February 8 marks the silver anniversary of an iconic early manifesto defending the Internet as a space where personal liberties and social cooperation might flourish free of political control … just in time. John Perry Barlow emailed “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” from the World Economic Forum the day Bill Clinton signed into law restraints on free expression via the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Barlow couldn’t have foreseen that on February 2, 2021, The New York Times would print a call for incoming President Joe Biden to appoint a “reality czar” to verify online information.  He did predict that national administrative substitutes for “parental responsibilities” would fail to contain “the virus of liberty” in “a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.”

Barlow’s Declaration promptly became ubiquitous in the cyberspace it extolled, its text reposted on tens of thousands of web pages (no mean feat when websites numbered in the hundreds of thousands). Detractors penned multiple Declarations of the Dependence of Cyberspace on governmental oversight, misinterpreting Barlow’s ideal of a World Wide Web freed from rulers as a Wild West Web un-moored by rules.

Barlow himself noted on his Declaration’s twentieth anniversary that it had become largely remembered as “an example of the sort of wooly-headed hippie thinking we could entertain in more innocent times.”  He admitted that he had overly high hopes for the amount of “horizontally networked consensus” that would result, and that he had underestimated the new medium’s potential for abuse.

Yet if Barlow under-emphasized the basis of his confidence in voluntary agreement to those who lacked his experience with the “unwritten social contracts” undergirding everyday life in his home state of Wyoming, he himself failed to fully appreciate its power.  He told Reason magazine in 2004 that the very nation-states he had famously declared “weary giants of flesh and steel” eight years before were now “the only force I know that is fairly reliable” at “countervailing against monopoly.”

To the contrary, political gigantism is the source of economic monopoly.  United States Steel Corporation chairman Elbert Henry Gary feared the “bitter warfare” of unregulated competition, as have industrialists closer on the cutting edge to U.S. Robotics than U.S. Steel.  Microsoft called for the United States to enact “a broad, nationwide privacy law” in 2005, just as users were abandoning Microsoft Internet Explorer for more secure competing web browsers like Firefox and Opera. Similar regulatory capture tipped the balance away from such alternatives and toward the consolidation of the Internet into a handful of centralized platforms.

Freedom of exit to innovative upstarts can still restore the potential of the early Internet to secure freedom in virtual reality, and in the real world “of flesh and steel” as well.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, February 6, 2021
2. “Brave new world wide web revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Intrepid Report, February 8, 2021
3. “Brave New World Wide Web revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Elko, Nevada Daily Free Press, February 8, 2021
4. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, February 9, 2021
5. “Brave new World Wide Web revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Brattleboro, Vermont Reformer, February 9, 2021
6. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, February 11, 2021
7. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Pottstown, Pennsylvania Mercury, February 12, 2021
8. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, The Phoenix Reporter & Item [Phoenixville, Pennsylvania], February 12, 2021
9. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, The Delaware County [Pennsylvania] Daily Times, February 12, 2021
10. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Mainline Media News [Exton, Pennsylvania], February 12, 2021
11. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Montgomery News [Lansdale, Pennsylvania], February 12, 2021
12. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Daily Local News [West Chester, Pennsylvania], February 12, 2021
13. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, The Times Herald [Port Huron, Michigan], February 12, 2021

As the federal government and state governments around the country roll out their COVID-19 vaccination programs, problems real and imagined abound.

The real problems include bottlenecks caused by limited availability, stringent storage requirements, and, most of all, the confusion and scheduling snafus that inevitably accompany large-scale mobilizations of resources.

The imagined problems boil down to belly-aching about how those who “should” be getting the vaccine aren’t getting it as soon as they “should,” and about how people who “shouldn’t” be getting it as soon are “jumping the line.”

At the extreme we hear claims that old “white” people shouldn’t be getting it before people of color for reasons ranging from the former being more at risk to older people having already lived enough and to payback for past institutional racism, the latter two of which are ghoulish. More on the reasonable side of things are complaints that some younger, less at risk, people are getting it before some older, more at risk, people.

Disclosure: I’ve already received my first jab and will go in next week to get my second, but I’m not displacing anyone else. I’m participating in the Phase III clinical trial for a new vaccine that hasn’t been approved yet. You’re welcome.

The biggest real problem is water under the bridge:  Governments always do things more expensively and less efficiently than markets. The Food and Drug Administration held up approval of the first vaccines for unnecessary months, and government inefficiency is almost certainly holding up your shots for unnecessary weeks.

Retrospectively, the best way to handle things would have been to push the state aside and let the market get this thing done quickly and cheaply. But instead of listening to anarchists like me, people just went along to get along yet again and are likely to continue doing so for some time.

We’re stuck with the worst possible way of doing things. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make the best of it.

How DO we make the best of it? If government policies were written in English, we’d look for something like this from President Biden and 50 governors:

“We’re shipping vaccines to hospitals and doctors and pharmacies as fast as we can, and ask them to put as many two-dose courses as they can in as many arms as they can, regardless of age, sex, race, or other considerations, using whatever scheduling and allocation methods they find work best.”

If the vaccines work, every immunized person is one person less likely to catch COVID-19 or pass it on, and puts us one step closer to hopefully achieving herd immunity.

Every vaccination administered is a win, if the goal is to reduce the numbers of cases, reduce the numbers of deaths, and hopefully bring this ugly era to an end.

Every missed opportunity to stick a needle in an arm is a loss on those same criteria.

Let’s stop letting jealousy over the ages, sexes, and races of the arms in question get in the way.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Better COVID-19 Vaccination Policy: Stick it to’em!” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 02/05/21
• “Better COVID-19 vaccination policy: Stick it to ’em!” by Thomas L. Knapp, Hopkinsville, Kentucky New Era, 02/05/21
• “Better COVID-19 vaccination policy,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Hammond, Louisiana Daily Star, 02/08/21
• “Better COVID-19 Vaccination Policy: Stick it to’em!” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 02/12/21
• “Point of View: Better COVID-19 vaccination policy: Stick it to’em!” by Thomas L. Knapp, Palm Beach, Florida Post, 02/24/21

Even before winning the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden began hedging his bets on US policy toward Iran. While correctly blaming Donald Trump for violating the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the Iran nuclear deal, he tried to fob responsibility for restoring that deal off on the Iranians rather than accepting the job himself.

“If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal,” he wrote in a September op-ed, “the United States would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations.” Since taking office, he and new US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have held to that line.

Meanwhile the Iranian government has made it clear that since the US violated the deal first, and pressured other parties to it to violate it as well, the ball is in Biden’s court, not theirs. The US can go back to keeping its word or continue breaking its promises. Biden’s call …  and the clock is ticking.

“The time for the United States to come back to the nuclear agreement is not unlimited,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tells CNN. “The United States has a limited window of opportunity … The United States has to accept what we agreed upon.”

If becoming president is like celebrating Christmas, Biden woke up to a lump of coal in his stocking from Donald Trump and a big, fat, pretty box under the tree from Barack Obama.

The Trump lump is the risk of being seen as “soft on Iran” if he returns to the deal without extracting further concessions from Tehran.

Obama’s gift went under the tree in July of 2015 when he got the deal codified as a UN Security Council Resolution. The UN charter makes such resolutions binding on all member states. The US Senate duly ratified the UN charter as a treaty in 1945, making it, along with the Constitution, part of “the supreme law of the land.”

It’s not just true that Joe Biden CAN immediately and unilaterally return the US to compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It’s also true that, legally, he MUST do so.

Not that modern US presidents trouble themselves very much over adherence to the Constitution or the law, of course. It’s still Biden’s choice to make. And where Iran is concerned, that choice is pretty simple: Does President Joe Biden want to serve Barack Obama’s third term, or Donald Trump’s second?

Think fast, Joe.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Biden’s Iran Dilemma: Serve Obama’s Third Term — or Trump’s Second?” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 02/02/21
• “Biden’s Iran Dilemma: Serve Obama’s Third Term — or Trump’s Second?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 02/02/21
• “Biden’s Iran dilemma: Serve Obama’s third term — or Trump’s second?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Hopkinsville, Kentucky New Era, 02/03/21
• “Biden’s Iran Dilemma: Serve Obama’s Third Term – or Trump’s Second?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Antiwar.com, 02/03/21
• “Biden’s Iran dilemma: Serve Obama’s third term – or Trump’s second?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Philippine Star [web and print], 02/04/21
• “Biden’s Iran Dilemma: Serve Obama’s Third Term — or Trump’s Second?” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 02/05/21
• “Biden’s Iran Dilemma: Serve Obama’s Third Term — or Trump’s Second?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Seoul, Republic of Korea Times, 02/09/21
• “Biden’s Iran Dilemma: Serve Obama’s Third Term — or Trump’s Second?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 02/13/21