Steven Erlanger

The contemporary internet was built on a bargain: Show us who you really are and the digital world will be free to search or share. People detailed their interests and obsessions on Facebook and Google, generating a river of data that could be collected and harnessed for advertising. The companies became very rich. Users seemed happy. Privacy was deemed obsolete, like bloodletting and milkmen. Now, the consumer surveillance model underlying Facebook and Google’s free services is under siege from users, regulators and legislators on both sides of the Atlantic.

President Donald Trump routinely invokes the phrase “fake news” as a rhetorical tool to undermine opponents, rally his political base and try to discredit a mainstream American media that is aggressively investigating his presidency. But he isn’t the only leader enamored with the phrase.

Ecuador cut off Julian Assange’s access to the internet in his exile in the country’s London embassy, making clear that it feared being sucked into an effort to “interfere in electoral processes” in the United States by the activities of the WikiLeaks founder.

Ecuador is not evicting Assange from its embassy, where he sought asylum four years ago. It said that its “temporary restriction” of internet services to Assange “does not prevent the WikiLeaks organization from carrying out its journalistic activities.” But it was clearly intended to keep the embassy from being the control center for that leaking operation. “The government of Ecuador respects the principle of nonintervention in the affairs of other countries,” it said in a statement, “and it does not interfere in the electoral processes in support of any candidate in particular.”