With an ambitious decentralized platform, the father of the web hopes
it’s game on for corporate tech giants like Facebook and Google.
 

[Photo: Flickr user gdsteam]

By Katrina Brooker
FastCompany.com

Last week, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, asked me to come and see a project he has been working on almost as long as the web itself. It’s a crisp autumn day in Boston, where Berners-Lee works out of an office above a boxing gym. After politely offering me a cup of coffee, he leads us into a sparse conference room. At one end of a long table is a battered laptop covered with stickers. Here, on this computer, he is working on a plan to radically alter how all of us live and work on the web.

“The intent is world domination,” Berners-Lee says with a wry smile. The British-born scientist is known for his dry sense of humor. But in this case, he is not joking.

This week, Berners-Lee will launch, Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, in stealth mode, for the past nine months. Backed by Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it. In other words, it’s game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon. For years now, Berners-Lee and other internet activists have been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals control their own data and the internet remains free and open. But for Berners-Lee, the time for dreaming is over.

“We have to do it now,” he says, displaying an intensity and urgency that is uncharacteristic for this soft-spoken academic. “It’s a historical moment.” Ever since revelations emerged that Facebook had allowed people’s data to be misused by political operatives, Berners-Lee has felt an imperative to get this digital idyll into the real world. In a post published this weekend, Berners-Lee explains that he is taking a sabbatical from MIT to work full time on Inrupt. The company will be the first major commercial venture built off of Solid, a decentralized web platform he and others at MIT have spent years building.

ConservativeFiringLine.com

Today’s video of the day comes to us courtesy of Chris Sevier, and explains the Stop Social Media Censorship Act, a proposal that if enacted in all 50 states, could put a significant dent in the censorship we’ve been seeing from social media giants like Facebook and Google.

As Sevier explains, the bill draws off contract law and gives users a private right of action against sites with 75 million users or more.  There are protections for social media companies built into the measure, but it also imposes a $75,000 penalty and provides for additional penalties, damages, court costs and attorney fees, basically making it extremely expensive for companies like Facebook to continue the type of censorship we’ve seen recently.

Here’s the video:

Someone leaked to Breitbart an hour-long video of an “all hands” Google meeting that was held just after the 2016 election. The video features Google’s co-founder, Sergei Brin, its CEO, Sundar Pichai, and numerous other high-ranking “Googlers” speaking in turn about the election’s tragic outcome. It is stunning.

All of the speakers express grief over Donald Trump’s election. All of the speakers assume that every Google employee is a Democrat and is stunned and horrified that Hillary Clinton–the worst and most corrupt presidential candidate in modern history–lost. There is much discussion about what Google can do to reverse the benighted world-wide tide exemplified by Brexit and Trump’s election. The insane doctrine of “white privilege” rears its head.

You really have to see it to believe it. Having suffered through the hour-long cri de cœur–OK, to be fair, there is a huge element of schadenfreude, too, and you will relish much of it–you probably will have several reactions: 1) These people may have certain valuable technical skills, but they aren’t very bright and are unusually lacking in self-awareness. 2) It is remarkable that they can achieve such an extraordinary monoculture in an organization with thousands of employees. It must require vigorous enforcement of right-think. 3) It is easy to see how these uniformly left-wing robots/people seamlessly transitioned into Resisting the duly elected Trump administration.

Here is the video, then a final comment:

By Ryan Saavedra
DailyWire.com

Fox News host Tucker Carlson revealed in an exclusive segment Monday that a newly obtained email from inside Google allegedly shows the tech giant's pro-Hillary bias during the 2016 election.

"An email obtained exclusively by this show reveals that a senior Google employee deployed the company’s resources to increase voter turnout in ways she believed would help the Clinton campaign win in the last election," Carlson said.

The November 9, 2016 email obtained by Fox News reportedly came from Eliana Murillo, the former Head of Multicultural Marketing at Google.

"In her email, Murillo touts Google's multifaceted efforts to boost Hispanic in the election," Carlson said. "She knows that Latinos voted in record-breaking numbers, especially in states like Florida, Nevada, and Arizona."

Carlson reported that Murillo said that Arizona was a "key state for us," and bragged that the company "used its power to ensure that millions of people saw certain hashtags and social media impressions with the goal of influencing their behavior during the election."

"[Google] supported partners like Voto Latino to pay for rides to the polls in key states," the email allegedly states, describing the assistance as a "silent donation."

"Murillo then says that Google helped Voto Latino create ad campaigns to promote those rides," Carlson said. "At the end of her email, Murillo makes it clear that Google was working to get Hillary Clinton elected."

"Ultimately, after all was said and done, the Latino community did come out to vote, and completely surprised us," the email alleged states. "We never anticipated 29% of Latinos would vote for Trump. No one did."

"If you see a Latino Googler in the office, please give them a smile," the email allegedly continues. "They are probably hurting right now. You can rest assured that the Latinos of these blue states need your thoughts and prayers for them and their families."

This is the most comprehensive report produced by CNS News and details, what may be one of the greatest threats to free speech in American history,” Media Research Center (MRC) President Brent Bozell explains in a video highlighting MRC’s study on social media censorship.

By Robert Kraychik
Breitbart.com

Dr. Robert Epstein, the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and a panelist on Breitbart News’ “Masters of the Universe” town hall on Internet freedom, joined SiriusXM hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on Thursday’s Breitbart News Tonight to warn of technology firms’ growing political power.

Epstein pointed to Google’s dominance of the Internet search market.

“As it happens, 90 percent of search around the world is conducted on just one search engine,” noted Epstein. “There’s never been a precedent for anything like this, ever. You’ve got one company that’s controlling search around the world.”

Epstein added, “That’s a power to shift opinions that’s in the hands of a handful of people in one particular town in Northern California, affecting people around the world, with no way to counteract what they’re doing, with no competitors out there.”

Mansour requested Epstein’s commentary on social media companies’ suppression of conservative content.

Mansour said, “I have a sneaking suspicion that as we approach the midterms, they’re tightening the noose on conservative social media in ways that are not even quantitative. We won’t even know [for sure] if they’re doing it. We’ll just sort of suspect that they’re doing it. They just do these antics, these sorts of games that they play with us.

Mark Dice commentary on the full frontal assault on Free Speech by almost totally obliterating Alex Jones from almost every social media platform.

Even though the internet is aflame with controversy over the coordinated purge of Alex Jones and InfoWars from Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and  Apple, there is no real transparency over their decision and the process by which it was made.

Alex Jones and InfoWars have been top Twitter trends for hours, and even some left-wing journalists like Michael Tracey are decrying Silicon Valley’s Masters of the Universe appointing themselves the arbiters of free speech on the web.

But Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube have offered, at most, only copy and paste explanations for why they banned InfoWars content from their platforms — or why, after months of pressure from the Democrats and CNN, they all came to the same decision on the same day. Questions about transparency have a much broader scope that just the case of InfoWars and Alex Jones. Beyond the banning of other individuals such as Tommy Robinson, the same questions apply to a whole host of actions by the Masters of the Universe, including partnering with foreign governments to shut down accounts, shadowbanning users to limit the scope of their engagement, and mass user purges.

Breitbart News sent the following questions to Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple earlier today, and have yet to receive a real answer for most of them. Apple and YouTube chose to provide the same canned statement they provided to all other media outlets who contacted them, while Facebook and Spotify ignored our request entirely.
 

THE QUESTIONS SILICON VALLEY WON’T ANSWER

1) What content specifically from InfoWars/Alex Jones was found to be”hate speech” and otherwise rule breaking?

InfoWars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson confirmed to Breitbart News that none of the tech giants that targeted InfoWars and Alex Jones over the past 24 hours pointed to specific content that violated their terms of service.

ZeroHedge.com

A Wednesday article in VICE confirmed a report from last week by the Daily Wire's Ryan Saavedra which revealed that Twitter has been "shadow banning" conservative users by limiting the number of people who are able to view content from the affected users. 

While last week's discussion focused on a site-wide "Quality Filter Discrimination" shadow ban, which prevents anyone not already following a user from viewing their posts, Vice notes that many conservative accounts aren't able to be found when typing names into the Twitter search engine. 

The Republican Party’s chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Republican Congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman no longer appear in the auto-populated drop-down search box on Twitter, VICE News has learned. It’s a shift that diminishes their reach on the platform — and the same one being deployed against prominent racists to limit their visibility. The profiles continue to appear when conducting a full search — but not in the more convenient and visible drop-down bar. (The accounts appear to also populate if you already follow the person.)

Vice found the same wasn't true for Democrats: 

Democrats are not being “shadow banned” in the same way, according to a VICE News review. McDaniel’s counterpart, Democratic Party chair Tom Perez, and liberal members of Congress — including Reps. Maxine Waters, Joe Kennedy III, Keith Ellison, and Mark Pocan — all continue to appear in drop-down search results. Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same in Twitter’s search.

By Ron Paul

Last week the United States Supreme Court, in the case of South Dakota v. Wayfair, ruled that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause allows state governments to force out-of-state businesses to collect state sales taxes. This decision overturns the court’s precedent that a state could require only businesses with a “physical presence” in the state to comply with state tax laws.

Unless Congress exercises its authority under the Commerce Clause to counter this decision with legislation, retailers will have to calculate sales taxes on every online purchase. An error in calculating sales taxes could cause a small retailer to undergo a costly and time-consuming audit, or even audits by multiple state governments. The compliance costs, along with the sales taxes themselves, will raise the cost of online commerce, burdening consumers and limiting the growth of internet business.

The burdens imposed on online commerce by the court’s decision will fall particularly hard on smaller internet retailers that rely on online sales to stay open. Stifling the growth of smaller and new internet retailers may be bad for consumers, but it serves the interest of large brick-and-mortar retailers, as well as large online retailers that already have to comply with state sales taxes because they have a physical presence in most states. These large businesses support giving states new taxing powers because they wish to use government power to make sure their smaller competitors stay small.

Allowing states to tax internet retailers with no physical presence in their states — and thus limited influence over state legislators — violates the principle of no taxation without representation. Tax- and power-hungry politicians will likely use this new power not just to increase taxes, but to impose other tax and regulatory burdens on out-of-state businesses. Having the power to tax and regulate employers and workers who cannot retaliate at the polls is a dream come true for many politicians. By making almost all online purchases subject to sales taxes, the decision will also reduce pressure on states to keep sales tax rates low.

The Constitution’s drafters intended the Commerce Clause to create free trade among the states, not to enable states to impose taxes and regulations on out-of-state businesses. The growth of online commerce does not change the Commerce Clause’s purpose.

Allowing state governments to force out-of-state retailers to comply with state tax laws harms small businesses, harms the growth of online commerce, and raises prices. It also benefits politicians seeking new tax revenue and helps large, politically-powerful corporations.

Congress must protect consumers, taxpayers, and small businesses by passing legislation limiting states’ ability to extend their taxing power across their borders. This would be a rare instance of Congress using its Commerce Clause powers for the intended purpose of promoting free trade among the states, not enabling the growth of government.

This article first appeared at RonPaulInstitute.org.