One of my students, today, was clearly upset because he had heard on the radio that POTUS was seeking to hand the reins of the Internet over to the FCC, Federal Communication Commission.  I am sure that politicians see that as feasible, but the fact is that “the Internet” is merely a collection of processes.  Now that mankind knows how to communicate globally, via a generic process, there is not much chance that the state, any state, can cram the genie back into the bottle.  The core idea of the Internet is that messages can travel over exponentially increasing pathways, if stopped on any given pathway.  Any network where all nodes are logically connected to all other nodes presents too great an obstacle for your run-of-the-mill authoritarian.  If you have 100 nodes, you must knock out 9,999 channels to shut off communication..  If the government could shut down the Internet that does not defeat the mathematical model that underlies the Internet.  The voluntaryists of the world can just make a similar infrastructure, maybe call it the “Toobz” or something.

Kilgore