Dissecting the “Internet Freedom” Agenda: A review of Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski, The Real Cyber War

A review of Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski, The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom by Richard Hill 2, April 2015

This review was originally published in boundary 2, at:https://boundary2.org/2015/04/29/dissecting-the-internet-freedom-agenda/

Disclosure: the author of this review is thanked in the Preface of the reviewed book.

Both radical civil society organizations and mainstream defenders of the status quo agree that the free and open Internet is threatened: see for example theDelhi Declaration, Bob Hinden’s 2014 Year End Thoughts, and Kathy Brown’sMarch 2015 statement at a UNESCO conference. The threats include government censorship and mass surveillance, but also the failure of governments to control rampant industry concentration and commercial exploitation of personal data, which increasingly takes the form of providing “free” services in exchange for personal information that is resold at a profit, or used to provide targeted advertising, also at a profit.
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