No more heroes

Who are the heroes and villains of the internet?  In any contemporary discussion, it’s a fair bet that the consensus view on villainy will be based on something like this: 

“The open Internet’s founding principle is under attack. Policymakers in the U.S. are considering rules that would erase net neutrality, the principle that all data on the Internet should be treated equally. If these rule changes go through, many fear it will create a ‘two-tier’ Internet, where monopolies are able to charge huge fees for special fast lanes while everyone else gets the slow lane”. 

While it could have come from any number of neutrality lobbyists, this particular clarion call originates with Mozilla, the developers of the not-for-profit browser, Firefox.  For the avoidance of doubt, Mozilla helpfully identify the villainous ‘monopolies’ here as the US Cable companies and major Telco’s.  More recently, the company has joined forces with the Ford Foundation to launch what they call the Open Web Fellows Program, “A global initiative to recruit the heroes of the Open Internet”.  Here’s some of their rhetoric: 

“We are at a critical point in the evolution of the Internet. Despite its emergence as an integral part of modern life, the Internet remains a contested space. Far too often, we see its core ethos – a medium where anyone can make anything and share it with anyone – undermined by forces that wish to make it less free and open”. 

“We are building a global movement to protect the free and open Web.  Mozilla supports the heroes of the Web – the developers, advocates and people who fight to protect and advance the open Internet”. 

So does all that resolve the identity of the good guys and the bad guys…?  Well, in the case of Mozilla, not entirely….  It turns out that the company (“We exist to protect the free and open web”) is almost entirely dependent on search engines for its income, and the vast majority of that ($300m in 2012) comes of course from Google, an operator not known for its advocacy of the ‘open web’.  And even Mozilla’s new ‘heroes’ initiative has faced criticism.  As Glyn Moody points out, with much regret, Mozilla has endorsed the incorporation of Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the latest version of internet software (HTML5).  DRM is, he says, “the very antithesis of openness and of sharing”.  On that basis, he argues that: 

“Mozilla's Firefox is itself is a vector of attack against openness and sharing, and undermines its own lofty goals in the Open Web Fellows programme”.

 Not so clear, then.  In practice, the ecosystem of the internet is deceptively complex, and one that defies easy characterisations like heroes and villains.