All news
Why the Internet is Stopping Being Free and Moving Towards Hyper-Control
The recent arrest of Pavel Durov and the blocking of Discord Messenger, popular among Russian and Turkish gamers, are high-profile but very minor incidents. The practice of forcing multinational companies to comply with local laws has become a general trend over the past decade. For example, just a month ago, Google lost a seven-year legal battle with the European Commission and now must pay $2.7 billion in fines for violating antitrust laws (to give you an idea of the scale, at the current exchange rate, this amount is the annual income of the Irkutsk region). However, the author of the column suffers from a syndrome of searching for deeper meaning, which allows him to see in the current events the influence of much more fundamental global processes.
Many people have probably heard the term "new ethics". In the classical interpretation, it represented the concept of psychologist Erich Neumann about the need to abandon the division of people into "black" and "white", which led to oppression and oppression, resulting in psychological trauma. In the modern Russian interpretation, it acquired the meaning of identifying the Western trend to overcome inequality and discrimination. As is known, the environmental and social agendas have become the focus of attention not only of ordinary people, but also of the largest investment funds in the West, such as Blackrock. This requires companies to more actively develop environmental, social and governance (ESG) and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which are prerequisites for their inclusion in investment portfolios. The second demographic transition has led to a decline in birth rates worldwide, forcing societies to increase life expectancy and, consequently, increase safety requirements.
The growing demand for security and law enforcement is evidenced by the growth of the global market for urban video surveillance systems. According to analysts from Business Research Insights, this market is expected to double in size by 2031, reaching almost $60 billion. Presented. Accordingly, the global market for public safety surveillance drones is expected to grow at a CAGR of 18% to reach $612 billion in 2032, while the facial recognition software market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16% to reach $24 billion in 2032. Each state is investing more in public safety. Recently, there has been a tendency to delegate some security responsibilities to the companies themselves. And if earlier the requirements were primarily put forward to media platforms and consisted of removing illegal content, with the main responsibility for its placement lying with the hosts, now the responsibility is shifted to the communication platforms themselves. Pavel Durov was accused by the French of complicity in criminal activity occurring in his messengers. In Russia, a law came into force in 2020 that obliges social networks to identify and block prohibited content, placing partial responsibility for possible illegal activity on the platforms themselves.
So the recent Discord block can be explained by a global trend to ensure public safety. But where does this lead? Following this logic, should a kitchen knife manufacturer be held accountable for failing to stop a drunk man from stabbing someone "on the chopping block"? Baseball bats are one of the most popular homemade weapons of crime, so should they be sold under license? Should Toyota executives be prosecuted for turning a pickup truck into the world's most popular weapons platform?
In the era of global digital transformation, social platforms are a kind of real digital twin. People are deeply connected to their social media accounts, which exist simultaneously in the real and virtual worlds. Discord is a “virtual city” with its server houses and channel apartments. Should the manager of a virtual house be held responsible for the fact that out of 1,000 apartments, there is one “bad” apartment in which antisocial elements live?
A positive answer to this question can change your business forever and dramatically slow down the development of your communications system. Only through full preventive moderation of each message can you completely eradicate the publication of illegal material, which can lead to the collapse of messaging systems. This can be partially achieved with the help of artificial intelligence, but this creates fundamental problems. People will not use a messenger without privacy. Pre-configuring messages with AI means that integrated bots have access to all user information, which companies can use for their own purposes. All your financial, personal, business and medical data is completely publicly available. In addition, the privacy and confidentiality of correspondence are fundamental constitutional rights of citizens of Russia, as well as many other countries. From a security point of view, this can lead to completely opposite results than expected.
Complete control over communications on the largest communications platforms leads to the emergence of many closed private "fidonets" and "jabbers" (private networks in which data is transmitted through the home servers of participants), which significantly complicates the search for extremist communities. After all, if the network does not officially exist, its owners will not moderate its content, and the search for such networks will become a huge burden for the special services.
We can only hope that, like other structural social changes, the pendulum of public security trends, swinging from the extremes of Internet freedom in the 2000s to the extremes of over-control today, will stop in a fairly balanced position.
The editor's opinions may not coincide with the author's point of view.