Brownstone Institute
These Amendments Would Open the Door to a Dangerous Global Health Bureaucracy
From the Brownstone Institute
One of the most extraordinary and disturbing aspects of the proposed amendments to IHR is the removal of an important clause requiring that the implementation of the regulations be “with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons.”
In its place, the new clause reads that the implementation of the regulations shall be “based on the principles of equity, inclusivity, coherence and in accordance with their (the?) common but differentiated responsibilities of the States Parties, taking into consideration their social and economic development.” It is hard to know how any sane and responsible adult could justify removing “dignity, human rights, and fundamental freedoms” from International Health Regulations.
The Covid pandemic gave the World Health Organization and its partners unprecedented visibility and a tremendous amount of “soft” power to shape public health law and policies across the world. Over the past year or so, the WHO has been pushing hard to consolidate and expand its power to declare and manage public health emergencies on a global scale.
The primary instruments for this consolidation are a WHO Pandemic Accord and a series of far-reaching amendments to existing International Health Regulations (IHR). The target date for finalizing both the IHR Amendments and the new Pandemic Accord is May 2024.
The net effect of the proposed text for the pandemic accord and the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations, would be to create a legal and financial basis for the emergence of an elaborate, internationally coordinated bio-surveillance regime and significantly strengthen the authority of the World Health Organization to direct and coordinate the international response to global and regional public health threats.
It is not entirely clear why the WHO decided to negotiate a separate pandemic treaty that overlaps in significant ways with the proposed IHR amendments. In any case, most of the far-reaching changes to global health regulations are already contained within the IHR amendments, so that is what we will focus on here.
Even if the WHO failed to get a new pandemic treaty passed, the proposed amendments to International Health Regulations would be sufficient by themselves to confer unprecedented power on the WHO to direct international health and vaccination policies in circumstances deemed by the WHO to be a “public health emergency of international concern.”
The WHO wants the IHR amendments to be finalized on time for next year’s World Health Assembly, scheduled for 27 May – 1 June 2024. Assuming the amendments are approved by a simple majority of the delegates, they will be considered fully ratified 12 months after that, unless heads of State formally reject them within the designated opt-out period, which has been reduced from 18 to 10 months.
If ratified, they will come into effect two years after their announcement at the May 2024 World Health Assembly (i.e., around June 2026), as stipulated in the annex to Amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) agreed to on 28th May 2022.
In other words, revisions to the International Health Regulations will pass by default rather than by formal acceptance by heads of State. The silence of heads of State will be construed as consent. This makes it all the easier for the revised IHR to pass without proper legislative scrutiny and without a public debate in the States that are subject to the new legal framework.
To get a flavour of how these changes in international law are likely to impact the policies of governments and citizens’ lives more broadly, it is sufficient to review a selection of the proposed amendments. While we do not know which of the amendments will survive the negotiation process, the direction of travel is alarming.
Taken together, these amendments to International Health Regulations would push us in the direction of a global public health bureaucracy with limited democratic accountability, glaring conflicts of interest, and significant potential for systematic harm to the health and liberties of citizens.
The amendments discussed below are drawn from a 46-page document hosted on the WHO webpage entitled “Article-by-Article Compilation of Proposed Amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) submitted in accordance with decision WHA75(9) (2022).” Because these changes are being negotiated largely outside the frame of national electoral politics, the average citizens is barely aware of them.
Should these amendments come into force, States will be bound by international law, in the event of a public health emergency (as defined by WHO) to follow the playbook of health policies determined by the WHO and its “emergency committee” of “experts,” leaving far less scope for national parliaments and governments to set policies that diverge from WHO recommendations.
Insofar as national States formally consent to the IHR amendments, their sovereignty would remain intact, from a legal perspective. But insofar as they are binding themselves to dance to the tune of political actors outside the scope of national politics, they would clearly lose their freedom to set their own policies in this domain, and health policy “gurus,” instead of representing their fellow citizens, would represent a global health regime transcending national politics and operating above national law.
Under a globally coordinated public health regime, activated by an international public health emergency declared by the WHO, citizens would be vulnerable to errors committed by WHO-nominated “experts” sitting in Geneva or New York, errors which could replicate themselves through a global health system with little resistance from national governments.
Citizens have a right to know that the amended regulations as they stand would give unprecedented power to a WHO-led global health regime and, by implication, its most influential financial and political stakeholders like the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, all of which are largely beyond the reach of national voters and legislators.
There are dozens of proposed amendments to the 2005 International Health Regulations. Here, I will highlight eight changes that are of special concern because of their implications for the independence of national health regimes and for the rights of citizens:
States Bind Themselves to Follow WHO’s Advice as “The Guidance and Coordinating Authority” During an International Public Health Emergency
One of the amendments to IHR (International Health Regulations) reads, “States Parties recognize WHO as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response during public health Emergency of International Concern and undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations in their international public health responses.” Like many other treaty “undertakings,” the means for other parties to IHR to enforce this “undertaking” are limited.
Nevertheless, States party to the new regulations would be legally binding themselves to adhere to WHO recommendations and may lose credibility or suffer politically for failing to follow through on their international treaty commitments. This may seem “toothless” to some, but the reality is that this sort of “soft power” is what drives a good deal of compliance with international law.
Removal of “Non-Binding” Language
In the previous version of Article 1, WHO “recommendations” were defined as “non-binding advice.” In the new version, they are defined simply as “advice.” The only reasonable interpretation of this change is that the author wished to remove the impression that States were at liberty to disregard WHO recommendations. Insofar as signatories do “undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations in their international public health responses,” it would indeed appear that such “advice” becomes legally “binding” under the new regulations, making it legally difficult for States to dissent from WHO recommendations.
Removal of Reference to “Dignity, Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms”
One of the most extraordinary and disturbing aspects of the proposed amendments to IHR is the removal of an important clause requiring that the implementation of the regulations be “with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons.”
In its place, the new clause reads that the implementation of the regulations shall be “based on the principles of equity, inclusivity, coherence and in accordance with their (the?) common but differentiated responsibilities of the States Parties, taking into consideration their social and economic development.” It is hard to know how any sane and responsible adult could justify removing “dignity, human rights, and fundamental freedoms” from International Health Regulations.
Expansion of Scope of International Health Regulations
In the revised version of Article 2, the scope of IHR includes not only public health risks, but “all risks with a potential to impact public health.” Under this amendment, International Health Regulations, and their main coordinating body, the WHO, would be concerned not only with public health risks, but with every conceivable societal risk that might “impact” public health. Workplace stress? Vaccine hesitancy? Disinformation? Misinformation? Availability of pharmaceutical products? Low GDP? The basis for WHO intervention and guidance could be expanded indefinitely.
Consolidation of a Global Health Bureaucracy
Each State should nominate a “National IHR Focal Point” for “the implementation of health measures under these regulations.” These “focal points” could avail of WHO “capacity building” and “technical assistance.” IHR Focal Points, presumably manned by unelected bureaucrats and “experts,” would be essentially nodes in a new WHO-led global health bureaucracy.
Other important aspects of this new global health bureaucracy would be the WHO’s role in developing global “allocation plans for health products” (including vaccines), the WHO’s role as an information hub for expanded disease surveillance and research units across the world, and the WHO’s role as a a lead player in an international network of actors devoted to combatting “false and unreliable information” about public health events and anti-epidemic measures.
Expansion of WHO Emergency Powers
Under the revised regulations, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, “based on the opinion/advice of the Emergency Committee,” may designate an event as “having the potential to develop into a public health emergency of international concern, (and) communicate this and the recommended measures to State parties…” The introduction of the concept of a “potential” public health emergency, along with the idea of an “intermediate” emergency, also to be found among the proposed amendments, gives the WHO much wider leeway to set in motion emergency protocols and recommendations. For who knows what a “potential” or “intermediate” emergency amounts to?
Entrenchment and Legitimation of an International Bio-Surveillance Regime
The old Article 23, “Health Measures on arrival and departure,” authorizes States to require that travellers produce certain medical credentials prior to travel, including “a non-invasive medical examination which is the least intrusive examination that could achieve the public health objective.” In the new version of Article 23, travellers may be required to produce “documents containing information…on a laboratory test for a pathogen and/or information on vaccination against a disease.”
These documents may include WHO-validated digital health certificates. Essentially, this reaffirms and legally validates the vaccine passport regime that imposed prohibitive testing costs on unvaccinated citizens in 2021-23, and resulted in thousands and probably tens of thousands of people vaccinating just for the convenience of travelling, rather than based on health considerations.
Global Initiatives for Combating “False and Unreliable Information”
Both WHO and States bound by IHR, under the revised draft of IHR, “shall collaborate” in “countering the dissemination of false and unreliable information about public health events, preventive and anti-epidemic measures and activities in the media, social networks, and other ways of disseminating such information.” Clearly the misinformation/disinformation amendments entail a propaganda and censorship regime.
There is no other plausible way to interpret “countering the dissemination of false and unreliable information,” and this is exactly how anti-disinformation measures have been interpreted since the Covid pandemic was announced in 2020 – measures, it may be added, that suppressed sound scientific contributions concerning vaccine risks, lab origins of the novel coronavirus, and efficacy of community masking.
The joint effect of these and other proposed changes to International Health Regulations would be to enthrone the WHO and its director-general at the head of an elaborate global health bureaucracy beholden to the special interests of WHO patrons, a bureaucracy that would be operated largely with the cooperation of State officials and agencies implementing “advice” and “recommendations” issued by the WHO, which State parties have legally undertaken to follow.
While it is true that international treaties cannot be coercively enforced, this does not mean that international law is inconsequential. Under the newly amended regulations, a highly centralized public health bureaucracy would be propped up by lavish funding mechanisms and protected by international law. A bureaucracy of this sort would inevitably become entrenched and intertwined with national bureaucracies, and would become an important element of the policymaking architecture of pandemic planning and responses.
Though national States could, theoretically, bypass this bureaucracy and renege on their legal undertakings under IHR, taking a different path to that recommended by WHO, this would be rather strange, given that they themselves would have both approved and financed the regime they are boycotting.
In the face of opposition from one or more signatory States, the WHO and its partners could pressure such a State into complying with its edicts by shaming it into upholding its legal commitments, or else other States may reprimand “renegade” states for putting international health in jeopardy, and apply political, financial and diplomatic pressure to secure compliance. Thus, while IHR would operate upon State officials in a softer way than national, police-backed regulations, it would certainly not be powerless or politically inconsequential.
The impact of the new global health bureaucracy on the lives of ordinary citizens may be quite dramatic: it would erect a global censorship regime legitimated by international law, making challenges to officially sanctioned information harder than ever; and it would make international public health responses even more slavishly dependent on WHO directives than they were before, discouraging independent, dissenting responses such as that of Sweden during the Covid pandemic.
Last but not least, the new global health bureaucracy would put the fate of ordinary citizens – our national and international mobility, our right to informed consent to medication, our bodily integrity, and ultimately, our health – in the hands of public health officials acting in lockstep with WHO “recommendations.”
Apart from the fact that policy diversification and experimentation is essential to a robust healthcare system, and is crushed by a highly centralized response to health emergencies, the WHO is already riddled with internal conflicts of interest and a track record of catastrophically unsound judgments, making them singularly unqualified to reliably identify a global health emergency or coordinate the response to it.
To start with, the WHO’s income stream depends on individuals like Bill Gates who have significant financial stakes in the pharmaceutical industry. How can we possibly expect the WHO to make impartial, disinterested recommendations about, say, the safety and efficacy of vaccines, when its own donors are financially invested in the success of specific pharmaceutical products, including vaccines?
Secondly, to allow the WHO to declare an international public health emergency is to create an obvious perverse incentive: given that a large part of the raison d’être of a WHO-led global health bureaucracy is to prevent, monitor, and respond to public health emergencies, and the activation of the WHO’s emergency powers depends on the presence of an actual or potential “public health emergency of international concern,” the WHO’s Director-General has an obvious professional and institutional interest in declaring potential or actual public health emergencies.
Third, the WHO wasted no time in praising China’s brutal and ultimately unsuccessful lockdowns, continues to support the censorship of their critics, repeatedly recommended community masking in the absence of plausible evidence of efficacy, failed to warn the public in a timely manner about the serious risks of mRNA vaccines, and has entered into a partnership with the European Union to extend the discriminatory and coercive Covid vaccine certificate system globally. These are certainly not people I would trust as custodians of my bodily integrity, health, informed consent, or mobility.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process?
Trump enjoys the momentum. Four of the most recent major national polls show him up 2 to 3%, while Democratic-friendly outlets like the New York Times and CNN both show a TIE race in their final surveys. The 2016 and 2020 elections were razor close even though Clinton (5%) and Biden (8%) had solid polling leads at this point. We need to contemplate a Trump win not only in the electoral college but also in the popular vote.
Here are some thoughts:
- JD Vance ascendant, obviously. Big implications for the Republican trajectory.
- Will Trump replace Fed chairman Jay Powell? Or merely jawbone for a change in policy? In a new CNBC interview, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh argues that the Fed has juiced both the stock market and inflation. Would reducing inflation, which Trump has promised, automatically therefore lead to a stock market correction and economic slowdown? Not necessarily. If Trump unleashes productive economic activity and Congress ends the fiscal blowout, the Fed could normalize monetary policy without causing a major economic slump.
- Will Trump impose the broad and deep tariffs he proposed? Or will he mostly threaten them as a bargaining tool with China? I’m betting on some of the former but more of the latter. We notice, however, Trump allies are floating a trial balloon to replace income taxes with tariffs. As impractical and improbable as that may be, we’re glad to see the mention of radical tax reform reemerge after too long an absence from the national discussion.
- How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process? One idea would be to offer a “reverse amnesty” – if you leave peacefully and agree not to return illegally, we will forgive your previous illegal entry(s) and minor violations. This would incentivize self-identification and quiet departure. Plus it would help authorities track those leaving. Would migrant departures truly hit the economy, as critics charge? We doubt large effects. Substantial native populations are still underemployed or absent from the workforce.
- We should expect a major retrenchment of regulatory intrusions across the economy – from energy to crypto. Combined with recent Supreme Court action, such as the Chevron reversal, and assisted by the Elon Musk’s substance and narrative, it could be a regulatory renaissance. Extension of the 2017 tax cuts also becomes far more likely.
- Trump has never worried much about debt, deficits, or spending. But he’s tapped Elon Musk as government efficiency czar. It’s an orthogonal approach to spending reform instead of the traditional (and unsuccessful) Paul Ryan playbook. Can this good cop-bad cop duo at the very least return out-of-control outlays to a pre-Covid path? Can they at least cancel purely kleptocratic programs, such as the $370-billion Green Energy slush funds? Might they go even further – leveraging the unpopular spending explosion and resulting inflation to achieve more revolutionary effects on government spending and reach? Or will the powerful and perennial forces of government expansion win yet again, sustaining a one-way ratchet not even Elon can defeat?
- What if the economy turns south? One catalyst might be the gigantic unrealized bond losses on bank balance sheets; another might be commercial real estate collapse. Although reported GDP growth has been okay, the inflation hangover is helping Trump win on the economy. But many believe the post-pandemic economic expansion is merely a sugar-high and has already lasted longer than expected. A downturn early in Trump’s term could complicate many of his plans.
- How will NATO and its transatlantic network respond? Or more generally, what will the neocon and neoliberal hawks, concentrated in DC and the media, but little loved otherwise, do? Does this item from Anne Applebaum — arguing Trump resembles Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin all rolled into one — portend continued all-out war on prudent foreign policy? Or will they adopt a more sophisticated approach? If the neocons move wholesale and formally (back) into the Democratic fold, how long will the coalition of wokes and militarists hold? On the economic front, Europe, already underperforming vis-a-vis the US, will fall even further behind without big changes. Reformers should gain at the expense of the transatlantic WEF-style bureaucrats.
- Can Trump avoid another internal sabotage of his Administration? Before then, if the election results are tight, will the Democrats seek to complicate or even block his inauguration? Can he win approval for his appointees in the Senate? Can he clean house across the vast public agencies? How long will it take to recruit, train, and reinvigorate talented military leadership, which we chased away in recent years? And how will Trump counter – and avoid overreacting to – taunts, riots, unrest, and lawfare, designed to bolster the case he’s an authoritarian?
- Will the Democrats reorient toward the center, a la Bill Clinton? Or will the blinding hatred of Trump fuel yet more radicalism? Orthodox political thinking suggests a moderation. Especially if Trump wins the popular vote, or comes close, pragmatic Democrats will counsel a reformation. James Carville, for example, already complains that his party careened recklessly away from male voters. And Trump’s apparent pickups among Black and Latino voters complicate the Democrats’ longstanding identity-focused strategy. Other incentives might push toward continued belligerence and extreme wokeness, however, and thus an intra-party war.
- Will the half of the country which inexplicably retains any confidence in the legacy media at least begin rethinking its information diet and filters? Or has the infowarp inflicted permanent damage?
- Will big business, which shifted hard toward Democrats over the last 15 years, recalibrate toward the GOP? Parts of Silicon Valley over the last year began a reorientation — e.g. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and before them, Peter Thiel in 2016. But those are the entrepreneurs. In the receding past, businesses large and small generally lined up against government overreach. Then Big Business and Big Government merged. Now, a chief divide is between politically-enmeshed bureaucratic businesses and entrepreneurial ones. Does the GOP even want many of the big guys back? The GOP’s new alignment with “Little Tech” is an exciting development, especially after being shut out of Silicon Valley for the last two decades.
- Industry winners: traditional energy, nuclear energy, Little Tech. Industry losers: Green Energy, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food. Individual winners: X (nee Twitter), Elon Musk, RFK, Jr.
- How will the Censorship Industrial Complex react? A Trump win will pose both a symbolic and operational blow to governmental, non-governmental, old media, and new media outlets determined to craft and control facts and narratives. It will complicate their mission, funding, and organizational web. Will they persist in their “mis/disinformation” framing and their badgering of old media and social media companies to moderate content aggressively? Or will they devise a new strategy? A.I. is pretty clearly the next frontier in the information wars. How will those who propagandize and rewire human minds attempt to program and prewire artificial ones?
- How will Trump integrate RFK, Jr. and his movement? Will RFK, Jr. achieve real influence, especially on health issues? Big Pharma and Big Public Health will wage a holy war to block reforms in general and accountability for Covid mistakes in particular.
- Trump has promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. On one hand, it should be easy. Despite what you hear from DC media and think tanks, Ukraine is losing badly. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and its military is depleted and faltering. Ukraine should want a deal quickly, before it loses yet more people and territory. Russia, meanwhile, always said it wants a deal, even before the war started, focusing on Ukrainian neutrality. Why Ukrainian neutrality should bother the US was always a mystery. And yet even critics of the West’s support for Ukraine, who want an agreement, think it will be difficult to achieve. The Western foreign policy establishment has invested too much credibility and emotion. It will charge “appeasement” and “betrayal” and make any deal difficult for Trump. Russia, meanwhile, has secured so much territory and now has Odessa and Kharkiv in its sights. Putin will not be eager to accept a deal he would have taken in 2021 or before. The far better path for all involved was a pre-war agreement, or the one negotiated but scuttled in April 2022.
- What if A.I. launches a new productivity boom, enabled by an agenda of energy abundance, including a nuclear power revival? The economic tailwinds could remake politics even more than we currently see.
- Can Trump, having run and won his last campaign, consolidate gains by reaching out and uniting the portions of the country willing to take an extended hand?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
Authors
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