Escaping black holes on the Internet

[Commentary] On March 14, 2014, Turkey shut down Twitter. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced, “We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.” He also said Turkey would “rip out the roots” of Twitter. Yes, and when I was in Istanbul last week, Twitter worked fine. That’s because Twitter’s roots are in the Internet.

Even if Turkey rips the roots out of the phone and cable systems that provide access to the Net, they can’t rip out the Net itself, because the Net is not centralized. It is distributed: a heterarchy rather than a hierarchy. At the most basic level, the Net’s existence relies on protocols rather than on how any .com, .org, .edu or .gov puts those protocols to use. The Internet is a world of ends rather than a world of governments, companies and .whatevers: a giant zero between everybody and everything on it. It cannot be reduced to any of those things, any more than time can be reduced to a clock. The Net is as oblivious to usage as are language and mathematics — and just as supportive of every use to which it is put. And, because of this oblivity, The Net supports all without favor to any.

[Doc Searls is a Fellow at the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barabara and alumnus Fellow of the Berkman Center at Harvard.]