There are obviously conflicting opinions about how to piece together new and complex regulation, legislation, or tech innovation. But this has been true throughout history whenever a new idea begins to be broadly adapted. Before the internet, we had to figure out how to manage cars and electricity and steam power and even the use of the written word (which many, including Socrates, actually argued against). The internet is no different.
Paul Roehrig in Quartz, arguing that the internet is Broken and we need to fix it. Left unregulated, the internet is increasingly shaping itself to serve two incredibly scary beasts:
One side is building a digital economy that is pure weaponized capitalism. In this model, your personal “code halo”–the “digital you” created by every click, swipe, buy, like, Tweet, message, post, or follow–is used almost exclusively to disconnect you from your money, your attention, and your vote. In what author and scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” every bit or byte of our data is monetizable.
The other side is creating pure Big Brother authoritarianism, where information isn’t used as much for commercial means as it is a means of control. Social credit score systems and monitoring technologies, like those being deployed in many countries (including China), will track individual and corporate behavior and then use it to control access to social services, loans, and other aspects of life.