Everyone who has been paying any attention is already aware of all this. I don't agree with the parallel the article attempts to draw between "The Great Firewall" and corporate information-manipulation practices, since national attempts at internet control (not including the U.S.) only discourage the dissemination of political information whereas corporations will go for whatever keeps them in profit. The problem is that, where China's firewall sticks to mainland China, corporations can manipulate information going to any country from their own servers. With tech corporations being worth now even more than they were in the dotcom era, they have a shitload of servers and lots of internet users on their services and yeah that's a threat but so far only in English-speaking countries have governments moved to side with corporate interests so they will bear the brunt of this. I can imagine those of us living in such countries can expect to see a huge drop in internet freedom in the following years if we haven't already (Firewall Australia, anyone?).
