Douglas Rushkoff, in Shareable magazine, calls for abandoning the internet and the construction of a new one.

I must disagree that it is an either/or proposition. Yes, indeed, the current internet infrastructure has become corporatized and is under the control of censoring governments, but unlike fully centralized media with one point of access, the internet is still distributed in many aspects, and we cannot assume we have lost the fight, such as for example over network neutrality, open standards, and free network services. Both struggles, that for independent distributed resources and for the defense of the current hybrid internet, have to be conducted at the same time. The success of many user revolts, and corporate backtracks, shows that many things can still be achieved. The internet will be the result of a social compromise between users/producers and platform owners, we cannot abandon the terrain to them.

Douglas Rushkoff, excerpt:

” I propose we abandon the Internet, or at least accept the fact that it has been surrendered to corporate control like pretty much everything else in Western society. It was bound to happen, and its flawed, centralized architecture made it ripe for conquest.

Just as the fledgling peer-to-peer economy of the Late Middle Ages was quashed by a repressive monarchy that still had the power to print money and write laws, the fledgling Internet of the 21st century is being quashed by a similarly corporatist government that has its hands on the switches through which we mean to transact and communicate. It will never truly level the playing fields of commerce, politics, and culture. And if it looks like that does stand a chance of happening, the Internet will be adjusted to prevent it.

The fiberoptic cables running through the streets of San Francisco and New York are not a commons, they are corporate-owned. The ISPs through which we connect are no longer public universities but private media companies who not only sell us access but sell us content, block the ports through which we share, and limit the applications through which we create. They are not turning the free, public net into a shopping mall. It already *is* a shopping mall. Your revolutionary YouTube video has a Google advertisement running across the bottom. Yes, that’s the price of “free” when you’re operating on someone else’s network.

But unlike our medieval forebears, we don’t have to defend our digital commons from corporate encroachment. Fighting and losing that un-winnable battle will only reinforce our sense of helplessness, anyway. Instead of pretending that the Internet was ever destined to be our social and intellectual commons, we can much more easily conspire together to build a real networked commons, intentionally. And with this priority embedded into its very architecture and functioning.”