Ephemera

Splinternet is an irregular report from Ephemera. Once upon a time, we thought of the Internet as like the Wild West; anarchic and mostly empty. The dream of the World Wide Web was ‘all of the world’s knowledge, at all the world’s fingertips’. But this dream has failed to materialize. As Scott Malcomson says in his book ‘Splinternet’, from which I’ve taken the title of this series: “the Internet is cracking apart into discrete groups no longer willing, or able, to connect.”  This month, we’ll be looking at the regulatory approach of the European Union, which seeks to curtail and police the Internet, but in a way that defends the privacy and human rights of Internet users. This is quite different from authoritarian forms of policing the Net, and the EU are pioneers in uncharted territory on this. Are there problems with the EU’s approach to copyright and surveillance? Are they being adopted elsewhere? Will they work? --- SHOW NOTES: My sincere thanks go out to ephemera’s patrons. I couldn’t have done a resear