Internet Access

Access to Broadband Risks

The director of a massive Department of Commerce program to improve rural broadband access has quit the government over concerns that the agency would delay the initiative to lavish Starlink with federal funds. In a departure email last week, Evan Feinman, who led the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, directed his ire at Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. “Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” he wrote. Feinman urged the Trump administration against changing BEAD “to benefit [satellite] technology that delivers slower speeds at higher costs to the household paying the bill.”

Lutnick recently said he would overturn BEAD guidelines prioritizing wired internet providers over satellite providers. But the change, according to Feinman, will lead to complications for multiple states on the verge of starting their BEAD-funded projects. “These more-sweeping changes will only cause delays,” he wrote. “Shovels could already be in the ground in three states, and they could be in the ground in half the country by the summer without the proposed changes to project selection.”

The Death of Open Web

Internet users must actively fight against the people trying to restrict and commoditize the internet. Websites like ours are made possible because of a fighting anti-web3 movement

Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead -- a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we're building an increasingly user-hostile web.

- Parimal Satyal

Current Web Traps

• Almost every website we visit reports your activities to third parties that you cannot confirm or trust
• Access to so much information to us allows for manipulative and targeted messaging to drive our behavior
• Social media sites have hardwire hacked our brain for the convenient and easy rush of domamine and created more risk to in real life socialization. Places like China who currently boasts the 2nd highest rate of online addiction is a fearful look into the future of how this impacts us.
• Virtual goods are sold at a cost and create an artificial scarcity to drive purchases (see gatcha gaming for example)

And this is what we often fail to realize: without its users—without you— Facebook would be nothing. But without Facebook, you would only be inconvenienced. Facebook needs you more than you need it.

- Parimal Satyal

How to Protect Yourself from Predatory Web

• Switch to an open source browser such as Firefox, Min or Chromium
• Install an ad blocker - it not only protects you from annoying ads but also third party tracking
• Install HTTPS Everywhere
• Limit the amount of information you share with social media sites
• Quit social media sites that are being unethical with your data and find new places to be with your friends
• Pay for services as directly as possible to creators you trust
• Use services like Pinboard.in to engage in more centralized content sharing

Sources:

• Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
• Webbkoll A Swedish tool created to check web privacy and work towards data protection for users
• Say No to Web3