UK needs its own internet (and why leaving the EU is arrogant madness)

Most British citizens use the internet every day. We use it all the time for buying and selling stuff, communicating with people, managing our money, for most of our entertainment, to study and to be alerted about things that matter to us. But we don't control the internet. It's defined and run by unelected faceless bureaucrats outside the UK. We've lost our sovereignty over one of the most important parts of our lives today. We need to regain that sovereignty so we can take control of our future. We need to leave the internet and build a better one that the British people can control! Alexander Graham Bell was British for heaven's sake. So is Sir Tim Berners-Lee. But it's foreigners who control the internet.

The internet we use today is hopelessly inefficient. The way it works was originally defined by DARPA - part of the US Department of Defense (they can't even spell). It used the best available technology at the time known as TCP/IP. But a British internet would be far faster and much more efficient if it used modern technology as its underlying architecture. Our businesses, our homes and our phones are being held back by allowing the internet we are forced to use by a group of unknown people in foreign countries who determine how it works. Yes we do have representatives on the various governing bodies of the internet, but they rarely, if ever, get their way. The best interests of the British people are not the priority for the people who run the internet. We need to take control of our digital future not only for ourselves but for our children and all future British generations.

But it's not just the internet itself that's out of our control. It's also the stuff on it that we can't control. For example, when we connect with amazon.co.uk, we're encouraged to think we're using a British website because it's got that .co.uk bit at the end. ICANN, the organisation who control all the internet's domain names, is in America. Amazon, the company who provide the website is American although its European HQ is in Luxembourg. The internet servers they use to make us believe it's a British website are in Iceland. There is a great deal of controversy surrounding Amazon. We have no control over them or what they do behind the scenes. And they can approach every citizen of the UK because they freely use the internet which has found its way into every British home, office and now onto our mobile phones and tablets. We are even beginning to wear it as it invades our personal space through watches, glasses and heaven knows what in the future. Our own bodies are being connected to a world that the British people have no say in and can't control.

The internet is much more than websites. It manages emails, messaging and VOIP phone calls. It also pumps entertainment into homes and phones. We might have freedom to decide which entertainment service providers we sign up to over the internet, such as BT, Sky, Apple TV or Netflix, but it's organisations outside the UK who decide what's available to watch. Some of it is British - and therefore subject to British laws and customs - but most of it is made outside the UK. We are being subjected to a mountain of trash, and far worse, mainly from the US, the production of which we have no control whatsoever. All because we don't operate our own internet.

The UK is the fifth largest economy on Earth. If we build a better internet, don't you think that every sensible country in the world who wants to collaborate and do business with us will find a way of connecting with it? Surely the British Commonwealth will breathe a sigh of relief and abandon the American led domination of the internet and flock to using our version. Even sensible Americans will prefer our internet over their slower one. We can probably assume that the largest trading block in the world, the EU, will stick with what works for them, but then they're not British and don't care about what TV our children watch and whether Amazon works from Iceland or not. In time they too will realise that the British internet is better than the rest of the world's and will beg us to use it.

We don't want our lives controlled by people we didn't elect and who don't care about what the British people want. We're big enough and smart enough to build our own, superior internet.

A British internet for British people! Let's make Britain great again!



...or maybe we should not be so incredibly stupid, and continue to make the best of an imperfect system that works, despite not controlling how it works. I'm IN (in case you hadn't worked out I'm parodying arguments for the UK leaving the EU).