The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

/edit i guess it could be possible to drive South and end up in key west but it will be daylight long before you run out of road.

I can't imagine it will be well received here in HN, where I imagine most regulars will side with Barlow, but if it reaches at least some of them (I know skeptics about cyberlibertarianism exist even here), I'll be glad.

No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.

But "corporation" is an extremely broad term. Mom and pop businesses are corporations. A friend and I own a corporation that makes games, just the two of us, no employees. But Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc. are also corporations. So "corporation" doesn't capture what's bad about the latter.

> The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations.

No, that's not correct. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that, first, corporations are not people--they don't have the same rights as people do. They are tools that people can use in a free market to more efficiently produce things and create wealth. But that's all they are. If we had that kind of free market, corporations that are larger than many countries probably wouldn't even exist.

Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market. The original concepts behind those corporations arose in what was more or less a free market--Larry and Sergey didn't need to get anyone's permission to put the original Google on the web, Jobs and Wozniak didn't need to get anyone's permission to build the first Apple computers. But at the scale those corporations are now, they cannot exist without the support and favoritism of governments. (And not just the US government; Apple, for example, would be dead in the water if it did not have the cooperation and support of the Chinese government for its manufacturing base.) And that means they are not products of "libertarian ideals". They might have started out that way, but they didn't, and couldn't, scale that way.

> Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires.

Sure we would. Zuckerberg isn't a billionaire because of copyright. He's a billionaire because he's convinced a substantial fraction of the entire planet that it's perfectly normal, routine, nothing to see here, to have an immensely valuable social networking tool appear by magic on the Internet for free. Same goes for the Google billionaires. Bezos isn't a billionaire because Amazon holds valuable copyrights; he's a billionaire because he sells something valuable, "what I want delivered to my door when I want it" convenience, and he's able to curry government favors so he can bully his supply chain into making that happen. Apple isn't sitting on a huge pile of cash because of copyrights; it's because they make devices that give a significant minority of the market what they want, no fuss, and governments let them manufacture those devices on the cheap while the market they're selling to is upscale.

Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in. But they'd do just as well, if not better, in a world without copyrights, as long as that world still had governments who would give them the favoritism they get now.

In the traditional 18th-century nation state model, events always happen somewhere, and it's the government with jurisdiction over that piece of land which decides whether those events are legal or not.If they want those events to stop, they use their monopoly on violence in that place to arrest you and make you stop. This basically doesn't work in cyberspace.

You can't steal candy from a store in Romania without physically being in Romania. This gives Romanian authorities the ability to arrest anybody who steals candy from Romanian candy stores, which makes their anti-theft law enforceable. In cyberspace, things are not so simple. If a German employee of a company incorporated in Delaware with servers in Northern Virginia uses company resources to DeDoS a Slovenian competitor, which prison should they rot in? Who should set the sentence? There's no answer here without unacceptable tradeoffs.

This problem is just going to get bigger and bigger with crypto, AI and drones. It's already possible for. Russian to coordinate a network of American spies, paying handsomely for their service, without ever falling in reach of American law enforcement. With drones, they'll soon be able to do the spying (or the assassinations) themselves.

I would be extremely surprised if we don't see a terrorist attack in the next 10 years where the culprits have never set foot in the country the attack happens in.

And there are examples where this actually works - like the stock exchange: people agree that to be able to take good decisions, the publicly listed companies must be transparent.

Of course changing from "full secrecy mode" to "let's be more transparent" can't happen suddenly, but there are places where there are more transparent (ex: in Norway you can ask for someones tax declaration) and the country continues to function. And you can't do it in all places: if you are in a place where people hate each other for various reasons with passion (ex: skin color, place of birth, what you believe in etc.) then keeping secrecy is smart while the society solves the other things. If you think secrecy is what protect I think it is taking a huge chance. Hatefull people around will make at some point a mess and can affect someone, secrecy or not.