Trump and Imprisoning the Internet

A year ago in early December, Donald Trump called for shutting down the Internet “in certain areas” to fight terrorism. He expressed alarm about young Americans drawn to fight for ISIS.

CNN at that time quoted Trump as saying:

"We're losing a lot of people because of the Internet. We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way. Somebody will say, 'Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.' These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people."

CNN’s reporter David Goldman responded that totalitarian governments may do that. The U.S., however, regulates the Internet “very loosely”, with only rare censorship to stop an activity such as child pornography. Goldman added:

“But a full-on ‘closing up’ of the Internet ‘in certain areas’ would be an impossible task. There are so many players with so much redundancy built into the system, that the Internet is not just something that can be turned off with a wave of a magic wand.”

Fast-forward to now, a year later. Donald Trump is the United States’ president-elect, according to calculated electoral votes, but not the popular vote. He’s now in a position to act on his “closing” idea, and appears ready to challenge that “impossible task”.

This has led The Atlantic, a moderate review magazine, to publish a Dec. 5 article questioning “Will Donald Trump Dismantle the Internet as We Know It?” The publication is predicting a coming policy war between Trump’s administration and open-web advocates, particularly over net neutrality: i.e. open access to all content and applications regardless of source, without favor or blocking of websites or the products they advertise.

Early actions by Trump show that the coming conflict is real. Trump’s FCC transition team includes three heavy opponents of net neutrality. And while the Federal Communications Commission does not directly control the Internet, it does oversee the mammoth phone utilities like AT&T and Verizon that link millions of customers to the web. And, of course, Trump will command the National Security Agency (NSA) and Justice Department's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), two agencies craving to spy on the Internet.

The Big Five Plus Two

In an effort to firm up his position, Trump summoned Silicon Valley’s largest tech firms to New York for a meeting next Wednesday, Dec. 14.  It’s being coordinated by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Facebook board member, who supported Trump.  Invitations to the private meeting appear to have gone to Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.  According to The New York Times’s Dec. 6 article: 

"Two Silicon Valley chief executives appeared willing to test the waters: Safra Catz, of the software maker Oracle, confirmed her participation in next week’s meeting with Mr. Trump. So did Chuck Robbins of Cisco Systems, the networking gear maker. 

"Representatives for other leading tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Apple, declined to comment. A Trump spokeswoman did not immediately reply to a request for comment."

Meanwhile, according to the UK’s The Guardian newspaper, Facebook, Google, Microsoft , and Twitter are uniting to “tackle extremist content”:

"[The four firms] have pledged to work together to identify and remove extremist content on their platforms through an information-sharing initiative.

"The companies are to create a shared database of unique digital fingerprints – known as “hashes” – for images and videos that promote terrorism. This could include recruitment videos or violent terrorist imagery or memes. When one company identifies and removes such a piece of content, the others will be able to use the hash to identify and remove the same piece of content from their own network."

Such actions immediately concern public-access advocates, including no mention by the corporations of an impartial body to monitor the database.

This effort at corporate control of the Internet should fit right in with Trump and his picks for his potential cabinet. They are all big-money corporate execs who want to privatize everything. And, once in power, they will try to, with little concern for the public or the Constitution.

We detailed this Trump attitude in our November column for The Clyde Fitch Report: “Prepare to Fight Fascism: 2017 and Beyond”. We expressed specific concern about the Bill of Rights, including freedom of the press and freedom of expression. We pointed, for starters, to Trump’s trying to control the press by banning certain reporters from his campaign. Most recently, we saw his knee-jerk over-reaction to the TV program “Saturday Night Live” satirizing him.

Come January, expect his efforts to control the press, public expression, and the Internet to expand.