Policy is theft: The state of global Internet policy in an age of revolutions

Abstract

This paper examines the history of media to argue that policy discourses need to recognise bottom‐up activism (‘exogenous shocks’), and not just the administration of economic and state interests (‘endogenous variables’), to address global agitation for revolutionary system change. Some say the internet – now in the guise of its latest tech‐craze, the metaverse – will ‘revolutionize everything’. But only if ‘everything’ is made of property, and companies (like Meta) ‘own every atom’, while states (like Saudi Arabia) control every agent. Under current international arrangements, ‘global internet policy’ does not exist. Instead, multinational firms appropriate the semiosphere – human communication, meanings, representation, and relationships – in property forms like data, IP, and platforms. State policy, meanwhile, is not to cooperate at global scale but to outsmart adversaries using strategic stories, data surveillance, and cybersecurity. In this power‐universe, corporate policy is theft, while state policy is war. Here, policy is inevitably an institutional process of administration, resisting system‐change or revolution. Instead of ceding internet policy to governments and consultancies, those who seek system change are exploring new ways to express themselves on a screen, so to constitute a meaning system that integrates the futures of the semiosphere, biosphere and geosphereThis article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.