We Need a Public Service Internet to Free Us from Big Tech’s Grasp
The profit-led business models of big tech are harming democracy. We should look to the tradition of public media to help us find alternatives
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“Big tech”—aka Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft—now outdoes the notorious trusts of the Gilded Age in their raw power. Much of it rests in the hands of some of the wealthiest men in the world. They share not just vast reach and influence, but a common thirst for maximum profit, to the detriment of the public interest.
We’ve seen the results, now too familiar, in everything from a widespread adolescent mental health crisis to increased political polarization. Critics such as Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu and Siva Vaidhyanathan, as well as Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s October testimony on the ways in which Facebook’s leadership repeatedly prioritized profit over safety decisions, have focused on the direct relationship between big tech’s rapacious profit-seeking business model and subsequent civic and individual harms. For them, far from isolated incidents of errors and misjudgement, the damage caused by digital platforms—ranging from anxiety to extremism to loss of privacy to misinformation—is evidence of a malignant profit system working. It is the natural consequence of the way digital businesses now work, where they encourage platform users to stay as long as possible on their sites in order to monetize their attention. Crucially, there is evidence that divisive, emotional and potentially harmful content drives attention online, and therefore not only are companies not incentivized to remove harmful content, they are actually incentivized to promote it—regardless of the ramifications. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama expands on the democratic implications of this—arguing in the Journal of Democracy that it is “unsurprising that these platforms have been blamed for propagating…
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