Daniel Joseph* says that in the early 1970s, Canada envisioned its own internet free from US control — an idea that is finding new traction today in different parts of the world.
Photo: Pietro Jeng
Net neutrality is officially dead in most of the United States, and US-based Facebook is currently shaking off a massive data-abuse scandal.
These are morbid symptoms of American capitalism in digital communication, and it’s hard not to be cynical about the future of the internet.
But it didn’t have to end this way.
In the early 1970s some of the brightest minds in Canada conceived of a national computer network that could have sidestepped some of the problems with today’s internet.
At the very least, it shows that another kind of internet was, and remains, possible.
While America’s ARPANET program was creating a forerunner to today’s internet by networking military and academic computers with funding from the Department of Defence, Canada wanted to build its own nationwide system of networked computers that linked the country’s most powerful research computers — based at various universities — with the personal computers of casual users.
The “Trans-Canada Computer Communications Network” (TCCN) was envisioned as a system that didn’t rely on America and wasn’t beholden to its whims.
TCCN’s planned usage in the everyday life of Canadians was forward-looking.
A report published by the Science Council of Canada in August 1971 describes an engineer using TCCN to draw on a “conversational computing service in Saskatoon for rapid design calculations using pre-stored procedures; b) a data bank in Vancouver for design data and specifications; and c) an ‘electronic catalogue’ in Toronto for the latest prices of materials. All in the course of a morning’s work.”
The report suggested the Canadian network would be managed as a federated system, with a single “national spine” that linked together various regional networks that were tailored to and managed by the regions themselves.
The Council recommended the national spine be owned by a single organisation, either a Government-owned company or a public–private partnership.
This vision was in keeping with the general mood of liberalism in the 1970s.
Coming off of the social struggles against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and sexism in the 1960s, even establishment politicians were willing to entertain what some have called “technological sovereignty.”
Author and researcher Evgeny Morozov described this idea as a “an effort at the level of the United Nations to resist the idea that information should flow freely across borders in a way that these countries wouldn’t have any defence against the efforts of foreign, mostly American, companies to come in and extract whatever data they were producing.”
In short, Canada was concerned that unchecked American capitalism would eat Canada’s lunch if the US controlled the internet.
The opening paragraphs of the TCCN report unabashedly states that “a ‘laissez-faire’ attitude will eventually result in the supply of most computing and information services via spur lines from US computer communications networks. Such an outcome is completely unacceptable on economic and social grounds.”
TCCN came as a proposal at a time when Chile was also experimenting with its own approach to networked computing infrastructure, which never came to fruition.
But there were popular concerns about privacy regarding the TCCN, as evidenced by a 1971 episode of a CBC radio program dedicated to it.
One caller was worried the Government would use it to spy on or collect data from residents.
Dr Leon Katz, a representative of the Science Council, responded by noting the majority of Canadian citizens’ data wasn’t held by the Government, but by credit-rating agencies that sold this information for a profit.
His concern was that if Canada didn’t develop its own infrastructure that was accountable to the public, private, mostly US-based interests would move forward with the privatisation and commodification of personal information.
The Council’s report recommended a five-year study, but the network itself never materialised.
It’s clear now that Katz and the TCCN architects weren’t wrong to be concerned about a US-led internet.
Improperly collected data from Facebook has led to abuses of personal information — most recently in the case of Cambridge Analytica.
To Katz’s point about credit agencies in 1971, look to the personal information of millions of people that was stolen from Equifax in 2017.
And as we know from Edward Snowden’s leaks, some data collected by the US National Security Agency was sourced by intercepting communication between users and corporate databases.
We also see this trend of the concentration of money and power, generally, with the acquisition of franchises by transnational conglomerates like Microsoft.
A cursory glance at mobile app stores reveals that the most downloaded and most profitable apps are owned by US or European corporations.
Today, Canada, like most of the world, doesn’t have much in the way of internet infrastructure or platforms that are locally created and owned.
Even if TCCN had been created, there’s a good chance it would have eventually been privatised in much the same way as ARPANET, which was decommissioned as private commercial interests built out the internet in the 1990s.
That is, things wouldn’t look much different than they do today.
But decades after the TCCN dream died, some enthusiasts and activists are carrying the idea forward, in a way.
Faced with many of the same concerns as TCCN’s architects — the power wielded by private companies online, data abuse, and so on — some communities are currently working together to create local “mesh networks.”
Motherboard is in the process of building a community mesh network in Brooklyn, as well.
Papua New Guinea’s recent announcement that its Government is considering building its own Facebook alternative suggests that some countries are getting serious about new forms of technological sovereignty.
The proposal is double-edged, however — Papua New Guinea will also block Facebook for a month and conduct research on identifying users who post prohibited material under fake names.
As the domination of a few Silicon Valley monopolies becomes ever more apparent, we should keep in mind that a different internet is achievable, one that might put the interests of the average people who use it first.
* Daniel Joseph is a freelance writer and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto.
This article first appeared at motherboard.vice.com.
