/******** Recently an essay of mine has been published in the German issue of Technology Review (TR 10/2018), in which I examine the history of the internet in order to predict the fate of the blockchain technology, especially regarding to it’s promise of decentralization. This is a translated and also extended version of the German text. ********/ „The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.“ The sentence became the battle cry of the early internet activists in the 1990s. It was coined by John Gilmore, co-founder of the digital civil rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in a 1993 interview with Time Magazine.1 It summed up the internet’s promise of technological freedom in a nutshell: „If you put the scissors in one place on the internet, the flow of information will simply bypass that place and still arrive unhindered at the recipient.“ This uncensoredness has always been an essential part of the Internet’s promise of freedom and is based on its „decentralization“. Looking back, one can argue whether the internet has ever delivered on this promise. Today, Google, Amazon and Facebook laugh at the dreams of a hierarchy-free internet. The Internet has certainly shifted the balance of power … Weiterlesen →