Joe Rogan upsets mainstream Rock Dinosaurs!

Joe Rogan Controversy Leads Rumble to Make Him a Public $100 Million Offer Rogan signed a deal that was reportedly "worth more than $100 million," with Spotify in 2019 to be the exclusive host of his podcast, according to CNBC. That deal has come under fire in recent weeks as clips of old episodes have resurfaced containing Rogan's use of racial slurs and spreading COVID misinformation. The controversy began earlier this month when a group of over 200 medical experts wrote a letter to Spotify asking the streaming platform to acknowledge the fact that Rogan's podcast had been a source of misinformation over COVID vaccines and treatments. In the following days, musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell had their music removed from the platform, citing the fact that they didn't want to share the space with Rogan. MSN News

Rogan signed a $100 million deal with the streaming service in late 2020, meaning that listeners could only tune into the podcast on Spotify. The controversial 54-year-old hasn't changed the 'Joe Rogan Experience' format since the move, although he, and his fans, want there to be a comments section added, with many of them missing out on being able to comment as they could when it was on YouTube. Other than that though, things are clearly going swimmingly for Rogan and Spotify, with 'JRE' bringing in 4.5% of all the podcast listeners to the service, according to BusinessInsider. Sport bible

That 100 million dollar deal: Daniel EK publishing rights confusion.

podcaster Joe Rogan hosting a UFC event (left) and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek at a presentation in Japan in 2016 (right).

And this is where things get really confusing. Rogan signed a $100 million deal with Spotify, which is the exclusive home of his podcast. The Joe Rogan Experience was previously available for free but Spotify paid to get this content and publishes it. Any reasonable person would describe Spotify as the publisher of his podcast. And yet Ek insists Spotify isn't Rogan's publisher. But Ek said he's taking concrete steps to make his company better. Or at least that's how he's positioning it. "If we believe in having an open platform as a core value of the company, then we must also believe in elevating all types of creators, including those from underrepresented communities and a diversity of backgrounds. We've been doing a great deal of work in this area already but I think we can do even more. So I am committing to an incremental investment of $100 million for the licensing, development, and marketing of music (artists and songwriters) and audio content from historically marginalized groups," Ek wrote. "This will dramatically increase our efforts in these areas. While some might want us to pursue a different path, I believe that more speech on more issues can be highly effective in improving the status quo and enhancing the conversation altogether. While Ek might be commended for investing $100 million in marginalized groups, remember that Spotify spent $100 million on just one guy—the guy that's causing them all this trouble in the first place. MSN news

Dinosaur Laurel Canyon candidate No1.: Neil Young

Neil Young has never been quiet about his hatred of streaming, Big Tech, or the digitization of the music experience in general. But the veteran rocker escalated the crusade earlier this week, when he posted (and then deleted) a letter on his website asking his manager and an executive at his label, Warner Bros., to pull his entire catalog from Spotify. Artists have long criticized the streaming platform for not compensating musicians fairly, but Young cited a different reason for his action: Joe Rogan. The most popular podcaster in the world has been trafficking in COVID misinformation and promoting quack treatments on his show throughout the pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci has pushed back against Rogan’s snake oil, and earlier this month, 270 global health professionals signed an open letter countering the COVID misinformation on The Joe Rogan Experience. Slate.com

Neil Young announced he was pulling his back catalogue from the Spotify platform - but it turns out that he does not own his own half his music back catalogue How do you get something pulled if actually it is owned & managed by another company, who own the rights...? 50% of Neil Youngs music is owned by Hipgnosis The owner of Hipgnosis music fund is Merck Mercuriadis In October 2021, the WEF linked Blackstone Group announced a partnership with Hipgnosis Songs Management backed by $1 billion in funds managed by Blackstone. It also acquired an ownership stake in Hipgnosis. Oh as a sign of his fight against big data - off he went to that conscientious mega corporation: Amazon. You could not make this shit up!

Dinosaur Laurel Canyon candidate no 2. : Joni Mitchell

Never trust a hippy fellow Hippy 70's dinosaur David Crosby admits he doesn't own his music pulls his back catalogue too. hmm this doesn't look orchestrated at all.

Joni Mitchell also followed suit supporting Neil Youngs decision Does she own her own music? Joni Mitchell sold her music catalogue to a company that is funded by Big PHaRMA investment industry - follow the money She has a Global Admin Deal With Reservoir Media. RESERVOIR whose investment company (meaning they get their funding from) Persis Holding is also invested in:DRI CAPITAL Global leader in healthcare investing involved in many of the big PhARma companies including: Pfizer, astrazeneca, johnson&johnson Owner of Resevior media Reservoir was founded in 2007 as a Music Publishing Company by Iranian-Canadian Golnar Khosrowshahi, investors include Vangaurd & Schwab Captial trust Charles Schwab is a full service broker with more than $6.6 trillion in client assets on its platform Holders of stock in Schwab? round and round it goes: where it stops nobody knows

Dr Robert Malone DARPA CIA connected whistleblower -
or stooge of the psyops manipulation industry?

Must read: In defense of Robert Malone with many citations.

Malones appearance, (along with Dr Mcullough) on Rogans show is the main cause of the controversy...but shortly after the backlash became global ...Joe Rogan apologized to Spotify and musicians amid boycott over his podcast - interestingly, a re-Surfaced Clip Shows Joe Rogan Praising Vaccines, Slamming Vaccine Conspiracy Theorists hmmm... why would someone who respects the opinion of Mallone and McCullough apologise? Could it be that Rogan is a $100 million dollar fink? A set up? A stooge?

mad rush to get on the Ban Joe Bandwagon:

Spotify CEO Addresses Joe Rogan Controversy: "We Don't Change Our Policies Based on One Creator Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Roxane Gay, and Mary Trump have all pulled their songs and podcasts from the service, as have Young's former bandmates David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash. Ex-Royals Harry & Megan have joined in too. Jon Stewart & The Rock have seemingly sided with Roganas is this interesting take on Rogan by fellow comedian Joey Diaz says he got $100million has to apologize and jump when they say jump!

Neil Young was misinformed?
Move to debunk conspiracy theories:

Neil Young has been busy both debunking and correcting, as his big beef with Spotify continues. He’s been correcting himself, but the debunking relates to a conspiracy theory that has been circulating that he’s only complaining about COVID misinformation in the Joe Rogan Experience podcast because vaccine maker Pfizer owns his songs catalogue. It does seem unlikely that a pharmaceuticals company would own Young’s songs, but there is a sort of logic to how this conspiracy theory came about. And, in fact, for said conspiracy theory to stand up, all you need to do is ignore most of the facts. Like all the great conspiracy theories. The basic allegation runs as follows: Pfizer is an investor in Hipgnosis and it was Hipgnosis that acquired a 50% share in Young’s publishing catalogue last year. Linking all that together, some believe it’s obvious that Pfizer has been very busy of late exploiting its control over Young’s music to pressure him to start a big old fuss in order to convince young people to eat up their yummy vaccines. However, the one issue with this is that Pfizer isn’t an investor in any of the various Hipgnosis ventures. A former CEO of the company is a senior advisor to investment outfit Blackstone, which has set up a music rights investment fund with Hipgnosis and bought into the Hipgnosis Song Management company.

The Offending meme: who put this in the mix?

But that’s a pretty weak connection between the pharma firm and Young. Plus Blackstone has no direct involvement in the specific Hipgnosis Songs Fund that has a stake in his songs catalogue. “The publishing share Hipgnosis has in my copyrights is in the Hipgnosis Songs Fund that is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange”, wrote Young. “The Blackstone investment went into a separate Hipgnosis Private Fund and none of that money was used for the Hipgnosis Songs Fund. Pfizer has not invested in Hipgnosis but a past Pfizer CEO is a senior advisor for Blackstone”. Referencing the Farm Aid initiative he helped launch back in the 1980s, he concluded: “So much for big Pharma. So much for PHARM aid! Clever but wrong”. As for Young’s big old correction, that related to past messages posted on his website regarding his decision to remove his music from Spotify because of COVID misinformation in Rogan’s Spotify exclusive podcast. That boycott, he has repeatedly stressed, was prompted by an open letter to Spotify about Rogan’s COVID misinformation signed by 270 experts.

Well, Young said “doctors”. And not all the signatories of that letter were in fact doctors, he has now admitted, but he originally believed they were due to confusing headlines in The Guardian and Rolling Stone saying as much. “The letter that prompted me to act on Spotify was written by 270 hundred medical professionals, not doctors”, he has now clarified. “I erroneously said they were doctors after having read disinformation on the internet”, he added. “About a third of them were doctors. But many of the rest were nurses and hospital assistants. I respect and honour all those people and the work they continue to do as I write this”. “I read their whole letter”, he went on. “I still support them. My mistake was calling them all doctors. I read and usually believe The Guardian and The Guardian made a rare mistake”. He then cited the misleading headlines. The Guardian had written “Menace to public health: 270 doctors criticise Spotify over Joe Rogan’s podcast”, while Rolling Stone went with: “A menace to public health: Doctors demand Spotify puts an end to COVID Lies on Joe Rogan Experience”. “So I was misinformed too”, he continued. “Glad it wasn’t a life and death decision for me. I still stand beside the medical professionals and others who signed that great letter. I stand with them, at their side”. This – like Young’s original post on his website criticising Rogan’s podcast – has since been deleted for reasons unknown. Still, that means that the latest post on said website is that in which he calls on Spotify staff to quit their jobs, so that’s fun. Whether any did – just like whether or not a significant number of people have closed their Spotify accounts in solidarity with Young – remains unclear. Complete Music Update

Joe has pulled his own Pods before!

Who is Pulling who?

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek confirms removal of Joe Rogan episodes after n-word video resurfaces Rogan chose to pull the episodes; Spotify will also spend $100m on content from marginalized groups Spotify CEO Daniel Ek addressed staff in a late night memo addressing Joe Rogan's use of the n-word and the mysterious removal of 70 podcast episodes earlier this week. The total number of deleted Joe Rogan Experience episodes is now 113, according to the website jremissing.com. "Not only are some of Joe Rogan's comments incredibly hurtful " I want to make clear that they do not represent the values of this company, Ek writes in the memo, which The Verge obtained. "I know this situation leaves many of you feeling drained, frustrated and unheard. He goes on to say Spotify spoke with Rogan and his team about "some of the content in his show, including his history of using some racially insensitive language. Following these chats "and his own reflections, Ek says Rogan "chose to remove a number of episodes from Spotify. The Verge

Spotify ownership publishing nonsense! hmmm

Spotify CEO Says Man He Gave $100 Million Does Not Represent Values of His Company And this is where things get really confusing. Rogan signed a $100 million deal with Spotify, which is the exclusive home of his podcast. The Joe Rogan Experience was previously available for free but Spotify paid to get this content and publishes it. Any reasonable person would describe Spotify as the publisher of his podcast. And yet Ek insists Spotify isn't Rogan's publisher. Ek went on to say the company is consulting with outside "experts, who weren't named, and said he wants to, "further balance creator expression with user safety. MSN

Spotify

Spotify is owned by SPOTify technology SA - and its not a surprise to see its investors are many of the same massive hedge funds - Vangaurd & Blackrock Wellington fund etc etc But over the last 3 years strange things have been happening and no one seemed to know who exactly owned what. 2019, Google announced the acquisition of the world-renowned swedish music streaming service. The price of the announced deal was truly astronomical "$ 43.4 billion".

In this CNBC article - Daniel Ek discusses 4th Q earnings The company expanded to become more than a music company to reach more than 50 million people with more than a billion in "user opportuniities" Could it be that Tabloid type controversy drives the money in? Never? Really?

Hedging bets & psyops media manipulation?

Edward Dowd hero or zero? is a former Blackrock hedge fund manager who started digging into death statistics from insurance companies and funeral homes: He also started accusing Pfizer and Moderna of fraud in the vaccine clinical trials. Then the Moderna CEO, Stephane Bancel, deleted his twitter account 2 days ago: (account) He has dumped $400M worth of MRNA stock: Noubar Afeyan is another Moderna cofounder who has dumped shares for $1.5B. They have a huge incentive to do another pump&dump with another risky vaccine: Former Blackrock Hedge fund manager Ed Dowd On Bannons war room (20 minutes in) former Blackrock Ed Dowd says: "i'm not in this for personal gain - i want the hedge funds to make money, i want to be a lightning rod" The Bannon War room Program includes Dr Robert Malone who Praises Ed Dowd - "he wrote the Malone doctrine" they met and have obviously conspired. Interestingly it was Dowd who arranged the Paine reports interview with Pfizer whistleblower Brook Jackson Are Blackrock sending in the clowns to engage in manipulation? create controversy / spook markets / tip the balance in favour of market manipulation & short options? Media Repositioning psyops: This Radio host seems to be upset about losing his job because: censorship! - then plugs spotify at 20 bucks a month!

It's those pesky Russians & Chinese again!

what these people are achieving, is exactly what they accuse
their illusory adverseries of doing!

BBC - The global internet is disintegrating. What comes next? By Sally Adee - 15th May 2019 Source BBC Russia is the latest country to try to find ways to police its online borders, sparking the end of the internet as we know it. In 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, ending 30 years of war across Europe and bringing about the sovereignty of states. The rights of states to control and defend their own territory became the core foundation of our global political order, and it has remained unchallenged since. In 2010, a delegation of countries – including Syria and Russia – came to an obscure agency of the United Nations with a strange request: to inscribe those same sovereign borders onto the digital world. “They wanted to allow countries to assign internet addresses on a country by country basis, the way country codes were originally assigned for phone numbers,” says Hascall Sharp, an independent internet policy consultant who at the time was director of technology policy at technology giant Cisco. After a year of negotiating, the request came to nothing: creating such boundaries would have allowed nations to exert tight controls over their own citizens, contravening the open spirit of the internet as a borderless space free from the dictates of any individual government. Nearly a decade on, that borderless spirit seems like a quaint memory. The nations who left the UN empty-handed had not been disabused of the notion that you could put a wall around your corner of cyberspace. They’ve simply spent the past decade pursuing better ways to make it happen. Indeed, Russia is already exploring a novel approach to creating a digital border wall, and last month it passed two bills that mandate technological and legal steps to isolate the Russian internet. It is one of a growing number of countries that has had enough of the Western-built, Western-controlled internet backbone. And while Russia’s efforts are hardly the first attempt to secure exactly what information can and can’t enter a country, its approach is a fundamental departure from past efforts. “This is different,” says Robert Morgus, a senior cybersecurity analyst at the New America Foundation. an independent internet policy consultant who at the time was director of technology policy at technology giant Cisco. “Russia’s ambitions are to go further than anyone with the possible exceptions of North Korea and Iran in fracturing the global internet.” Russia’s approach is a glimpse into the future of internet sovereignty. Today, the countries pursuing digital “Westphalianism” are no longer just the usual authoritarian suspects, and they are doing so at deeper levels than ever before. Their project is aided as much by advances in technology as by growing global misgivings about whether the open internet was ever such a good idea to start with. The new methods raise the possibility not only of countries pulling up their own drawbridges, but of alliances between like-minded countries building on these architectures to establish a parallel internet. What’s wrong with the open internet? It’s well known that some countries are unhappy with the Western coalition that has traditionally held sway over internet governance. It’s not just the philosophies espoused by the West that troubles them, but the way those philosophies were baked into the very architecture of the internet, which is rather famously engineered to ensure no one can prevent anyone from sending anything to anyone. That’s thanks to the baseline protocol the 2010 delegation were trying to work around: TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet protocol) allows information to flow with absolutely no regard for geography or content. It doesn’t care what information is being sent, what country it’s coming from, or the laws in the country receiving it; all it cares about is the internet address at either end of the transaction. Which is why, instead of sending data across predetermined paths, which might be diverted or cut off, TCP/IP will get packets of information from point A to point B by any means necessary. It’s easy to dismiss objections to this setup as the dying cries of authoritarian regimes in the face of a global democratising force – but the problems that arise don’t just affect authoritarian regimes. Any government might be worried about malicious information like malware reaching military installations and critical water and power grids, or fake news influencing the electorate. (my note: The West are doing the following too) “Russia and China were just earlier than others in understanding the potential impact that a massively open information ecosystem would have on humans and human decision-making, especially at the political level,” says Morgus. Their view was that a country’s citizens are just as much a part of the critical infrastructure as power plants, and they need to be “protected” from malicious information targeting them – in this case fake news rather than viruses. But this is not about protecting citizens as much as controlling them, says Lincoln Pigman, a Russia scholar at the University of Oxford and a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre think tank in London. A sovereign internet is not a separate internet Russia and China started talking publicly about the “sovereign internet” around 2011 or 2012, as Russia’s two-year “winter of protest” was beginning to take hold, and as internet-borne revolutions rocked other authoritarian regimes. Convinced that these revolts had been stirred up by Western states, Russia sought to stop disruptive influences from reaching their citizens – essentially creating checks at its digital borders. But internet sovereignty is not as simple as cutting yourself off from the global internet. That may seem counterintuitive, but to illustrate how self-defeating such a move would be, one need look no further than North Korea. A single cable connects the country to the rest of the global internet. You can disconnect it with the flip of a switch. But few countries would consider implementing a similar infrastructure. From a hardware perspective alone, it’s close to impossible. “In countries with rich and diverse connectivity to the rest of the internet, it would be virtually impossible to identify all the ingress and egress points,” says Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who maps the network of physical pipes and cables through which the global internet runs. Even if Russia could somehow find all the hardware by which information travels into and out of the country, it wouldn’t serve them very well to close these faucets, unless they are also happy to be separated from the world economy. The internet is now a vital part of global commerce, and Russia can’t disconnect itself from this system without mangling its economy. The trick, it would seem, is to keep some types of information flowing freely while impeding others. But how can this sort of internet sovereignty possibly work, given TCP/IP’s notorious agnosticism? The leader in separating problematic from authorised internet content has traditionally been China. Its Golden Shield, otherwise known as the Great Firewall of China, famously employs filters to selectively block certain internet addresses, certain words, certain IP addresses and so on. This solution is by no means perfect: it’s software-based, meaning that programmers can design further software to circumvent it. Virtual Private Networks and censorship avoidance software like Tor get around it. More to the point, the Chinese system won’t work for Russia. For one thing, “it relies heavily on the big Chinese platforms taking the content down”, says Adam Segal, a cybersecurity expert with US think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, whereas Russia is “more reliant on US social media companies”. Much of China’s advantage also comes down to the physical pipes its internet is built on. China, suspicious of the new Western technology from the get-go, only permitted very few entry and exit points to be built from the global internet into its borders, whereas Russia was initially quite welcoming of the internet boom and is now consequently riddled with interconnects. China simply has fewer digital borders to keep an eye on. So, Russia can’t afford to turn itself into a corporate internet. And it can’t replicate China’s approach. Russia is therefore working on a hybrid method that neither relies entirely on hardware nor on software – instead messing with the set of processes and protocols that determine whether internet traffic can move from its origin to its intended destination. Internet protocols specify how all information must be addressed by your computer, in order to be transmitted and routed across the global wires; it’s a bit like how a Windows machine knows it can’t boot up an Apple operating system. This is not one specific thing. “In effect a protocol is a combination of different things – like data, an algorithm, IP address – across different layers,” says Dominique Lazanski, who works on international internet governance and consults on standards development. One of the most fundamental of these is the DNS standard – the address book that tells the internet how to translate an IP address, for example 38.160.150.31, into a human-legible internet address like bbc.co.uk, and points the way to the server that houses that IP location. It’s DNS that Russia has been setting its sights on. At the beginning of April, the country was supposed to test a new method of isolating the entire country’s internet traffic so that citizen internet traffic would only stay within the country’s geographical boundaries instead of bouncing around the world. The plan – which was met with skepticism from much of the engineering community, if not dismissed outright – was to create a Russia-only copy of the DNS servers (the internet’s address book, currently headquartered in California) so that citizens’ traffic would be exclusively directed to Russian sites, or Russian versions of external sites. It would send Russian internet users to Yandex if they typed in Google, or the social network VK instead of Facebook. To lay the groundwork for this, Russia spent years enacting laws that force international companies to store all Russian citizens’ data inside the country – leading some companies such as LinkedIn to be blocked when they refused to comply. “If Russia succeeds in its ultimate plans for a national DNS, there wouldn’t be any need for filtering out international information. Russian internet traffic would just never need to leave the country,” says Morgus. “That means that the only stuff that Russians – or anyone – would be able to access from inside Russia is information that's hosted inside Russia, on servers physically in the country. That would also mean no one can access external information, whether that is their external cash or whether it's Amazon to buy that scarf.” Most experts acknowledge that Russia’s primary goal in doing this is to increase its control over its own citizens. But the action may have global consequences too. Governments hoping to gain "digital sovereignty" must find a way to control what information enters a country without blocking The approaches taken by Russia and China are too expensive for smaller countries to emulate, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be influential. “The spread particularly of repressive policies or illiberal internet architecture is like a game of copycat,” says Morgus. His observation is borne out by research done by Jaclyn Kerr at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Authoritarian adoption of digital solutions that shape the extent and type of Internet control they exert, she finds, is likely driven by three variables. The first is just what’s available out there. The second is whether the regime can afford to implement any of the available options. The third variable – “the policies selected by the states in the regime’s reference group” – is a kind of keeping up with the Joneses that explains why it has been described as a game of copycat: what policies have its buddies endorsed or chosen? This often hinges on the attitude of the regime; are its friends open or illiberal when it comes to internet control? Regarding the first variable, Russia's neighbours, like the Central Asian Republics, could certainly leverage Russia's architecture – like the Russian DNS – to connect only to the RUnet version of the internet. This would essentially expand the proposed borders of the RUnet to their periphery, says Morgus. The digital deciders As regards the third variable, the list of countries that find themselves attracted to more authoritarian internet governance seems to be growing. Not all countries fall neatly into one or the other of the “open internet” and “authoritarian repressive” peer groups when it comes to how they treat their countries’ internet. Israel for example, lies neatly between the two extremes, as Morgus and his colleagues Jocelyn Woolbright and Justin Sherman pointed out in a paper published last year. They found that over the past four years, “digital decider” states – Israel, Singapore, Brazil, Ukraine, and India among others – have drifted increasingly toward a more sovereign and closed approach to information. The reasons for their drift are varied, but several of these countries are in similar situations: Ukraine, Israel, and South Korea, which exist in a perpetual state of conflict, have found their adversaries weaponising the internet against them. Some experts find that the strategic use of the internet – in particular social media – has become like war. Even South Korea – despite its reputation as open and global – has developed a groundbreaking technique to crack down on illegal information online. But can the deciders really copy China or Russia’s model? China’s technological means to sovereignty is too idiosyncratic for smaller countries to follow; Russia’s is not yet fully tested. Both cost a minimum of hundreds of millions to set up. Two of the largest “digital decider” countries, Brazil and India, have long sought a way to deal with the global internet that relies neither on the “open values” of the West nor on closed national intranets. “Their internet and political values sit very much in the middle of the spectrum,” says Morgus. For the better part of the last decade, both have tried to come up with a viable alternative to the two opposing versions of the internet we see today. That innovation was hinted at in 2017, when the Russian propaganda site RT reported that Brazil and India would team up with Russia, China and South Africa, to develop an alternative they referred to as the BRICS Internet. Russia claimed it was creating the infrastructure to “shield them from external influence”. The plan fell through. “Both Russia and China were interested in pursuing BRICS, but the rest were less enthusiastic,” says Lazanski. “Brazil’s change in leadership in particular derailed it.” Belt Road Initiative Some see the groundwork being laid for a second try in the guise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, China’s “21st Century silk road” project to connect Asia to Europe and Africa by building a vast network of overland corridors, shipping lanes and telecommunications infrastructure in countries like Tajikistan, Djibouti and Zimbabwe. According to estimates from the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, China is now engaged in some 80 telecommunications projects around the world – from laying cables to building core networks in other countries, contributing to a significant and growing Chinese-owned global network. “There could be a very significant infrastructure element to these plans,”says Sim Tack, an analyst formerly with Jane’s who now works with the intelligence group Stratfor. One possibility is a scenario where enough of these countries join Russia and China to develop a similar infrastructure to a point where they could sustain each other economically without doing business with the rest of the world, meaning they could shut themselves off the Western internet. Smaller countries might prefer an internet built around a non-Western standard, and an economic infrastructure built around China might be the “third way” that allows countries to participate in a semi-global economy while being able to control certain aspects of their populations’ internet experience. Tack, however, argues that such a “self-sustainable walled off internet economy, while possible, is also extremely unlikely.” Maria Farrell of the internet freedom campaign organisation Open Rights Group doesn’t think it’s too far-fetched, though the separate internet may take a slightly different form. The Belt and Road Initiative, she says, offers a plug-and-play internet that gives “decider” countries, for the first time, an option for getting online that does not depend on the Western internet infrastructure. “What China has done is put together a whole suite of not just technology, but information systems, censorship training, and model laws for surveillance,” she says. “It’s the full kit, and the laws, and the training, to execute a Chinese version of the internet.” It’s cheap. And it’s being sold as a credible alternative to a Western internet that increasingly feels “open” in name only. “Nations like Zimbabwe and Djibouti, and Uganda, they don’t want to join an internet that’s just a gateway for Google and Facebook” to colonise their digital spaces, she says. Neither do these countries want to welcome this “openness” offered by the Western internet only to see their governments undermined by espionage. Along with every other expert interviewed for this article, Farrell reiterated how unwise it would be underestimate the ongoing reverberations of the Snowden revelations – especially the extent to which they undermined the decider countries’ trust in the open web. “The poorer countries especially, that scared the bejesus out of them,” she says. “It showed what we had all suspected was actually true.” Just as Russia is working to reinvent DNS, the Belt and Road Initiative’s plug-and-play authoritarian internet gives countries that sign up access to China’s [bespoke] internet protocols. “TCP/IP is not a static standard,” points out David Conrad, chief technology officer of the International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, which issues and oversees major domain names, and runs DNS. “It is always evolving. Nothing on the internet is unchanging.” But their evolution is careful and slow and based on global consensus on a single internet. If that were to change, TCP/IP might well bifurcate, says Morgus. For well over a decade, China and Russia have been pushing the internet community to nudge the protocol toward greater identifiability, adds Farrell, a development that won’t surprise anyone familiar with its mass adoption of face recognition for tracking its citizens in the physical world. Western contagion But maybe the authoritarian countries have less of a job to do than they thought. “More and more Western countries are being forced to think about what that means, sovereignty on the internet,” says Tack. In the wake of recent election meddling, and the well-documented practice by Russian governments to sow discord on Western social media, Western policymakers woke up to the idea that an open and free internet could actually harm democracy itself, Morgus says. “The parallel rise of populism in the United States and elsewhere, coupled with concerns about the collapse of liberal international order, saw many of the traditional open internet sword-bearers retreat into their shells.” Threats to the "open internet" continue to excite passionate responses - but some experts believe that change is now inevitable “It’s not about bad countries and good countries – it’s about any country that wants to suppress communications,” says Milton Mueller, who runs the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta. “The worst thing I’ve seen lately is the British online harms bill.” This white paper proposes the creation of an independent regulator, tasked with establishing good practices for internet platforms to follow and punishments to mete out if they don’t. These “good practices” limit the kind of information that would be familiar to anyone keeping up with recent Russian internet laws: revenge porn, hate crimes, harassment and trolling, content uploaded by prisoners, and disinformation. Indeed, the very multinationals that decider countries fear today might be eager to be enlisted to help them meet their goals of information sovereignty. Facebook has recently capitulated to growing pressure by calling for government regulation to determine, among other things, what constitutes harmful content: “hate speech, terrorist propaganda and more”. Google is rather famously working to have its cake and eat it too, by providing an open internet in the West (which it may open to Western governments every now and again) and a censored search engine in the East. “I suspect there will always be a tension between desires to limit communication but not limit the benefits that communication can bring,” says Conrad. A separate internet for some, Facebook-mediated sovereignty for others: whether the information borders are drawn up by individual countries, coalitions, or global internet platforms, one thing is clear – the open internet that its early creators dreamed of is already gone. “The internet hasn’t been one globally connected thing in a long time,” says Lazanski. Sally Adee is a freelance science and technology writer. She blogs at the science writing collective The Last Word on Nothing.

It's those Anti-Vaxxers again!

initially set up to provide protection to platforms
over free speech issues look at the reframe here:
ref: section 230 vaccine misinfo Bill

Klobuchar targets vaccine misinformation with Section 230 bill “We need a long term solution” that goes beyond removing accounts spreading falsehoods about the crisis, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said. Sen. Amy Klobuchar attends a Rules Committee hearing. By ALEXANDRA S. LEVINE - 07/22/2021 Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) introduced legislation Thursday to fight bogus medical claims online during health crises like the coronavirus pandemic. Her target: Section 230. Klobuchar's bill would carve out an exception to Section 230, the 1996 law that protects internet platforms from liability for content that users post, for health misinformation proliferating during public health emergencies — like the misinformation that has been running rampant about vaccines for Covid-19. “We need a long term solution” that goes beyond removing accounts spreading falsehoods about the crisis, Klobuchar said. “This legislation will hold online platforms accountable.” Why it matters: Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been pushing to amend or revoke the Section 230 statute — often for opposite reasons. Many congressional Democrats argue that social media platforms have leaned on Section 230 legal protections to flout responsibility for false and potentially dangerous content on their sites, like the medical misinformation that has undermined the uptake of Covid-19 vaccines. The Biden administration is struggling to fight vaccination misinformation, a problem that has contributed to vaccine hesitancy and a plateau in inoculation rates at a time when the Delta variant is sweeping the country and the U.S. appears to be backsliding on recovery. Klobuchar’s Health Misinformation Act of 2021, co-sponsored by Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), is one attempt to address that, and it would extend beyond just the current crisis. Under the measure, tech platforms would be on the hook for propagating false or misleading health content during any public health emergency that has been declared as such by the secretary of Health and Human Services. The secretary, with input from experts and the leaders of other federal agencies, would be tasked with defining what qualifies as health misinformation. What’s missing: Republican support. Political polarization around vaccinations is intensifying as some Republican lawmakers and conservative activists attack the vaccines and the administration’s strategy for deploying it. In this climate, without Republican buy-in, Klobuchar’s bill faces an uphill battle. Politico

So what's happening now? (global HONK!)

Being labelled Military - & even Russian!

Canada To France, New Zealand: Ottawa Truckers Inspire Worldwide Protest | Trudeau Vs Freedom Convoy

Valentines day freedom massacre!

Canada passes emergency act
GET PREPARED - CANADA BLOCKING ACCESS TO BANK ACCOUNTS
TEST RUN FOR NEXT STEP IN GLOBAL TYRANNY
ANYONE CAN BE FROZEN OUT

Feb 14th - In an unprecedented move, Prime Minister Trudeau invoked sweeping powers of The Emergencies Act enabling him to seize funds of his political enemies and deem them terrorists of Canada. Insurance companies ordered to cancel the car & truck insurance. Protesters not allowed to use any cryptocurrency under "Terrorist Financing" rules. No need for any court orders as State of Emergency in effect. The government can arrest and detain anyone without trial.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY HAPPEN NEXT?