Whether or not there's any substance to Anonymous' threats (or lack thereof) to 'destroy Facebook', I'd like to give you my take on the world's biggest anti-social network ever and it is a great danger to both its members as well as the open and free (as in freedom) internet as a whole. The sooner it (and its brethren) go away entirely, the better it'll be for all of humanity.

Stewardship over the Age of Information

At present you and I are still a privileged minority: the 'haves' when it comes to Internet access. I don't know about you, dear reader, but personally I feel deeply grateful and privileged to have been a witness to the dawn of the Age of Information.

My first private login to the Internet took place in 1994 and it was totally amazing. Not because of the content -there was hardly anything there worth mentioning except Pizza Hut- but because of the potential. The enormous potential just waiting to be tapped.

And oh boy did that potential get tapped! In the years that followed tons of web pages, music, porn, movies, porn, encyclopedic content, porn, games, porn, free software development, shops, porn and academic literature found their way to billions of viewers and all of that with an almost-zero cost of entry. Right now you can have your very own website online under your own domain name for around $10,- a year and independently publish anything you want on there.

It turns out though, after about 16 years of Internet for the masses, that the masses are gravitating towards walled gardens. A walled garden on the Internet is a service owned and controlled entirely by a single entity which dictates what you can and can not do with their Internet service. Think Facebook: you can do whatever you want on Facebook as long as the Facebook admins think it's OK. If they think it's not, you'll be kicked off the network in a heartbeat and without any explanation or recourse.

I don't see much of a problem in a commercial entity managing the content of a service that it itself creates and maintains by investing large sums of money and the sweat of their brows. I do take issue with the way in which such services purposefully work towards supplanting previously free (as in freedom) alternatives and the sheep-like mentality of many of their users.

Oooh, shiny!

<dl><dt>E-mail</dt><dd>Is being replaced with Twitter, Facebook and other services' direct messaging systems. At the same time RFC-compliant e-mail is moving wholesale to so-called cloud providers, such as Google, who proudly confess that they read your mail for marketing purposes and reserve the right to kick you out at their discretion.</dd><dt>Internet Relay Chat</dt><dd>Is being replaced with Facebook Chat, AIM, MSN and other commercially controlled realtime chat protocols.</dd><dt>Usenet</dt><dd>Usenet has probably never been bigger than it is today, but we're not using it for its intended purpose anymore. The fact that "warez" can be spread there so easily and anonymously speaks volumes about its freedom, though. The egalitarian discussion platform it used to be is being supplanted by the likes of Facebook and Google+.</dd><dt>Websites</dt><dd>The web is gradually moving towards blogs hosted on commercial facilities such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and Wordpress.com, owned by firms that intend to capitalize on what you publish. If they don't like your style, they just terminate your channel. Traditional web hosting just bills you for the bandwidth and storage capacity you use, no questions asked about what you publish.</dd></dl>

All those free services made the internet into what it is today. A place where anyone is free to enter and express themselves in whatever way they see fit. That freedom is rapidly being replaced by large billboards advertising colourful and shiny services that may cost no money to use, but they certainly aren't free.

I don't want to have it on my conscience that I simply stood by while the greatest invention humanity ever pulled off since the advent of writing itself gets squandered to short-term commercial interests. The vast majority of humanity has yet to take their first steps on the net. I want them to have the same degree of freedom that I myself enjoyed way back in 1994.

When a service costs no money to use, then you are not the provider's customer. You are their product.