I was reading an article today, the gist of which was the amazing, and seemingly insatiable growth in Internet bandwidth. It included the usual doomsday scenarios, the life blood of the drive-by media, like the Internet will run into capacity problems by 2011. It did however raise counterpoints by some experts saying this will not occur.

I am not about to enter the fray over whether or not the Internet is running out of capacity. I will point out that these predictions have been made in the past and have not come true. Technological advances are cited as the reason we have not had a disaster yet. But I think that deep down there is a more potent force at work here.

I think the Internet is the success that is because it is one of the greatest example of Laissez-faire Capitalism at work. What the hell am I talking about. The Internet is largely a totally unregulated, unrestricted marketplace. It has been built from the ideas, thoughts, capital, and hard work of thousands of corporations, governments, universities, and millions of people the world over. The only real structuring involved is related to interface standards, packet structure & transport standards, and naming standards, basically low-level technical stuff. Use and content have been largely unregulated and left to the marketplace to determine. Goods and services, thoughts and ideas of all kinds now utilized the Internet in a vast multitude of ways none of us could have fully comprehended a mere decade ago.

Just take a simple thing like the delivery of news. Go back before the Internet and virtually all news was controlled by a few networks and newspapers. There, the personal biases of a few individuals in each news organization determined what we were told was happening, and what the truth was. This will always be the case, but there where perhaps only a couple of dozen organizations that controlled all news flow. They where overwhelmingly “liberal” in there bias, almost to the extreme, for over the years they only recruited and fostered like minded individuals. Today with the Internet, this monopoly is rapidly dissolving. Those of us who have enough interest can be extremely well informed and now have the ability to get an accurate picture of what is going on.

This exists because for all practical intents and purposes the Internet has brought down the “cost to broadcast” to essentially zero. Massive outlays of capital are no longer a requirement. The number of sources has gone from a few dozen to millions. The effete snobs of the old media monopoly will attempt to argue that they have control standards that make their operations credible. But that is just vaporware. They have been promoters of an agenda ever since the Vietnam War, and have continuously obfuscated, covered-up, exaggerated, and fabricated stories to fit their agenda. It is quickly becoming impossible to hide the truth, if one is willing to make the investment to learn it.

The physical infrastructure of the Internet has evolved at break-neck pace, largely through private investment, by thousands of firms varying of size and scope. People have come up with incredibly inventive services, and goods to offer. Some of them, like news, are mostly “free.”

I submit that it precisely because of lack of “regulation “ and “interference” by governments that the Internet has grown and flourished. Only one thing (outside of a giant asteroid, gamma ray burst, super-volcanic eruption, etc.) can stop it. That is government interference. Once the government starts regulating, that is when the problems will start.

What types of problems. Things like capacity problems. The Internet as been called the ‘information super-highway.” Today’s highways are run by the government, how do they do at it? Take as an example the “Blue Route" (a section of Interstate 476) around Philadelphia. A classic example of the government providing infrastructure. It’s something like 20 miles long, took over twenty years to build, was horribly over-budget, and was over-capacity the day it opened. That’s the type of result you get when the government gets control. Such things really don’t occur over the vast expanse of the Internet precisely because government has little involvement. I think you’ll find in many of the cases of Internet capacity problems (pretty much localized phenomena) that a government is sitting squarely in the middle, regulating/dictating/controlling something.

The greatest benefit the Internet has brought to mankind is in the arena of free speech. A vast multitude of people have access to largest public forum in history. We are no longer limited to hearing only the thoughts and ideas of a select few of the ruling elite of this world. We can hear everyone’s opinions and ideas. For the vast majority of us the mere fact that we are exposed to so many differing points of view, as honed our abilities to discriminate between truth & lies, good & evil, and right & wrong. The New York Times no longer gets to decide what “All the News that is Fit to print” is, each one of us gets to decide for ourselves.

This is powerful stuff, easily on the order of the printing press in historical magnitude. However the ruling class (i.e., the Type Ones) can not rule for long where there is a free expression and interchange of ideas. In short they must gain control of The Internet.

How will they go about it? They will utilize their tried and true methodology of incremental encroachment & control. First they will parade out the children. “Your children must be protected when they are on the Internet”, they will tell us. They will exploit parents basic fears, sexual predators, pedophiles, kiddy porn, for certainly no one can defend that. Gradually over time, spurred on by well publicized sensationalized stories of abuse, the definitions will broaden (i.e., children will morph into “young people” and such). Next we will have to protect the elderly from unscrupulous individuals, and then women from predatory men. They will start to outlaw “hate speech.” At first it will done with strict definition, then once the principle has been accepted the definition of hate speech will broaden. The real definition of “hate speech” will become any speech the ruling elite do not agree with. It will quickly become a death of a thousand cuts. It will eventually reach the point where you no longer have enough useable “allowed” vocabulary left to present your ideas in a persuasive manner.

Content control will be coupled with exercising of control over the physical Internet. Bandwidth will be allocated based on political imperatives, not market imperatives. Monitoring will become imbedded, to weed out the bad apples. Pedophiles need not worry, because they will be kept around so that the need for maintaining and increasing regulation can forever be made (shades of the “War on Drugs”). The ability to shutdown and control Internet traffic based on content will be established. Look at the playbook used by repressive regimes around the world, something bad happens, they now immediately clamp down on the Internet in their countries. They know they must control the Internet, to control the people. China, Pakistan, Burma, need I say more.

There are many who will feel that these are the ravings of a deranged person, and your probably right. But those of you, capable of critical thinking will realize that indeed the encroachment has begun, and that it is really a matter of controlling the public, and not a matter of public safety. Free men must never rest; for tyranny never rests. When free men rest, they cease to exist.