As the internet becomes part of our habitat, and as digital tools make our daily lives easier or more enjoyable in countless ways, almost without realizing it, we have become increasingly dependent on spaces, services and platforms controlled by private companies. And indeed, on the internet, public spaces are increasingly giving way to private spaces that are managed according to interests that diverge from ours.
Since the internet is increasingly indispensable for work, commerce, education and politics, it would be logical for it to be considered a public service, with appropriate regulations to ensure access, privacy, equity, ethics, etc. But little progress has been made in this regard.
Today, more than 50% of the world’s internet traffic passes through one or another of the major platforms run by the big tech transnational corporations, whose central goal is to expropriate as much data as possible in order to generate profits. And they are determined to throw their economic and political weight behind that goal in order to avoid regulations that would hinder it. So, it is worth asking ourselves: what can we, as citizenries, do to reverse this situation? How can we make internet serve the people, rather than further swelling corporate profits?
This is precisely the question posed by the book: Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, by Ben Tarnoff (Verso Books, London and New York, 2022). The author starts from the idea that, to build a better internet, we need to change the way it is owned and organized, “not with an eye toward making markets work better, but toward making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it.” In this sense, the book focuses on summarizing the history of internet privatization, since that “helps us see how problems that might seem distinct are actually connected: how severe inequalities in broadband access and the proliferation of right-wing propaganda on social media are in fact two moments of the same movement.”
Tarnoff recounts how the internet was essentially developed with public funds, having its cradle in the US military and being then deployed in the academic sector. But from the 1990s, when its use began to become widespread in the US, connectivity was privatized, allowing a few large telecommunications companies (such as AT&T, Sprint, Verizon…) to divide the infrastructure between them. Consequently, in the absence of regulations, they ended up offering an expensive service, distributed inequitably and in many places of poor quality. As the author points out: “in an internet organized by the profit motive, not everyone can obtain the resources they need to freely choose the course of their own lives. Nor can everyone participate in the decisions that affect them.”
The author starts from the idea that, to build a better internet, we need to change the way it is owned and organized, “not with an eye toward making markets work better, but toward making them less dominant”
In response to this, hundreds of communities in the US have developed non-profit connectivity initiatives under different models, offering lower-cost service and even, in some places, better quality broadband, with conditions for more democratic control of the technology. In certain cases, such as the Detroit Community Technology Project, they also incorporate actions to interconnect poor communities through mutual aid relationships to sustain social, health and economic wellbeing. In fact, “Privatization does not just describe the political process whereby the internet became a business, but a social process whereby people’s mode of interacting with the internet was engineered for business’s benefit. Passive and isolated consumers are the profitable end point of this process”. On the other hand, “Self-determination in the digital sphere, and the solidarities it generates, offers a point of departure for achieving self-determination in all fields of social life”.
While these community projects are still minute in comparison to the dominant telecommunications corporations, the latter do not hesitate to bring to bear their full economic and political weight to try to eliminate them, succeeding in several states in getting legislation adopted that prohibits local authorities from offering connectivity services. No doubt they fear the demonstrative effect of such ‘bad examples’.
Ben Tarnoff concludes that a democratic internet would have to emerge from a movement, precisely what was missing when it was privatized in the 1990s. “It wasn’t a failure of ideas—activists had ideas—but of power. Other possibilities existed, such as a ‘public lane on the information superhighway,’ but the instrument for making those possibilities practical did not: namely, masses of people willing to take disruptive action to overcome the opposition of industry and its faithful representatives in government”.
“Ben Tarnoff concludes that a democratic internet would have to emerge from a movement, precisely what was missing when it was privatized in the 1990s”
Platforms or online shopping malls
The internet is considered to be built in layers, where the connectivity infrastructure is at the bottom of the stack and the platforms are at the upper layers. But at the different levels, large corporations dominate today. The business model that emerged with the platforms (though for Tarnoff, this is a misleading name, since it gives an illusion of neutrality to what are actually “online shopping malls”) is more about how to monetize internet content, the core of which is the data they collect and process through algorithms. Platforms initially struggled to generate revenue until Google, and then Facebook, introduced the advertising factor. They created a business model that depends on the (free) contribution of users; and Facebook in particular was dedicated to capturing their attention and participation as much as possible, creating “enclosures” to keep them on the platform.
What the platforms are trying to sell to advertisers is the attention of users, by providing them with profiles that reveal their particular data and internet usage. However, Tarnoff considers this claim to be exaggerated, as attention is proving elusive, as a result of growing indifference, the proliferation of ad-blocking apps, etc.; all of which does not prevent the platforms from making a profitable business out of it.
It was around 2010 that a substantive leap in the model took place, when the internet broke away from the limitation of the computer to be present always and everywhere (with the mobile phone, “smart” devices and security systems, etc.). In doing so, the internet “became fluid, ubiquitous, diffuse… something that was always on: fastened to your hand or wrist or pocket, woven through homes and workplaces and cities.”
This untethering made it possible to generate a “human cloud” everywhere. For these companies, “The goal is a world where labor power can be conjured as painlessly as computing power, scaled to meet demand, and then discarded—a human cloud of virtual machines in which the virtual machines are people.”
“The business model that emerged with the platforms is more about how to monetize internet content, the core of which is the data they collect and process through algorithms”
One of the companies that has taken advantage of this most successfully is Uber. But Uber has also introduced a new dimension to data monetization, in that, so far, it loses billions of dollars each year, becoming the most unprofitable tech company; and yet the market value of its shares continues to rise and it receives a steady inflow of financial capital, under the expectation that it will eventually become profitable. “Data helps Google and Facebook sell ads and Amazon sell goods (and ads). But data helps Uber sell itself—which is to say, its equity. Data is converted into money through its interaction with the psychology of financial markets.”
So Tarnoff concludes that digitalization has not fulfilled its promise to reinvigorate American capitalism, but rather that the economic legacy of the privatized internet is “the creation of islands of super-profits in a sea of stagnation, the minting of several dozen billionaires in a time of flat and falling wages, the hypertrophy of select real estate markets in the midst of widespread housing insecurity.”
There are variants of the digital business model, but in general, online shopping malls are “inequality machines”, according to Tarnoff. “More specifically, they reallocate the existing distribution of risk and reward. They push risks downward and spread them around. They pull rewards upward and focus them in fewer hands.” And that starts with employment. For every worker in programming, marketing, etc., there are dozens of “shadow” workers, who are indispensable for the platforms to function, but generally invisible. This work is often outsourced to low-wage countries, in undignified conditions, involving monotonous tasks such as teaching algorithms to recognize images (a dog, a tree), or even stressful tasks such as identifying images of pornography or violence on social networks. Thus, “The excluded are included, but only on the condition that they absorb most of the risk and forfeit most of the reward.”
The fight for our digital future
As internet is so attractive and useful – and increasingly indispensable – in everyday life, it is not easy to mobilize a movement for its reform. Nonetheless, there is growing concern about how digital corporations operate, including among political power circles in the US. Generally, two trends are expressed: the first seeks to write new rules for corporate behavior, or enforce existing ones; the second seeks to reduce the market power of these large companies, including through antitrust laws, to make markets more competitive.
Ben Tarnoff, however, puts forward a third option: deprivatizing the internet. “Deprivatization opens the door to a different kind of internet. Just as community networks are challenging the legacy of privatization down the stack, a similar approach can be applied up the stack. The internet reformers want to make online malls into more responsible stewards of our digital sphere. A more realistic response, if one hopes to reach the root of the problem, is to abolish them.”
In this respect, the author stresses that eliminating these online shopping malls requires, first and foremost, imagination. “Not imagination in the singular but in the plural: imagination as an embodied, collective process of experimentation.” This requires technology to ceases being something that is done to people, and to become something they do together. And there are already numerous ideas and initiatives along these lines. We might envision a “public lane” in the cloud, he suggests, with a variety of cooperative initiatives in various fields. For example, gig economy platforms, or cleaning service agencies, controlled by their workers. This would be enhanced by public policies that favor such initiatives (laws, grants, credits, tax exemptions, contracts, etc.).
In terms of data, the deprivatized sector will need to create its own mechanisms for handling data. In this respect, the author stresses the importance of recognising the collective nature of data. “Data is made collectively, and made valuable collectively. It follows that its governance should also be collective”, that is, that users should have the power to shape the purposes and conditions of data production. He cites several authors who have developed proposals to create “data trusts” and “data commons”. And he adds: “Crucially, the ownership of data would be separated from its processing: users could determine under what conditions an online service would have access to their data, and under what conditions more data could be manufactured”.
However, creative initiatives of this kind face a number of obstacles: “Currently, the creativity of the communities that are doing the best work … is constrained by their narrow social base. They tend to attract specific kinds of people, generally those with technical skills and ample free time. Elevating the level of creativity involves making such spaces larger, more representative, and more integrated into everyday life.” Another is how to generate initiatives that have sufficiently strong institutional relationships to be sustainable. And undoubtedly the most serious obstacle will be the opposition of the big tech corporations themselves, in the face of which Tarnoff insists that it will be better to go on the offensive from the start. For example, measures could be demanded that force companies to implement “interoperability”, that is, that platforms such as Facebook, for example, would be obliged to adopt open protocols that allow interconnection with other social networking applications (which would also force open the enclosures).
However, in order to move in this direction, it will be necessary to build a movement for the deprivatization of the internet, aimed at developing an internet organised around the idea that the people, not profit maximisation, should come first. The author reminds us that “Movements are made of both creativity and coercion. Masses of people in motion generate new ideas… But they must also threaten enough disruption to have their ideas taken seriously. While movements don’t always succeed—more often they don’t—this dual character is the source of their strength: the combination of the capacity to envision a different future with the force necessary to achieve it.” This implies the need to find different strategies for the different layers.
In the Latin American region, Internet Ciudadana (people’s internet) is one of the ongoing initiatives that share this vision: of the need to build a de-privatised internet, with social justice and democratic control, oriented to serve the people; where data serves social purposes rather than private profit. Internet Ciudadana aims to contribute to building a movement in this direction and to define strategies to move forward.
But as Tarnoff says, it will not be an easy task: “Making it possible for the world’s computers to talk to one another was an impressive technical achievement. Making this machinic conversation serve an end other than infinite accumulation will be a political one. It may seem unlikely, but so was the internet.”
Article first published in Spanish in the magazine Internet Ciudadana No. 8
