Do you believe in life after links?

With the news that we could be in for new rules that would allow the proliferation of link censorship online, many community members are wondering: how will this affect me?

And more specifically, what does life after links look like?

It’s important to note right up front that the proposals being considered by the European Union in the coming weeks and months would not ban or eliminate links, but they would dramatically affect the way that Internet users, online businesses, and Web platforms use links, and fundamentally change the way we use the Web.

As we’ve mentioned before: links are like the highways of the Internet. They both tell us where to go for more information, and actually help us get to where we’re going.

And because links are the routes that we travel to get from one page to another, they serve as critical infrastructure for the Web.

Are we there yet?

One of the big promises that we were made about the Internet was its potential to revolutionize the way that we interact with the world around us. Put differently, the Internet has the potential to enable us to transcend our physical restrictions and travel the world; it allows us to access and ingest research, art, culture, and knowledge that would have in the past been stored in libraries and other physical archives.

Perhaps even more importantly, due to its interconnected nature, the Internet also allows us to contextualize all of these bits of knowledge in relation to each other: it is the only human invention that has the capacity to store unfathomable volumes of data, and to be able to call up any individual piece, and look at it next to another in a fraction of a second.

The Internet is connected.

While it may seem obvious, this feature is what makes the Web a network, instead of a fragmented smattering of websites. Imagine a series of islands. Without bridges to connect them, you would only be able to experience the world on your island.

Here’s an example that hits close to home: the Wiki-hole. It’s a common experience many of us have shared in, when you go to Wikipedia looking for a simple piece of information, and instead find yourself sucked into hours of seemingly-random link surfing that brings you to new places. It’s how I learned about star formation, anti-ballistic missiles, and the Russian taiga all in one sitting.

It’s also what we at OpenMedia like to call ‘serendipitous linking’ and one of the reasons we’re committed to protecting the possibilities of the open Internet. When you go online, sometimes you don’t know where you’ll end up–and that’s a crucial part of what brings us joy in our online lives. It’s how memes start, it’s how mashups are made, it’s the creativity and malleability of the human brain in practice.

This differs from ‘strategic linking’–the kind we see in news articles, and as sources (footnotes) in scientific studies–but both forms are at risk if we let this plan go through unchallenged.

A chill on linking

So now imagine–as was suggested in a recent leak from the European Commission–that Internet users were held financially liable, not only for the content on their own site, but for websites they linked out to as well.

It’s not a leap to suggest that under a regime such as this, linking would become a high risk activity.

As a blogger, a website owner, or a forum moderator, you’d have to be certain the pages you were linking out to didn’t host to any copyrighted or allegedly infringing content. And even if you were certain, the dynamic nature of the Web means that from one day to the next, that could and certainly would change.

It would ultimately degrade the essentiality of hyperlinks, and create a digital ecology where only the big players (think: Google, Facebook, Amazon) who had the money and staff to stave off and fight spurious lawsuits were the ones that were able to utilize this indispensable tool without fear.

Some possible outcomes flowing from this type of regime aren’t hard to imagine:

• the Internet would become largely paid content, where only those established organizations would link out to things

• we’d lose that sense of flow when surfing the net, with broken links, 404 errors and paywalls everywhere

• self-determined learning and free will online would be threatened, with certain companies and powerful interests determining the stream of online knowledge

• a one-directional flow of information and entertainment, more like cable TV than the Internet we know and love

Linking should not be a crime, full stop. And the chilling effects of uncertainty around liability envisioned by these censorship schemes is just as bad as outright censorship, perhaps even worse.

But I don’t live in Europe…

Not only are we looking at the possibility of linking liability, but we’re also facing other threats to our right to link.

‘Ancillary copyright’ is one of them. Essentially amounting to a link tax, ancillary copyright says that aggregators like Google or reddit or Facebook have to pay for linking out to snippets of copyrighted news articles. Once again, Internet users are looking at this regime and thinking “this can’t be happening,” but unfortunately it’s all too real.

Laws on the books in both Germany and Spain have already put this practice into law, and have actually caused Google News to pull out of Spain completely, as conforming to the precedent-setting link tax is simply not in the best interest of the company itself, or Internet users the world over.

To make matters worse, this law actually punishes smaller publishers, who receive huge amounts of traffic from being listed on aggregation websites, and allows them to be found by the vast majority of Internet users who would otherwise be unaware they existed. It might not be such a problem for large publishing houses like Der Spiegel, but it certainly poses a problem for up-and-coming publications, and further cements the supremacy of legacy media companies.

Now, we’re facing the threat that this link tax could be expanded to the entire EU, with German Commissioner Günther Oettinger pushing for this law to be uploaded to the rest of Europe.

If you’re thinking to yourself: I don’t live in Europe, so this doesn’t affect me–think again.

Because the Internet we know and love is interconnected–an ecosystem–the actions taken in one corner of the net can’t help but affect what happens elsewhere. Or, putting it more simply, you might not live in Europe, but some of your favourite websites and services do. And when those services are affected by these backwards proposals, you will be too.

That’s why it’s important that digital rights activists stand up for the principles that govern the Internet as a whole and not just when it’s happening in their backyard.

Because–newsflash everyone!–the whole Internet is your backyard. And unless you want that to change, we’re going to have to speak out now to Save the Link, and the Internet.