They're Coming For Your Internet

By Nate Levesque

The Internet is an innovation unlike any other. It has revolutionized the way we communicate, work, and do business. When it comes to communication, it may be the most important invention in our history. On the web, all of us are creators and global citizens.
We've been fighting for a platform like the Internet since the invention of the telegraph, the first long distance, real-time communication network. We're on the brink of losing that fight and losing the Internet as we know it due to the greed of large corporations. Is the Internet doomed? Are we fated to become second-class citizens online? What might happen to our books, our apps, our porn, and our freedom of speech?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nate Levesque
• Release date: Mar 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393366126

Nate Levesque

Nate Levesque is a software engineer, independent author, and digital rights advocate. He writes about technology and digital rights, including his blog, his books, Please Upgrade for Access and The Thought Trap, and has written for Opensource.com. Nate holds a degree in software engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and builds networking products at his day job.

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Additional Information

The views expressed in this book are solely those of the author. They are not influenced by and do not reflect the views of any affiliations of the author other than by pure coincidence.

If at any point you find a factual error or poorly chosen source, you can make your concerns heard at www.natelevesque.com/factcheck

This book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. In short, this allows you to make and distribute derivative works based on this book without permission, as long as they are not used commercially and use a compatible license. Visit creativecommons.org for more information.

This is an independently published work and your support is appreciated. Thank you.

Revised March 2020

Beginnings

In 1844, Samuel Morse sent the first telegram from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland. By 1861, just under two decades after its invention, Western Union completed the first telegraph lines to connect the east and west coasts of the U.S. It was, for the first time, possible to instantly send a message coast-to-coast—and five years later in 1866, to send a message across the ocean.

Not long after, the telegraph network under the control of Western Union would be the center of a scandal to steal the 1876 U.S. election.

Though transformative, the telegraph—and as well as later communication networks—came with a problem. Building long distance lines was extremely expensive and only the largest of companies could afford to do it. Western Union already had a network that reached across the continent, and promised reliability and privacy. People, as well as other companies, simply paid Western Union for the use of its network.

Near real-time communication was such a