It is an ancient story, almost like a grandfatherly, hard-as-nails, that the Internet is the sophisticated granddaughter of Arpanet, a decentralized military network designed by the US Army during the Cold War to ensure that the destruction of one of its nodes did not prevent communication from continuing to function. That communications are essential in any military campaign is something that anyone who has seen The Bridge on the River Kwai also knows. That is why I read with stupefaction, although not surprised, that the arrest of Durov, CEO of Telegram, has left the communications of the Russian Army in disarray, which, as in a joke by Gila, made use of this application for the transmissions of operations on the ground. Putin has fallen into the trap of thinking that the purpose of these platforms was his, that they were at his service.
It would seem reasonable. Technology has always been at the service of a human purpose and has been designed to fulfil it. Therefore, it can be redesigned, closed, changed or stopped being used; it is not a force of nature, an act of God in the face of which there is only room for resignation.
The question posed by Durov’s arrest or Musk’s standoff with a Brazilian judge is what purpose Telegram or Twitter (call it X) serve and whether that purpose is oriented to the general good. We know it is not. These services are designed to maximize the profit of their shareholders, not to improve the privacy of their users. That is what the law is for, a system of checks and balances and conflict resolution between naturally selfish human interests that allows us to achieve a balance within the ideal framework of the society we have decided to be. When a relevant part of the social fabric is left out of the balance of power because the rules we draft cannot be enforced, impunity and injustice arrive, and with it, motivational talks about the beauty of failure and the metaphysical impossibility of opposing “progress.”
But this is not the only recurring reflection that Durov’s arrest leaves us with. If technology has a design that responds to a human purpose, someone will have to be that human. Technology has an ideology, but it also has owners. Experience has shown us that the more concentrated the control of a company is in one person, a man, white, and, almost always, a messianic narcissist, the less likely it is that it will comply with the rules and the more likely its design is to make it difficult. Any legislation or legal action that, in personal entities such as those of Musk, Durov, or Zuckerberg, does not target the head is doomed to failure. When the US administration threatened Zuckerberg with holding him responsible with his own assets for Facebook’s violations, he immediately accepted a fine of 5 billion and the establishment of an independent committee that has not served much purpose. Now that Durov has tested the benches of a dungeon, Telegram will surely be more willing to comply with the European DSA moderation rules. However, the actions of Brazilian judge Moraes that target Twitter are going nowhere. There is no one responsible for the platform within his jurisdiction because Elon has fired them all. Any blockage will be circumvented by the use of VPNs, and the threat of sanctioning users who break the ban will end up with identified users being silenced while anonymous accounts, the bots of disinformation, the target of judicial activity, will continue to run rampant.
The spaces of impunity are filled with intelligent regulation and not with inert pages that no one can apply in the real world. Let us stop wasting gunpowder on salvos and aim the legislation at the head.
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