A World to Win: Internet Enclosure w/ Ben Tarnoff

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4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

This week, Grace speaks to Ben Tarnoff, author of Internet for the People. They talk about the origins of the web, how it was enclosed and privatized, and ways we might work together to build a different model for the internet.

A World to Win is a podcast from Grace Blakeley and Tribune bringing you a weekly dose of socialist news, theory, and action with guests from around the world. Thanks to our producer Conor Gillies and to the Lipman-Miliband Trust for making this episode possible.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another episode of A Well To Win. This week I speak to Ben Tarnov,
0:17.2	author of Internet For The People, The Fight For Our Digital Future. We talk about the origins
0:23.3	of the internet and how it was enclosed into the privatised system that we have today,
0:29.4	as well as how we could work together to build a different model for the internet.
0:33.8	As always, thank you so much to all of our amazing patrons, you are the ones who make this
0:39.2	show possible. If you have not already signed up to become a patron, please consider doing
0:44.1	so at patreon.com slash A Well To Win Pod. There's a link in the description. If you want
0:49.5	to support the show in another way, please do share this episode on social media, tagging
0:53.9	at A Well To Win Pod on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Now here is this week's interview
0:59.7	with Ben Tarnov. How are you doing today, Ben? Well, thanks so much for having me, Grace.
1:09.8	Thank you so much for being here. So, the first question I want to ask you about the book
1:16.0	is that there is this interesting tension at the beginnings of the internet. Although,
1:21.2	whether or not it's actually a tension is an interesting question. The fact that it never would
1:24.7	have happened without a huge public investment and the open source ethos, but also that early
1:30.7	investment reflected the particular interests of the US military. How do you think that that
1:37.2	influence the origins and development of the internet? Yeah, it's a good question that helps us get
1:43.3	to where the internet comes from. In the United States, we often say that the Pentagon is how we
1:48.9	do industrial policy. And I think the internet is a useful illustration of that. Here is this
1:55.4	breakthrough technology that requires billions of dollars of public money to invent, to develop,
2:02.8	to the point of maturity. But in order for such an experiment to be conceivable, it had to come out
2:11.5	of military funding in particular in DARPA, which is the Pentagon's R&D arm. And there is a
2:18.5	specific military pretext for developing the first internet protocol, a protocol being a set
	...

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