Once upon a time

Once upon a time, the intertubes were the people wet dream, silicon and copper made, connecting each and every computer that could be physically connected to it. The tubes were made to be resilient, even with low resources, and a lot of volunteers worked day and night to maintain it alive.

It was the biggest home made construction. Think about it, from your internet box to any server connected in the world, there’s a physical link (once in copper, now in fiber optic), going across oceans and land, sometime the link goes up through a satellite but most of the time, everything is connected in a World Wide Web.

The internet was, back in the time, free to use (as long as you had access to it, you could do whatever you wanted to do), decentralised (if the cable running through the Atlantic was severed, you could still access your side of the internet, and even goes through the Pacific to reach the United States for instance) and without any control (you do not need DNS to publish content, you need people to know how to find you).

And everything was nice, and the RTC modems were singing their happiness song, long time before anyone heard the Nyan Cat.

And then everything goes faster

But states looked at it and realized that people could find any information they wanted to find, not only the one they could more or less control. They find that each reader of a blog is potentially a writer of another blog, or a musician, or a painter and will produce online content to be read by someone else.

But corporations saw that people were duplicating content, because that’s the only thing Internet can do: it duplicate content. Whenever you reach seeks, you make a local copy of the content hosted on the server (and yeah, that’s why I’m yelling at my fellow colleagues that they must clear their cache). So, corporations saw that anyone were copying anything, not like when you were doing mix-tapes (with a degradation on each copy) or when you were exchanging CDs with your friend (because, then you have no access to the physical item).

Corporations were upset and they killed the cat with headphones, aka napster. They, in fact, did something good for internet because, then, everyone remembered that internet is decentralized and that sharing must be decentralized also. So, emule and bittorent rises from the ashes of napster. No more single point of failure in the exchange process.

Corporations wouldn’t just let it go and accept they needed to change. Instead of changing (and growing up, and going next-level, like Pikachu turns into Raichu to face bigger challenge). So they get in touch with governments.

And they wrote ACTA down. Secretly. Without anyone knowing. They wrote a remote access tool that would inscribed in each and every constitution of the states that will sign it. They wanted to do it without anyone noticing it, because they knew from the beginning that what they were doing couldn’t survive to a public debate.

They wrote the only thing that could destroy democracy from the inside, without due process of law or without the people consent. And they almost succeed.

Here comes a new challenger

It would have succeed without the fierce determination of small groups of people. Those are called Liberty Fighter, or Civil Society. One, in particular, is fighting the European Arena, they are La Quadrature Du Net (aka LQDN). They oppose each try of ‘cultural lobbies’ to hinder our right to communicate.

They fight the Four Horsemen of Infocalypse each day, they’re not afraid of tackling our so called ‘Elected Representative’ in the different places of power in Europe or else where.

But they cannot do it alone. They need your support. It’s a full time job to read each law that can kill one of your liberty, to call and explain to our deputies why those laws should not get anywhere near a legal code of a country, to speak and hear in panels all around the world.

So, if you like your freedom of expression, if you like your intertubes being uncentralized and without control, if you like your nyan cat diving in the sky you must support them. And you can probably get a Tshirt for that.