AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: How the Internet Works, Censorship and Section 230

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Jim Polito.  We had a lively discussion about the inner workings of the Internet and the decisions that Parler made that may have cost them their business.  Censorship, Collusion, and Anti-Trust. Has Big Tech, the Sultans of Silicon Valley, become like the Robberbarrons of yesteryear?

For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com.

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we had a great discussion here. If you want to know what's going on with the internet, and why I call myself an internet originalist, and why you should stick around because here we go with Mr. Jim Polito of course.

Jim Polito: [00:00:19] You know what, right now, you want to be right here. We got our guy standing by who better to have with us right now than the tech talk guru. Craig Peterson.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:36] Tis I. Good morning.

I wanted you to get all excited, and say woo I'm here. I just want it. We have, we're w we're in Providence now we have expanded and the Providence audience doesn't know this and they might think I'm joking.

But Craig Peterson actually did help to invent the internet, Al Gore likes to take credit for it. But Craig Peterson wrote code for the internet that is still in use today.

Okay. He didn't invent it, but he was like one of the guys at NASA. Who got the Apollo program to the moon? There were many of them and Craig Peterson is one of the many people who get the internet to work. So I just want to make sure people understand those credentials.

Jim Polito: [00:01:28] Today we're going to talk about the internet. What perfect timing to have you here today, when there's craziness.  There are how many businesses that really could, how many large corporations, big tech, very few who control the whole thing right now. Isn't that correct, Craig?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:51] By the way, one more thing for you. I also designed systems that helped to build design and fly the space shuttle. I don't know if you knew that.

Jim Polito: [00:02:02] Woah, Woah.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:07] Yeah, years ago. I don't think I mentioned that too before. Way back when I was down in New Jersey as a contractor consultant and I wrote this code. It was my company that was hired and we put together systems for RCA Astrospace who was building part of this. One of these days we'll have to talk about it. It was cool.

Jim Polito: [00:02:26] I want to hear about that because getting the shuttle to fly, they said was like getting a brick to fly. That's the way that the pilots who piloted it, explained it. So we need to hear that.

But look, here's what I'm bothered about. That Apple, Google, and Amazon can say, you know what Parler you're done now. They can say it's because of some disturbing material, but we all know it's because of competition. Come on.  That's three companies. That sounds to me like the old robber barons and why we have antitrust laws.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:02] Yeah. This is really interesting because we've had so many people, libertarians on out, say it, remember the first amendment, the right to free speech only applies to government.

But the concept of free speech is part of the basis of this country. It doesn't just stop at the edge of the first amendment, frankly.  I want to point out something else related to this. And that is I am an internet originalist.

So speaking about the Constitution and the Supreme court, I'm an originalist. The internet was designed to be decentralized. You could say and do almost anything, as long as it wasn't illegal online. The whole idea behind it was to create and implement new ideas. Anyone could now connect anything to anything.

Heck, we even got light bulbs now on the internet?

It was an open, free, fair society. It was initially used by the military research people. It was used by universities to communicate with each other. That kind of evolved into the ARPANET. And then they were connected together and it became the internet. 

Even the term internet tells you what it is. It's an interconnected network of networks. It had no one place that was vulnerable. We could not have Russia blow up a city in the United States and have the internet disappear. It was entirely designed to be decentralized and still pretty much is. The problem is we have these companies, like you mentioned, who are so big, and ultimately so powerful that they can shut things down.

So when you talked about Parler as an example of how it was shut down. There are attorneys looking into antitrust regulations because of this. Amazon pulled access to their systems. Now Amazon runs about 60% of the computers in the United States of America. And certainly at a minimum of 60% of the computers that run the internet today.

What's happened is they have all of this computing power. They have all of this network connectivity. Remember I said, these are interconnected networks. So someone like Amazon can block data from Parler from even traveling over their networks.

Now the internet there are protocols like BGP and others. We won't get too technical, that are designed, well if Amazon goes off the air, or won't route the packets for Parler, we'll send them around another way. It's just like water seeking another way around and it can do that. It does do that. The real problem Parler seems to be facing right now is Amazon doesn't just provide computers. It doesn't just provide network bandwidth. Amazon has quite a number of services.

You can register with Amazon, for instance, and have it handle what's called your DNS, which is the internet addressing system. Parler did that. You can have Amazon handle the queue processing, automatic load balancing. Can manage your databases, can manage all of your data storage, but if you're going to have Amazon do these things, you have to write your program, your code, so that it knows how to use all of this stuff on Amazon. All of a sudden now, You are 100% dependent on Amazon.  If you're a company that made the mistake of being Amazon, not just centric, but Amazon dependent, like Parler apparently is, if Amazon pulls the plug on you, you are out of business.

And then to top it off, you've got apple pulling the plug on Parler's app and you've got Google pulling the plug on Parler's app.

Parler was smart enough to say what would happen potentially if the apps were pulled.

Parler could be used via a web browser, except for the fact that they're a hundred percent dependent on Amazon and Amazon pulled the plug.

Jim Polito: [00:07:36] We're talking with our good friend, tech talk guru, Craig Peterson.

So Craig, look you and I could start up a small business right now and with nothing to do with the internet. Craig and Jim's coffee shop. Okay. There's a lot of red tape to go through, but we could start it up and we could do it and we wouldn't be dependent on these corporations. Some people may say you may be dependent to promote it.

But what I mean is we could actually start a coffee shop and if we were on a busy enough corner, be okay.  We would have certain entities that would have to go to like banks. Okay. Yeah. Small business administration. Yeah. But still, there are ways to do that.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:21] There's no real way to do it.

You need truckers. You've got to buy the coffee. You have to have the truckers delivered every day. You have to work with a conglomerate, which is distributing cream that you would buy, right? You're not buying it from the local farm.  By the way, that truck is probably driven by a union member. So any one of those people. Even if you want to compare what's happening now to starting a printing press and printing your own newspaper broadsheet, whatever it might be, you still have to get the paper. You still have to get the ink. Those suppliers when they are big enough can stop you from competing. They look at newspapers today, for instance, how many newspapers are printed by the New York Times, The Boston globe, including local newspapers. It's one company. Nobody has all of these presses, anymore.

I think we've just become far too reliant on these big companies.

Now there are some options.  There's something called Mastodon out there that is a completely decentralized kind of Twitter, Facebook replacement.

Some people have moved to MeWe. The same type of thing can happen if they didn't plan, Jim.

Jim Polito: [00:09:40] Yeah, I guess I understand that, but there's no one thing that can shut you down. Like they can shut you down. They can really shut you down. You're done. You want to be in the world online. You're done.

Now. My question is so Parler signs a contract with Amazon and less, the Department of Justice decides to go after. Amazon and Apple for and others for antitrust. It's probably not that much Parler can do. Cause you know, I'm a free marketer and a free marketer is Hey Craig Peterson, and his amazing work. He can do business with whoever the heck he wants to.

That's Craig Peterson's prerogative and you can't force him to do certain things. I'm not one of those people. When you have this kind of power, I think robber baron, I think back to John Rockefeller and Standard Oil, it reminds me of that.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:42] Apparently, by the way, Amazon did violate the terms. Parler every time Amazon has asked us to remove something. We have removed it after, we double-checked it all. We have removed it and they have a 30 day period, according to the contract with Amazon, that if Amazon complains about something, there's a 30 day period where they have the ability to remove it and negotiate with Amazon, et cetera, et cetera.

None of that was honored. This all happened over the weekend. Basically with all of these companies. So now we're looking at collusion here. This is fascinating.

Then Ron Paul now, it's reported in the Washington Times, Ron Paul says I'm not calling for anything illegal and he's blocked by Facebook.

Jim Polito: [00:11:38] Yeah. Yeah. In the weeks to come, I'm sure we'll be discussing this more, but I'm glad you were here.

Craig Peterson, how do people get more from Craig Peterson?

Craig Peterson: [00:11:50] The best way is just to go to Craigpeterson.com. You'll see right there, the ability to subscribe. You'll see all my podcasts.

You'll see a lot of the articles and I've got training starting here in about two weeks on improving windows security. So it's step one. I have these all planned out. We're going to be doing VPNs and everything. Make sure you sign up. 

Jim Polito: [00:12:17] You can find out about Craig peterson.com. I love it.

Craig as usual. Thank you for your expertise. I can't wait till we'll have to talk, NASA someday. About how you taught a brick to fly. But we'll get into that.  Thank you very much, Craig.

Talk to you soon.

Bye-bye.

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