Does Donald Trump understand the internet?
In his comments about the internet, Donald Trump is challenging the late senator Ted Stevens for strange and inaccurate statements.
Stevens, who gave pop culture the metaphor of the internet as “a series of tubes” in a rambling unprepared speech about net neutrality in 2007, was ridiculed as an old person confused by technology. For Trump, his bold statement detached from the reality of the internet could erase Stevens’ fame.
“We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some way. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people,” Trump said in South Carolina earlier in December.
His flippant dismissal of freedom of speech is worrisome, and puts him in league with Hillary Clinton. It also shows, however, a simplistic understanding of the internet. Neither Bill Gates nor tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have a button to push that shuts down the internet, and it’s not clear that such a move would make America safer.
When asked to clarify his comments about “closing that internet up” during the CNN Republican Debate, Trump talked about “our internet.”
“ISIS is using the internet better than we are using the internet. And it was our idea. What I wanted to do was I wanted to get our brilliant people from Silicon Valley and other places, and figure out a way that ISIS cannot do what they’re doing. … we should be able to penetrate the internet and find out exactly where ISIS is and everything about ISIS. And we can do that if we use our good people,” he said.
Trump explicitly endorsed shutting down the internet.
“I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody. I sure as hell don’t want to let people that want to kill us and kill our nation use our internet. Yes sir, I am,” he said.
“Shutting down people’s ability to communicate on the Internet is a blunt and risky instrument,” the Chrisitan Science Monitor noted. It might sound simple as Trump envisions a shutdown, but it’s completely divorced from reality.
“The Internet is not just something that can be turned off with a wave of a magic wand,” CNN noted.
Anti-terrorism policy would be simple and effective with the magic wand, but Trump loses credibility when he ignores reality to pander.
“Trump does seem to have a mobbed up realtor’s vision of how the Internet works. ‘We’ll just bulldoze the inconvenient bits. I know a guy’,” Cato Institute Senior Fellow Julian Sanchez tweeted during the debate.
It might sound tough, but Trump’s ignorance about the internet threatens the freedom of Americans and effective anti-terrorism policy. Not to mention that the countries that shut down the internet are bastions of liberty and prosperity such as China, North Korea, and Iran.
