Only good genies get put back in the bottle

There’s an old expression that you can’t put the genie back into the bottle (or the toothpaste back into the tube).

Governments around the world are working willy-nilly to prove that old expression wrong. So says Sergey Brin, as he explains why Web freedom faces the greatest threat ever:

In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”

The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.

The 38-year-old billionaire, whose family fled antisemitism in the Soviet Union, was widely regarded as having been the driving force behind Google’s partial pullout from China in 2010 over concerns about censorship and cyber-attacks. He said five years ago he did not believe China or any country could effectively restrict the internet for long, but now says he has been proven wrong. “I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle,” he said.

I’ve been online since the early 90s, and I had long assumed that the geeks who knew what they were talking about (and who knew a lot more than I) were right when they said that the greatest virtue of the Internet was that it could not be controlled.  So, this worries me. I like to think that “the geeks” can still reroute against anything.

But what about the geeks who are on the wrong side? The government enforcement geeks?

How can the good geeks be expected to prevail against the bad geeks? History shows that once power is given up, it is very hard to take it away, and once freedom is lost, it is very hard to get it back.

Maybe government genies are harder to put back in the bottle than regular genies.

I don’t even want to think about government toothpaste.