Independence Has a Price Tag and Nobody Wants to Pay It
The internet stopped being free around the time everyone stopped noticing. Governments figured out that controlling digital infrastructure is cheaper and more effective than controlling broadcast media. Facebook and Google spent billions making sure entire countries run on their platforms. The NSA and its equivalents decided that collecting everything was more efficient than collecting something. And most people—even people who consider themselves switched on—absorbed all of this and kept scrolling.
Netzpolitik.org is one of the few places actually writing about this in a way that doesn’t read like a manifesto or a press release. They’re a German platform for digital civil liberties—net neutrality, surveillance, data rights, the slow enclosure of the commons—and they’ve been at it long enough to know what they’re talking about. They don’t pretend to be neutral, which is the only honest position: they’re advocates, and they say so. What they produce is closer to journalism than activism, but it’s journalism with a stated point of view, which I prefer to journalism that pretends it doesn’t have one.
The problem is the same one that’s been killing independent media for a decade: reader funding goes down as the work gets harder. About ninety percent of their budget comes from readers, and when people treat an open web as a given rather than something that requires active maintenance, donations dry up. The editorial team was blunt about it—without a meaningful increase in monthly support, they’d have to cut staff and reduce coverage. In practice that means the stories that don’t get written are the constructive ones, the ones about what to actually do, which are the stories most worth writing when surveillance is the ambient condition of existence.
You don’t have to read German to understand why this matters. Edward Snowden didn’t take those risks so that we could be comfortable about the outcome. Net neutrality is either something people defend or something companies and governments take away—there’s no passive option. Every time I hear someone explain why they don’t need to care about digital rights because they have nothing to hide, I think about how that logic works out historically. It doesn’t.