Paul Fernhout unearthed this older piece from Langdon Winner:

“One especially foggy area in cyberlibertarian rhetoric is its depiction of matters of power and distribution. Who stands to gain and who will lose in the transformations now underway? Will existing sources of injustice be reduced or amplified? Will the promised democratization benefit the populace as a whole or just those who own the latest equipment? And who gets to decide? About these questions, the cyberlibertarians show little concern.

Characteristic of this way of thinking is a tendency to conflate the
activities of freedom seeking individuals with the operations of enormous, profit seeking business firms. In the Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, concepts of rights, freedoms, access, and ownership justified as appropriate to individuals are marshaled to support the machinations of enormous transnational firms. We must recognize, the manifesto argues, that “Government does not own cyberspace, the people do.” One might read this as a suggestion that cyberspace is a commons in which people have shared rights and responsibilities. But that is definitely not where the writers carry their reasoning.

What “ownership by the people” means, the Magna Carta insists, is simply “private ownership.” And it eventually becomes clear that the private entities they have in mind are actually large, transnational business firms, especially those in communications. Thus, after praising the market competition as the pathway to a better society, the authors announce that some forms of competition are distinctly unwelcome. In fact, the writers fear that the government will regulate in a way that requires cable companies and phone companies to compete. Needed instead, they argue, is the reduction of barriers to collaboration of already large firms, a step that will encourage the creation of a huge, commercial, interactive multimedia network as the formerly separate kinds of communication merge. They argue that “obstructing such collaboration — in the cause of forcing a
competition between the cable and phone industries — is socially elitist.”

From that standpoint, The Magna Carta moves on to advocate greater
concentrations of power over the conduits of information which they are confident will create an abundance of cheap, socially available bandwidth.

Today developments of this kind are visible in the corporate mergers that have produced a tremendous concentration of control over not only the conduits of cyberspace but the content it carries. We see elaborate weddings between Turner Broadcasting and Time Warner, ABC and Disney, and other media giants. What, one wonders, ever happened to the predicted collapse of large, centralized structures in the age electronic media? And what happened to the movement of power closer to the realm of everyday actors and decisions?

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The larger issue concerns the problems for a democratic society created when a handful of organizations control all the major channels for news, entertainment, opinion, artistic expression, and the shaping of public taste. In the dewy-eyed vision cyberlibertarian thought, such issues are bracketed and placed out of sight. As long as we are getting rapid economic growth and increased access to broad bandwidth, all is well. To raise questions about emerging concentrations of wealth and power around the new technologies would only detract from the mood of celebration.

The combined emphasis upon radical individualism, enthusiasm for free
market economy, disdain for the role of government, and enthusiasm for the power of business firms places the cyberlibertarian perspective strongly within the context of right wing political thought. Indeed, The Progress and Freedom Foundation that sponsored the Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, is the creation of Newt Gingrich and his associates. It is no coincidence that a radical cyberlibertarian vision is to an increasing extent the position of persons who call themselves “conservatives.” In Gingrich’s view, the celebration of cyberspace is directly linked to the attempts repeal the New Deal and major social reforms enacted this century. Following the logic of
cyberlibertarianism one affirms a range of anti-government, anti-welfare, anti-labor, anti-environment, and anti-public education policies. One aspect of this thrust is the rejection of any and all attempts to guide technological development in ways shaped by publicly debated, democratically determined social choice, a commitment made more than clear by the abolition of the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress. In his most
enthusiastic moments, Gingrich describes the computer as a powerful social solvent that can help dissolve existing institutions in education, medicine, law and the like, institutions that he associates with an outmoded welfare state. As he asked a gathering at the Heritage Foundation in late 1996, “Why can’t we have expert systems and advanced computers replace 80 percent of the legal system?” (Koprowski, 12)

It is interesting to speculate about how it happened that prominent views about computing and society have become associated with a political agenda of the far right. There are a number of explanations one might give, explanations about the rise of the electronics industry in the of the Cold War, or about the role of former hippies in Norther California’s high tech industries who now affirm libertarianism as the spirit of Haight/Ashbury finally realized. But such speculation is a project for another occasion.

The pressing challenge now is, in my view, something entirely different: Offering a vision of an electronic future that specifies humane, democratic alternatives to the peculiar obsessions of the cyberlibertarian position.
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In sum, my suggestion is not that we need a cyber-communitarian philosophy to counter the excesses of today’s cyberlibertarian obsessions. Instead is a recommendation to take complex communitarian concerns into account when faced with personal choices and social policies about technological innovation. Superficially appealing uses of new technology become much more problematic when regarded as seeds of evolving, long term practices. Such
practices, we know, eventually become parts of consequential social
relationships. Those relationships eventually solidify as lasting
institutions. And, of course, such institutions are what provide much of the actual framework for how we live together. That suggests that even the most seemingly inconsequential applications and uses of innovations in networked computing be scrutinized and judged in the light of what could be important moral and political consequences. In the broadest spectrum of awareness about these matters we need to ask: Are the practices, relationships and institutions affected by people’s involvement with networked computing ones we wish foster? Or are they ones we must try to modify or even oppose?”