technology

The Best Possible Form of the Internet

Technology Writer and Speaker
Internet Society
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale

Maria Farrell

Technology Writer and Speaker

March 23rd, 2021
The best possible form of the Internet is one where it’s possible “to Internet” – i.e. to actually do stuff, not be a data-serf in the current feudal set-up – in myriad more ways than foreseen and permitted by the current, highly centralised and metastatically data-devouring business models of Google, Facebook and Amazon. I mean the web and the app economy, also, and how those companies are reaching into core state functions, i.e. not just the underlying technical infrastructure, because they are how most people experience the Internet. The Internet is Google negotiating sweetheart deals for citizens’ private health data in countries with ostensibly national health systems (UK); it’s Facebook writing its own media laws (Australia); it’s Amazon shuttering whole industries and undermining working conditions for everyone (everywhere). It’s my home country, Ireland, remaking its data protection regulator as a Trojan Horse in the European system to undermine citizens’ rights all over Europe, and rewriting our entire tax code so we are a key node in how Big Tech exfiltrates vast profits from our continent to avoid tax.
That’s ‘the Internet’ for me, because these unaccountable American companies are eating the world and remaking it in their own image. A “best possible form of the Internet” is one that’s not corroding democracy globally because it profits from hate; one that doesn’t hollow out the tax-bases of democratic governments that we need to protect and serve our citizens; an Internet that doesn’t re-create nineteenth century colonialism with most of humanity just a commodified resource to extract profits from, regardless of the human cost, so a tiny number of white, male Silicon Valley billionaires can play planetary-level status games against each other and privatise and destroy everything that once was good.
So, let’s absolutely talk about consolidation, open standards and protocols, and all that good stuff about a Platonic ideal of the Internet, and why it is that the current set of duopolies/monopolies are internalising and making those things unavailable for the generations to come. Let’s talk about interoperability of platforms, data portability, commonages and all the alternative models of ‘how to Internet’, at all layers of the Internet.
But the world is on fire and the version of the Internet we’ve been fed by US tech firms is pouring gasoline onto the conflagration. The adtech model of the Internet sold by Google and Facebook as the only gig in town has single-handedly destroyed journalism’s business model, ravaged our privacy, and in terms of the global processing power required to fuel it, is a vast, unnecessary and unapologetic greenhouse gas emitter. Adtech is a lie, and it doesn’t even work – as any media publisher or advertising company can tell you. But we’re all still pretending it’s the only way to Internet, and that it can somehow be tweaked to make it not destroy democracy.
If we want the best possible form of the Internet, we need first to burn the current one to the ground.
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