1996 telecommunications act in the US for one.
Because we dropped community communications in favor of corporate communications for two.
Bring back barb wire phone networks.
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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Money. Lots and lots of money.
Because the campaign to prioritize money over morals by the capitalists won the war 30 years ago.
Because people are generally too lazy to setup alternatives.
And even with alternatives, corporations own all the infrastructure. There is no publicly owned and operated infrastructure anymore.
My data still has to pass through their pipes, and if at some point they decide they don't like my data, they can just block it from going through their pipes entirely. Coupled with deep consolidation of ISPs, it means effectively being blocked from communications on the internet.
@[email protected] @[email protected] there ARE city owned fiber and wireless networks. The dark fiber bought up in the early 2Ks to form the existing Internet2 that connects Research 1 universities and many other non-commercial entities is also real.
You CAN in fact communicate using open standards like DNS, SMTP or even ActivityPub between some points without using a service or network owned by a billionaire. What you CANNOT do is communicate without hardware made by billionaires. Even if you did manage to create a compute device using open hardware to create and consume the communication, traffic over that fiber is being routed with some very expensive, very proprietary hardware.
My point is that it IS possible and there have been a few people who are not only NOT lazy, but visionary thinkers motivated by more that greed building protocols, tools and networks.
DNS, TCP/IP and HTTP were all designed to function if large parts of the network were no longer available. They were more concerned with nuclear war at the time, but the design works just as well to route around walled gardens.
I agree that most people are too lazy to care... let alone take any action to change the status quo, but here we are discussing this through MBin/Lemmy./ActivityPub.
thank you for the enlightenment
And even with alternatives, corporations own all the infrastructure.
It depends on what you mean by infrastructure. If you mean ISPs, then the majority of their infrastructure was built with public funds. It's public infrastructure... They use your infrastructure.
My data still has to pass through their pipes
For sure. Which is why encryption and anti-censorship tools were and are created.
I'm guilty of using YouTube to communicate a lot but YouTube Shorts is a hilarious way of communicating this particular message