Last year Ben Tarnoff, tech worker, writer and cofounder of Logic Magazine, published Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future; it’s a sweeping history of the privatization of the internet, as well as a roadmap offering possible alternatives.
I got together with Tarnoff to talk about the interconnected tasks of building both a democratic internet and a democratic media.
Kate Harloe: Why is the story of the internet’s privatization so rarely discussed, and why is it foundational to where we are now?
Ben Tarnoff: The initial phase of privatization happened early, at a time when the internet was not as widely known or used as it is today. By the time most people started using the internet, it was already in the hands of the private sector. So privatization came to seem natural and inevitable, rather than the result of a set of political choices.
My book is the story of how this took place: how the internet was created, developed, and privatized; how a system that had been constructed through public investment, and was under public control, came to be first owned and then transformed by the private sector into the highly commercialized internet of today. It’s important to emphasize that this was a complex process in which the profit motive was programmed, over time, into every layer of the network.
That initial phase took place in the mid-nineties, and concerned the infrastructure of the internet. The next stage came over the latter half of the nineties and into the early 2000s; it involved pushing privatization up the stack, so to speak, to the application layer, where people experience the internet directly.
One of my favorite parts of your book is your discussion of possible alternatives for the internet. For example, you distinguish between the “pipes” level of the internet, and then, up the stack, the “platforms” level.
Starting with the pipes level: You write about how community networks offer a model for what it might look like to reorganize the pipes of the internet around human need. How would that work?
Community networks are broadband networks owned by public entities such as municipalities, or cooperatively by the network’s users. There are several hundred all over the United States, owned mostly by municipalities. Perhaps the best known is Chattanooga’s Broadband Network in Tennessee, which is owned and operated by the city’s Electric Power Board (EPB).
Community networks tend to provide better service at lower cost because, unlike their corporate counterparts such as Comcast, they aren’t funneling money to their executives and investors. That means more money to invest in infrastructure. Community networks are also accountable to the communities they serve. For them, connectivity is primarily a social good, rather than a source of private profit.
In addition to better, less expensive service, community networks offer the potential to encode democratic principles and practices into their everyday operations. In the case of cooperatively-owned broadband networks, for example, members of the community can participate in regular democratic elections for a governing board and take part directly in decisions that vitally affect their wellbeing, such as: Where will broadband infrastructure be deployed? What kind of technology will be used?
Community networks present a seed from which a different type of internet could grow—they’re offering, right now, the embryonic forms of a more democratic internet.
We’re at a moment where decentralizing power can feel like a far-off dream, so considering the challenges we’ll face once we’re there is something I’ve thought about less often. How would we mitigate the risks that come with redistributing power along local lines?
It’s a difficult question. A number of proposed alternatives involve blockchain, which is an area where there have been a lot of scams. But a lot of people are working earnestly on this question of decentralization and arriving at some interesting places, like Mastodon, which has received renewed interest since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
There is an elevation of the community as the ideal political unit on the left, which I think we have to be careful about. American history shows again and again how local control has often served as a pretext for institutionalized racism, or for keeping the resources of an affluent community out of the hands of a poorer community. We have to be vigilant about the dangers of local control and suspicious of the fetishization of the community, full stop.
I think it’s crucial to understand, as concretely as possible: What are the particular advantages that the local level provides? What are the dangers and risks that accompany those advantages? How could we develop systems of collective governance that allow us to enjoy those advantages while mitigating the dangers and risks?
Inevitably, that means building systems that are not purely local. In the case of the internet, that’s a technical necessity because the internet is not purely local. We have to build structures that are also regional, national, and transnational. The same is true for any of the many other structures of social provision that we aspire to transform.
Further up the stack, you discuss possibilities where the alternatives are more complicated. One idea that really stood out to me was the Technology Networks that were created in London in the 1980s.
The basic business of putting packets through pipes looks the same for Comcast as it does for AT&T, but the internet’s application layer is much more complicated. The technical composition of Google is more complex than that of Comcast, for example, and Google’s technology and business models differ from those of Amazon or Facebook or Uber. That’s all a way of saying that there are inherent difficulties to this layer of the internet when it comes to imagining alternatives.
Above all, what we need at this layer is more imagination.
That’s where the Technology Networks come in, because if we’re going to figure out how to build an internet that works for everyone, then everyone’s voice needs to be part of that process. In order to create an internet that is ruled by the people, you have to create spaces where people can rule.
The Technology Networks were an experiment undertaken by the Greater London Council at a time when the left of the Labour Party had won control of the council. One of their initiatives involved establishing these centers across London where ordinary people could come in, get access to machine tools, get access to expertise, and design and build technologies that would improve their lives. Many of the technologies that came out of these centers, the Technology Networks, were focused on energy efficiency and sustainability.
To my mind, the Technology Networks provide a useful precedent for thinking through how we might create spaces in which masses of people could come together to creatively reimagine the internet and, crucially, receive resources that can support their doing so. Because imagination is expensive. If you want to enable creativity, you have to direct investment towards it. One of the limitations of these experiments is that they don’t have access to the kind of investment that their private sector equivalents do. We have to even the playing field somewhat if we want to develop alternatives that can really pose a credible alternative to corporate products.
Let’s talk about mass movements. You talk in your book about the history of where movements have succeeded or failed when it comes to the internet, and how the lack of a movement in the 90s enabled industry to push privatization “of a particularly comprehensive kind.” You wrote that people had ideas for alternative ways the internet could work; that “it wasn’t a failure of ideas—but of power.” What happened?
With some exceptions, the 1990s were not a terrific period for social mobilization; neither was much of the first decade of the 21st century. And if masses of people aren’t in motion already, the internet is not going to be the catalyst.
The internet can be an important organizing issue, but to the extent that it works as a complement to other organizing issues. The internet itself will never and should never be at the top of anyone’s concerns. The value of the internet as an organizing issue lies in the fact that it is a component of every other issue, and can potentially help provide the connective tissue between those issues. So if you care about climate change, or racial justice, or ending capitalism, there are internet components to all of those issues.
That may help account for the absence of any real social movement around the internet.
Is there anything you’d want to add about where you think this movement is now?
There is no movement to deprivatize the internet, not even the stirrings of one. I hope one emerges, but it’s not visible yet.
I remember I did an event for this book when it came out and in the Q&A, someone asked: “Well, where do I sign up for this movement?”
I’m like, well, I’ve got some bad news. I have no idea. When you find out, you can tell me.
Often, the answer is not terribly specific to the internet; it has to do with the amount of space there is for a certain kind of politics. I remain hopeful and I remain in conversation with various people who have like-minded views about this sort of thing, including people on Capitol Hill. But so far, in terms of what the visible reform agenda for the internet is, it remains dominated by issues of antitrust and privacy and the more traditional regulatory paradigm.
In terms of the changes you’re arguing for, I’m thinking in much the same way about the media system generally. How do you think about making the case to the left, broadly, that reforming the communications infrastructure—which includes the internet, as well as media and journalism—is vitally important?
Capitalism tends to produce the impression that the present allocation of social power is the outcome of an automatic, inevitable process. The history of social movements under capitalism could be seen as an attempt to contest this depoliticizing tendency by deliberately politicizing more spheres of social life, drawing attention to existing sites of contestation, and by participating in those conflicts so as to bring about a different distribution of social power.
This is worth thinking about because the internet is a deeply depoliticized arena. More recently, in the era of the “techlash” and with the emergence of certain reform agendas, the internet is being, let’s say, partially politicized. But that process doesn’t go nearly far enough.
Comcast consistently ranks as one of the most hated companies in the country. That’s an obvious organizing issue, because people understand that they’re being charged outrageous rates for bad service. It’s broadly understood that companies like Comcast are not making the necessary investments in infrastructure to provide adequate service.
A very straightforward way to politicize the internet would be to knock on people’s doors and ask them how they feel about Comcast. When you’re having those conversations, you can say, look, there is actually a proven alternative model that is currently working in hundreds of communities around the country; it’s called a community network, and it can bring your community better service at a lower cost. That’s an obvious material advantage to anyone, but also, as a member, and as a user of the network, you get a chance to participate directly in decisions that affect you.
One could present this argument without any formal political language. Simply: This is not inevitable, and a different model exists.
Then those community networks, because they are spaces of democratic control and deliberation, potentially become spaces of further politicization. One of the things that happened with the Technology Networks in London is that the participants not only built new technologies, but they also came to understand the limits of technology for solving their problems. For example, one of the Networks kick-started a campaign called “Right to Warmth” that involved organizing community energy efficiency initiatives, creating local energy cooperatives, and pressuring Margaret Thatcher’s government to invest more money in energy conservation measures. One could imagine community networks playing a similar role. Once people have a degree of decision-making power in an arena that vitally affects their lives, that can be contagious. The door is open for them to make even bigger demands, and participate in an even bigger set of decisions.
Maybe that’s too optimistic of a view, but I think community networks could play a role in building a broader project of social transformation.
This reminds me of the part of your book about Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and the mechanism by which they are given public funding to solve the problems they themselves created…
So upsetting.
How is this not a bigger story? It doesn’t matter what your politics are, anyone should be able to see how bad this is.
It’s such a scandal. They got money from the pandemic, too. They got a bunch of money. It’s such a broken system. It’s such an easy organizing issue. There’s so much low-hanging fruit there.
But inevitably, people want to talk about Facebook. It’s hard because so much of the popular conversation is focused on the platforms, and deservedly so; platforms are how people experience online life. We encounter the internet through apps and sites. Further, the “techlash” of recent years has focused attention on the various forms of social damage that platforms inflict around the world, so the tech reform conversation tends to be very platform-centric. When you shift the register to talk about community networks, it feels a bit banal. But we have to be able to speak to both registers.
How do you think about the relationship between the privatization of the internet and the privatization of the media system?
One can’t understand the privatization of the internet, or the social damage that has been generated through the privatization of the internet, without situating both within the broader history of a highly commercialized media system.
As Victor Pickard’s work has shown, there have been very strong incompatibilities between the profit motive—which has dominated American media, because we have weak systems of public media provision—and media’s ability to provide reliable information.
Commercialism has always produced a tendency towards sensationalism, and further, it has often silenced or sidelined oppositional voices in favor of those who have most power.
Unfortunately, these tendencies have been magnified by the digitization of our media sphere. To some extent, insights we’ve derived from looking at the broader history of commercialized media can be applied to the contemporary internet. But it’s also a very dispiriting realization. We’re facing modulations of deeper issues that have been at work throughout the history of capitalism. That’s depressing.
Fortunately, Victor always says it with a smile.
He is a very cheery person.
You’ve got to be.
Helps swallow the truth.
Exactly.
So, the alternatives to both the privatized internet and this highly commercialized media system are linked.
The task of building a saner media sphere is not just linked, but almost synonymous with the task of building a democratic internet. Those two feel almost completely fused, to my mind, or perhaps they tackle different aspects of the same problem.
Certainly one of the many problems with the contemporary internet is the poor quality of the information that passes through it. In mainstream media, this problem is often glossed as disinformation. But I would put a slightly different emphasis on this. When you have the incentive to maximize user engagement—as a platform like Facebook does, collecting as much user information as possible in order to monetize it through the sale of advertising—you create a system with a very strong, built-in tendency to prioritize sensationalistic content. That tendency now takes an algorithmic form, but it is in fact a continuation of an earlier trend within commercialized media.
One part of the solution will be creating online spaces with better incentives built in. But the other part is to build systems that are capable of supplying better forms of content. That’s where community media centers, and public investment in media production, come in. If there is a fundamental incompatibility between treating media as a business, and media’s capacity to provide reliable information, then we have to develop media models that weaken—and perhaps ultimately eliminate—the role of the profit motive completely.
