How has the Internet been positioned as a frontier for freedom?
The Internet, conflated with cyberspace, was sold as a tool of freedom, as a freedom frontier that by its nature could not be tamed: the Internet allegedly interpreted censorship as damage and routed around it. Further, by enabling anonymous communications, it supposedly freed users from the limitations of their bodies, particularly the limitations stemming from their race, class and sex, and perhaps more ominously, from social responsibilities and conventions. The Internet also broke media monopolies by enabling the free flow of information, reinvigorating free speech and democracy. It supposedly proved that free markets—in a “friction-free” virtual environment—could solve social and political problems. Although some condemned the Internet for its excessive freedoms, for the ways in which it encouraged so-called deviant behavior that put our future at risk, the majority (of the Supreme Court at least) viewed the Internet as empowering, as creating users rather than couch potatoes, as
