Word reached a Roman governor’s household on the Black Sea coast that an old man had died in Italy. His granddaughter wanted to reach her grieving aunt as quickly as anyone could travel in the ancient world. The fastest way was the emperor’s courier service, but it was reserved for official business.
The governor was Pliny the Younger, a lawyer and magistrate who administered the province of Bithynia and Pontus, in what is now northern Turkey, for the emperor Trajan. His wife was Calpurnia. The courier service, the cursus publicus, was a network of relay stations along the main roads, and only the emperor and his governors could issue permits. Trajan had given Pliny a supply of permits for state business. By Pliny’s own account, he had never granted anyone a permit or sent a messenger except in the emperor’s service.
Then he issued one to Calpurnia.
Afterward, he wrote to Trajan and confessed. He explained that he had not asked permission first because, by the time an answer crossed the empire, the favor would have come too late to matter. Trajan replied that Pliny had been right to trust his sympathy. The emperor agreed that a request would have made the permit useless and that the journey’s speed must have made her arrival all the more welcome to her aunt.
Elsewhere in the same correspondence, Pliny asked Trajan whether to honor permits past their expiration date, because he feared blundering in either direction. Even a governor worried about misusing them.
The exchange is small, and it explains how a road holds power.
A Road with a Gatehouse
The internet works like the Roman road network, and social platforms work like the towns, marketplaces, and gathering places the roads connect. The comparison becomes sharper when we ask who owns the roads, who governs the towns, who controls access, and who profits from the traffic.
The strongest link is infrastructure. The systems that enable communication, commerce, and shared life can also enable domination. Roman roads carried merchants, travelers, and farmers’ carts. They also carried legions, tax collectors, and imperial orders. The power to connect people and the power to extend control were never separate.
The cursus publicus demonstrates the second power at work. Augustus most likely organized it between 27 and 20 BC so officials and official messages could traverse the empire quickly. A courier covered about 50 Roman miles a day, roughly 46 modern miles. Augustus chose one courier for each journey rather than a relay of riders, allowing officials to question the person who made the trip. Only the government and the military could use the service, and carriers proved their errand with a permit called a diploma. The system rested on obligations the state imposed on local communities, and historians record both its frequent abuse and the burden it placed on the towns along the route.
The internet repeats that pattern in layers. These are interpretive comparisons, not claims that the institutions are identical.
The road. The cables, protocols, and exchange points that carry data between locations. Anyone may travel it in principle, and whoever controls the junctions controls far more than the road itself.
The towns. Social platforms. Each has its own residents, rules, and owner.
The marketplaces. App stores, ad exchanges, and creator storefronts. Commerce happens there on the operator’s terms.
The permits. Accounts, developer keys, and verified status. They determine who moves faster, farther, or at all.
The checkpoints. Internet service providers and national gateways. States use them to filter, slow, or cut traffic.
The governors. Executives and policy teams who enforce the rules. They answer upward to owners and regulators more reliably than they do downward to residents.
Landlords, Not Villagers
A platform is not merely a village by the roadside. It can be the landlord, the marketplace operator, the rule-maker, and the gatekeeper at once. “Privately governed towns connected by a shared road network“ describes it better than “villages along an imperial highway.”
For thirty-five years, I helped build the systems I now question. A feature that makes life easier for residents often hands the owner a lever, and the owner decides when to pull it.
Nor is there a single digital Rome. The picture is one of overlapping centers of power: states, corporations, and communities whose interests sometimes coincide and sometimes collide. From January to May 2025, Freedom House found that people organized protests online, and authoritarian governments responded with censorship and offline repression, while people in democracies faced growing limits on digital expression. The network served both sides.
The Cost of Dissent
Claiming that authoritarian states “replicate“ Roman rule goes too far. The evidence supports the claim that they reproduce some mechanisms of domination. Rome changed over the centuries, and modern states are not interchangeable. Three mechanisms still make the comparison productive.
Control the routes. Roman roads enabled the state to move troops, supplies, officials, and messages across the territory. Modern authorities block websites, cut connectivity, monitor messages, and punish online dissent. The parallel is functional: whoever controls circulation controls much of the population.
Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net 2025, covering June 2024 to May 2025, found that global internet freedom declined for the fifteenth consecutive year. Of the 72 countries assessed, conditions worsened in 28 and improved in 17. Half of the 18 countries rated “Free“ also slipped. Kenya, Venezuela, and Georgia saw the largest declines.
Iran provides the sharpest recent example. Protests began in Tehran on 28 December 2025, triggered by a currency collapse and soaring prices. On 8 January 2026, the authorities imposed an internet and telecommunications blackout. Amnesty International said the shutdown was deliberate and intended to hide grave human rights violations. By 23 January, it said the blackout isolated more than 90 million people from the rest of the world. On 16 January, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, said at least 5,000 people had been killed. On 21 January, Iran’s Supreme Council of National Security put the figure at 3,117. With the road cut, outsiders could not settle the difference.
Make resistance costly and make the cost visible.
Repression affects more than its victims. Punishing one dissenter warns many others. The Roman arena made that warning public. Condemned prisoners died before crowds, often by being devoured by wild animals, in a punishment called damnatio ad bestias. Not every arena fight was an execution, and the two should remain distinct.
Public executions have not disappeared. Amnesty recorded at least 17 in 2025, including 11 in Iran and six in Afghanistan. That figure fell within a year in which it counted at least 2,707 executions in 17 countries, the highest since 1981, and it excludes the thousands it believes China carried out. Amnesty’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, said a minority of states was using the death penalty to instill fear and crush dissent. None of this means those governments run the whole Roman system. It means the public warning still works as a tool of power.
Keep protection unequal.
Rome did not organize society around equal rights. Legal privilege and political opportunity depended on status: citizenship, wealth, freedom or enslavement, and membership in privileged orders. Pliny’s letters show this. In his report on Christians, he sent those who were Roman citizens to Rome for trial because a provincial governor lacked the power to execute a citizen.
The modern comparison therefore requires a sharper question than “people have lost freedoms, just as in Rome.” It asks whether different groups receive unequal protection, voice, and access to those who govern. That question crosses the historical divide without pretending Roman citizenship and modern human rights are the same.
A Pamphlet with Names on It
The talk of public executions needs two separate answers because literal killing and online humiliation are different acts. Calling a pile-on a “digital execution“ is a strong phrase and a careless comparison, since it shrinks the meaning of actual killing.
A more precise comparison is public punishment as spectacle. An audience exposes a person, joins in, and the event signals which behavior the community will tolerate. Roman spectacles tied visible punishment directly to the legitimacy of power.
Rome also issued a rule against one version of this. In the letter in which Pliny describes how he handled Christians, he mentions an anonymous pamphlet circulating with a list of names. Trajan’s reply drew a line: anonymous pamphlets “must not carry any weight whatever” because they set a terrible precedent and did not suit his age.
That ruling was no charter of liberty. Trajan also wrote that Christians were not to be hunted out, yet those brought before a governor and found guilty were to be punished. A rule against anonymous accusation can coexist with a system that still kills.
Criticism, investigative journalism, harassment, threats, state persecution, and legitimate moderation are not the same phenomenon. Five tests help distinguish among them:
Who organized the exposure.
What evidence supports the accusation.
Whether the response is proportionate.
Whether the person can answer or appeal.
Whether the event informs the public or mainly mobilizes hostility.
These tests discriminate better than treating every controversy as an arena.
Knights, Senators, and Patrons
The closest Roman counterpart to a technology oligarch is neither the emperor nor a “patrician.” The comparison works better as a blend of three figures: the equestrian, the senator, and the patron.
Equestrians: wealth tied to administration. The equestrian order was a wealthy status group ranked below the senators. Augustus appointed its members to senior posts, bypassing senators who might threaten him. Equestrian procurators administered tax collection, imperial properties, and army pay in the provinces. The comparison asks how private wealth becomes part of the machinery of government and what follows when a state cannot run without a private firm’s systems. It does not claim that every wealthy entrepreneur is authoritarian.
Senators: wealth translated into political standing. Senators formed the uppermost citizen elite and preserved their prestige under the emperors. The analogy holds when concentrated wealth buys unusual access to political decision-makers or influence over public priorities. A technology billionaire is not a Roman senator, and the modern role need not carry any formal office. The question is whether economic power can produce political consequences without corresponding public accountability.
Patrons: dependency as power. A patron was a powerful person whose resources made others dependent on that person’s favor. A platform owner resembles a patron and a landlord when a community’s livelihood or public presence depends on continued access to privately controlled space. This extends Rome’s unequal social order as an analytical tool. It does not equate one person with another.
High-tech oligarchs resemble a fusion of Rome’s wealthy administrative elite, its politically influential upper class, and its powerful patrons. They do not resemble its emperors.
The Best Case Against the Analogy
A fair defender of the platforms would make six points, and each one carries weight.
Residents can leave. Roman subjects had no easy way out of the empire. A user can close an account. But does that get harder as the autonomous revolution evolves?
Rivals exist. Many platforms compete, and open protocols mean no single town owns the road. Do owners collaborate, or is it honor among thieves?
Moderation protects tenants. A landlord who evicts harassers, scammers, and abusers serves the other residents.
Corporations lack legions. Roman imperial authority included armies, conquest, legal coercion, and slavery. A company can exclude a person from a market. A state can imprison one, and the two should not be lumped together. Or what happens when they do become one?
Law still binds. In its 2025 assessment of the United States, Freedom House judged the overall information landscape vibrant, diverse, and free. The First Amendment limited the government’s power to restrict content or block websites, and the government imposed no limits on connectivity. The same assessment also reported federal pressure on online speech and expanded digital surveillance after the change in government in January 2025. Not every modern state is equally authoritarian.
Networks help resisters. People used the same communication systems to organize the protests that Iran’s blackout tried to silence. Infrastructure does not decide political outcomes on its own.
These objections hold. They show that the analogy is a caution, not a prediction, and that history does not repeat itself institution for institution. The evidence supports a narrower claim than “the internet is an empire,” and the reason is plain. The strongest evidence of coercion, from shutdowns to public executions, points to states. The strongest evidence about platforms is dependence, which is real but not the same as coercion.
Dependence still leaves an open civic question. When a small number of actors control the essential spaces of communication, people participate either as citizens with enforceable rights or as tenants who stay by permission. The answer varies by place and by platform, and it is worth asking about each one.
An Index Card
Five checks fit on a card and work on any road, Roman or digital.
Find the permit. Name who decides who may move fast, far, or at all.
Find the appeal. Check whether an ordinary traveler can write to anyone, as Pliny wrote to Trajan.
Find the cut. Learn who can close the road, how fast, and who finds out.
Find the rule. Confirm the same rule applies to the senator and the shopkeeper.
Find the way around. See whether people can still route around the gate once it closes.
Pliny had an appeal. He wrote, the emperor answered, and the answer was kind. That is the best case for a road that runs on permits: sometimes the person at the gate has a heart.
A road that runs on kindness also runs on whatever takes its place. The Roman system did not need a villain. It needed a gate, a permit, and someone to hold both.
The internet has all three, and most of us do not hold the permit.
Trajan said yes. Most people never get to ask.
And that is Wisdom Speaking.
Sources
Pliny the Younger, Letters, Book 10, letters 45, 96, 97, 120, and 121, translated by J. B. Firth (1900): letters 61–121 and letters 1–60, Attalus.org.
Freedom House, Freedom on the Net 2025 and its United States report.
Amnesty International, “Death penalty in 2025: Facts and figures,” published 18 May 2026.
Amnesty International, “Iran: Internet shutdown hides violations in escalating deadly crackdown on protesters,” 9 January 2026.
Amnesty International, statement on Iran’s militarized clampdown and internet shutdown, 23 January 2026.
“La «vehiculatio» (o «cursus publicus») y las «militares viae»,” Studia Historica. Historia Antigua 32, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 15 de diciembre de 2014.
“The Cursus publicus: The Courier Service of the Roman Empire,” History of Information, and “How did people send letters in ancient Rome?” History Skills.
“Equestrian Bureaucrats,” California State University, Northridge, and the Classics for All review of the Cambridge University Press history of the equestrian order, 2019.
“Damnatio ad bestias,” Encyclopedia Romana, University of Chicago.