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Martin Avila, CEO of Right Forge. (courtesy Martin Avila)
Media & Big Tech


AMERICANS NEED A ‘SECOND INTERNET’ TO SURVIVE, ENTREPRENEUR ARGUES

By Matthew Vadum
Matthew Vadum
contributor
Matthew Vadum is an award-winning investigative journalist and a recognized
expert in left-wing activism.
View profile
August 31, 2021 Updated: August 31, 2021
biggersmaller
Print

Freedom-loving Americans need to build a “second internet” if they wish the
United States to survive in this era of increasing left-wing big-tech domination
of the nation’s communications infrastructure, according to tech entrepreneur
Martín Avila.

“These big tech companies are just gobbling up infrastructure companies, and
they’re just trying to own the hard assets,” said Avila, CEO of RightForge,
which describes itself as “the first global internet infrastructure company
committed to American principles online.”

“What we’re seeing BlackRock do with housing, Big Tech’s been doing on the
real-estate side of the internet. There’s got to be an alternative here because
if we lose that, we lose everything: They control it all,” Avila told The Epoch
Times in an interview.

New York-based BlackRock Inc., run by billionaire Laurence Fink, is the world’s
largest asset management firm with a reported $9 trillion in assets under
management. Critics say the company has been buying entire neighborhoods in
cities like Houston and converting single-family homes into rentals and in the
process pushing those with modest resources out of the housing markets.

For years Big Tech has been sorting Americans into groups that can be easily
marketed to, and corroding relationships with friends and family members by
producing addictive media platforms that can monopolize users’ time, Avila said.
“Now that so many people are hooked and driven by a desire to crush support for
former President Donald Trump, Big Tech has revealed its true face by shutting
down open dialogue in the United States.”

“Big Tech has made it clear that they want to exclude from public discussion
every single person who challenges their authority, holds alternative beliefs,
or thinks even a bit differently,” he said.

By choosing not to do business with certain users, “they are starving
individuals, companies, and organizations of the fundamental means required to
make a living. They censored newspapers, de-platformed Parler, and prevented the
president of the United States from communicating with the American people and
the world.”

Big Tech has been engaged in a “ruthless” campaign against “the ideals and
principles enshrined in our nation’s founding documents,” Avila said. Even
worse, Big Tech is “not only excising our ideas from society—it’s eliminating
our very ability to formulate and express them.”

Silicon Valley has no allegiance to the United States, he said. “Instead, it is
captive to radical ideologies that repudiate individual liberty, tradition, and
transcendent truths.”

The recent revelation that American billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Amazon Web Services
allowed Nida-e-Haqq, an ISIS media organization that promotes content in the
Urdu language widely spoken in Pakistan, as well as parts of Afghanistan, to
disseminate pro-Taliban propaganda, including praise of the deadly Aug. 26
terrorist attack at the Kabul airport, urgently underlines the need for
Americans to be free of the Silicon Valley oligopoly, Avila said.

Amazon only disabled the offending ISIS website after it was caught red-handed
and the matter widely reported, he added.

“We need a second internet because Amazon will have and host and keep ISIS and
Taliban websites up, but at the same time they will deplatform pages and
applications like Parler, and until people call them out, they’re happy to keep
doing this,” Avila said. “They’re constantly looking for ways to shut down
conservatives and the American viewpoint. People need to be free to build
applications and express American ideas.”

Unfortunately, some of the more libertarian elements of the conservative
movement have not been helpful in taking on big tech domination, Avila said.

“You get the libertarians who hide behind, ‘Well, it’s a private company. We
can’t tell them what to do,’” he said. “So then they go and cozy up to China and
we’re told that we can’t say anything because they’re private companies? We
can’t demand that they institute core American principles? This is nuts.”

Checking the power of Big Tech won’t be easy, but it’s not impossible, Avila
said.

By “second internet,” Avila said he means an internet infrastructure that is
beyond the reach of Silicon Valley companies.

“Conservatives have to make sure that we’re not living on the highways that
liberal big tech companies own, because they will put toll booths and guardrails
around what we’re allowed to see.

“We need a second internet in which you can use your same websites that you have
today. You just want to make sure they’re not housed in a place like Amazon,
because what happened to Parler will happen to other organizations.”

Avila said it gives him hope that pro-conservative businesses like Black Rifle
Coffee Company have become the coffee places preferred to liberal Starbucks in
parts of the country, such as the Dallas, Texas area.

“People are making choices with their dollars, and people running organizations
need to know that the internet, as you know it, the infrastructure—the
servers—is owned by Big Tech, largely controlled by Big Tech, and there needs to
be an alternative. So that’s why we built it.”

RightForge is able to host websites or build applications for social networks
and has servers in every major city in the country, he said.

Avila said RightForge’s customers cannot be shut down.

“You cannot be removed from the internet. You can be removed from a phone if
Apple wants to get you out of the App Store. But you cannot be shut down when
you’re on RightForge. They will not be able to remove you from the internet. You
will still be able to exist, gain users, and be completely independent from Big
Tech.”

And RightForge doesn’t moderate content that it hosts, he said.

“I’m talking to conservative and libertarian organizations that are fighting,
pushing back against woke cancel culture, standing up for American values. But
we’ll have a platform where anybody can launch any site that they want. The
internet should be a place for open debate and free speech and we recognize that
sometimes that’s uncomfortable.”

“Of course, we’ll abide by all laws. But from where we stand, that’s not the job
of a hosting company to moderate the content that’s going on it other than for
things that are illegal.”

Matthew Vadum
contributor
Matthew Vadum is an award-winning investigative journalist and a recognized
expert in left-wing activism.



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