But it's also a way to make sure your secret police can lay hands on population-scale data about anyone they might want to kidnap and torture:

doctorow.medium.com/theyre-sti…

At its worst, "technological sovereignty" is a path to a shattered internet with a million dysfunctional borders that serve as checkpoints where thuggish customs inspectors can stop you from availing yourself of privacy-preserving technology and prevent you from communicating with exiled dissidents and diasporas.

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They’re still trying to ban cryptography - Cory Doctorow - Medium

Some bad ideas never die. Since the late 1980s, spy agencies and cops have argued that the public should not have access to working cryptography, because this would mean that terrorists, mafiosi…

^{Cory Doctorow (Medium)}

But at its best, "technological sovereignty" is a way to create world-girding technology that can act as an impartial substrate on which all manner of domestic and international activities can play out, from a group of friends organizing a games night, to scientists organizing a symposium, to international volunteer corps organizing aid after a flood.

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In other words, "technological sovereignty" can be a way to create a *public* internet that the *whole* public controls - not just governments, but also people, individuals who can exercise their own technological self-determination, controlling crucial aspects of their own technology usage, like "who will see this thing I'm saying?" and "whose communications will *I* see, and which ones can I block?"

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A "public internet" isn't the same thing as "an internet that is operated by your government," but you can't get a public internet without government involvement, including funding, regulation, oversight and direct contributions.

Here's an example of different ways that governments can involve themselves in the management of one part of the internet, and the different ways in which this will create more or less "public" internet services: fiber optic lines.

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Fiber is the platinum standard for internet service delivery. Nothing else comes even close to it. A plastic tube under the road that is stuffed with fiber optic strands can deliver *billions* of times more data than copper wires or any form of wireless, including satellite constellations like Starlink:

pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fig…

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(Starlink is the most antifuturistic technology imaginable - a vision of a global internet that gets slower and less reliable as more people sign up for it. It makes the dotcom joke of "we lose money on every sale but make it up in volume" look positively bankable.)

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The private sector *cannot* deliver fiber. There's no economical way for a private entity to secure the rights of way to tear up every street in every city, to run wires into every basement or roof, to put poles on every street corner. Same goes for getting the rights of way to string fiber between city limits across unincorporated county land, or across the long hauls that cross national and provincial or state borders.

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Fiber itself is cheap like borscht - it's literally made out of sand - but clearing the thicket of property rights and political boundaries needed to get wire everywhere is a feat that can only be accomplished through government intervention.

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Fiber's opponents rarely acknowledge this. They claim, instead, that the physical act of stringing wires through space is somehow transcendentally hard, despite the fact that we've been doing this with phone lines and power cables for more than a century, through the busiest, densest cities and across the loneliest stretches of farmland.

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Wiring up a country is not the lost art of a fallen civilization, like building pyramids without power-tools or embalming pharoahs. It's something that even the poorest counties in America can manage, bringing fiber across forbidden mountain passes on the back of a mule named "Ole Bub":

newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-t…

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When governments apply themselves to fiber provision, you get fiber. Don't take my word for it - ask Utah, a bastion of conservative, small-government orthodoxy, where 21 cities now have blazing fast 10gb internet service thanks to a public initiate called (appropriately enough) "Utopia":

pluralistic.net/2024/05/16/sym…

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So government have to be involved in fiber, but *how* should they involve themselves in it? One model - the worst one - is for the government to intervene on behalf of a single company, creating the rights of way for that company to lay fiber in the ground or string it from poles. The company then owns the network, even though the fiber and the poles were the *cheapest* part of the system, worth an unmeasurably infinitesimal fraction of the value of all those rights of way.

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In the worst of the worst, the company that owns this network can do anything they want with its fiber. They can deny coverage to customers, or charge thousands of dollars to connect each new homes to the system. They can gouge on monthly costs, starve their customer service departments or replace them with mindless AI chatbots. They can skimp on maintenance and keep you waiting for days or weeks when your internet goes out.

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They can lard your bill with junk fees, or force you to accept pointless services like landlines and cable TV as a condition of getting the internet.

They can also play favorites with local businesses: maybe they give *great* service to every Domino's pizza place at knock-down rates, and make up for it by charging extra to independent pizza parlors that want to accept internet orders and stream big sports matches on the TV over the bar.

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They can violate Net Neutrality, slowing down your connection to sites unless their owners agree to pay bribes for "premium carriage." They can censor your internet any way they see fit. Remember, corporations - unlike governments - are not bound by the First Amendment, which means that when a corporation is your ISP, they can censor anything they feel like:

pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/use…

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