At the moment I am writing this, bad internet bills are being proposed across the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK. They're using the usual tactics: they claim they're fighting for kids or fighting security risks, but in general, that's what surveillance and censorship bills have always claimed.

But something feels different. There's so much happening at once, for one thing, it feels like there's a massive coordinated attack on internet freedoms. But it also feels like the wind is out of the sails of these fights, which is alarming, because the stakes have never been higher. Who's coordinating all these? What money is pushing it? Palantir? Heritage Foundation types? Large, centralization-enthused orgs like Meta? All of the above? It's hard to tell. But there's certainly a lot of money flowing underfoot.

But it's not just the coordinated attack. The fight itself feels deflated, in ways the fight for the internet hasn't been before. Sure, we have orgs like the ACLU, the Open Rights Group, the EFF, Fight for the Freedom, the usual suspects all fighting for the rights of the internet. And that's great.

But there's something else.

It feels like people are tired.

And it feels like the PR for locking things down has more acceptance publicly than before.

This is dramatically different than in my formative days.

Net neutrality, SOPA... these battles for internet freedom had massive buy-in across the internet. 2012's Wikipedia blackout was especially memorable. It wasn't just the tech engineers of the world in that fight; family and friends who had never thought about the technical underpinnings of the internet were asking me questions, saying they were worried that we were going to lose our digital rights and asking what could be done.

Now we are facing an international swell of legal movements to age-gate and thus surveil the entire internet, lock down operating systems and hardware in the process, and generally crush the internet into an even more centralized shape than it's already been going.

And so it's with great irony that I believe it is actually because the internet got so centralized that we are facing the greatest amount of centralization and backdoor threats we've ever faced.

Because there's a difference between now and 2012. The internet feels a lot less like an "our thing" than it used to.

There are exceptions, of course. If you're a regular reader of my blog, you know the history of my life work on decentralizing internet communication. The fediverse and decentralized social networks in general are a counter-point to centralization. The thing is, when working on decentralized tech, I always believed it was important because we had serious risks from centralization, surveillance, etc from governments and corporations, potentially co-conspiring. But what I hadn't anticipated is that as things became more centralized, the will to fight for the internet as something in the public interest too would evaporate.

When I have conversations with family members and friends who haven't yet thought much about the age verification and similar bills and their consequences, they've said "well, someone has to hold corporations like Meta" responsible. To which I say, "but what about all the smaller, non-corporate parts of the internet?" To which, many people are surprised, because they've simply forgotten about those things.

When the internet and computing becomes five corporations to most people, they begin to treat it as the concerns of reigning in five corporations.

But.

We can't let that be what this is.

Because I believe, and I believe firmly, that we are in for the fights of our lives right now. As fascism creeps across the globe, as queer people get squeezed out of public life (which I believe is A LARGE PORTION of the reasons all of this is being pushed, the fear of queer kids using the internet to discover things about themselves), as all of media gets consolidated and filtered to the views of the powerful keeping themselves in power, decentralized and encrypted communication is increasingly all we have left to fight for ourselves.

We have to fight for our rights.

For ourselves.

For our children.

For the future.

Get active. Call your representatives. Sign up for a fediverse cooperative. Explore p2p tech. Install a non-Google, non-Apple operating system on your phone. Start your blog back up. SPEAK OUT!

Because the internet is ours, if we make it so.

And if we don't...

... well I'm too worried about that to finish that sentence.

If the internet feels decreasingly like it's ours, then by god, let's make it ours.