Internet Frontierism and Net Neutrality

This week’s texts offered a variety of perspectives into the vast cultural landscape that the internet has become. Werry’s “Imagined Electronic Community” offers some insight into the formation and increasing influence of online spaces, as well as the part they were beginning to play in commerce at the time of writing. Though a bit dated, Werry introduces some concepts that explain “how representations of online community shift over time.” Clearly, with the ever-shifting nature of online environments, his arguments could be extended for applicability to the current online culture.

In particular, I found the exploration of the internet as unexplored frontier to be relevant to our modern use of the internet, especially with recent threats to Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is a concept that, until around 2017, was upheld by US ISPs. It outlines an open use conception of the internet, where ISPs cannot throttle, ban, or otherwise limit user access to the internet based on payment plans or other means. With the appointment of Ajit Pai as chairman of the FCC, Net Neutrality had a very real threat in a place of power, and internet users flew up in outrage at the possibility of having internet access limited at the hands of ISPs. This threat to Net Neutrality likened ISPs to gatekeepers of the internet, allowing companies to control the content that users had access to.

Often, I would see people interacting online, lamenting about how the “Wild West” days of the internet were coming to an end. Coincidentally, this ties into the frontier narrative indicated in Werry’s piece. To apply Canter & Siegel’s concept in a more modern context, native users of the internet felt as though their frontier had been so far encroached upon by the pioneers, the very fabric of their environment was changing irreversibly. The negative view of these internet natives as described by Canter and Siegel aligns with the perspective of ISPs, who clearly see the Internet as a place to be tamed and controlled for business interests.

In my view, the natives are in the right and deserve to uphold ownership of and access to the spaces they inhabit. The pioneers, the business owners and ISPs that seek to gain from limiting user access, have chained the free and open spirit of the internet to the limiting architectures of commerce and capitalism. There is a lot more to be said about the application of Canter and Siegel’s metaphor in the modern world, and how it essentially breaks the spirit that drives online communities.