A public internet?

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The Beginnings of the Internet: A State Matter

A nascent internet emerged already in the 1960s. It was the American defense research unit, ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), that developed the electronic network, ARPANET. It is often dubbed the early Internet , because it founded the Internet's technological backbone. For example, ARPANET in 1971 made it possible for the US Defense Forces to send electronic messages to each other. What we know today as e-mails. The Internet was inherently public in the sense that it was state-owned.

In 1990, however, ARPA was closed and ARPANET was tendered to private companies that could take care of it (cf. Tarnoff 2016). It also meant that the communication system that ARPANET had established could be spread to the general population. The world's Internet was born, and could be further developed under new economic conditions.

The Internet continues to develop in private hands

In the 1990s, the Internet is therefore no longer owned by the American state, and loses its public character in that sense. However, the Internet becomes public in the other sense: The corporate takeover of the Internet means that millions of people can now gain access by paying for an Internet connection. The internet-based public, and the public debate on the digital media , can begin to take shape. Because just as newspapers are outlets that publish public opinion, a digital counterpart to the established public is also taking shape on the internet: social media.

Social media as the new public

In the late 00s, there are many different social platforms. Here you can talk or write with new strangers or old friends, and the contact surface is not burdened by geographical distances. As you know, the social internet makes it possible to share music, images and videos - and also to exchange attitudes and opinions.

Internet pioneer and researcher Ethan Zuckerman has in this connection formulated what he calls The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism . Zuckerman (2015) explains that, after ARPANET, the Internet has primarily been developed for the pleasure of ordinary people: in the 00s, the Internet is a network that is perfectly set up for sending Friday jokes or pictures of, yes, cute cats .

This means that you have a hyper-integrated communication network for the general population. And it was precisely this that enabled popular protest movements such as the Arab Spring (2010-2012) and the Occupy movement (2011-2012) to mobilize huge crowds over Facebook and Twitter. According to Zuckerman, the Arab Spring was successful, among other things, because those in power in the Arab countries, on the one hand, had not seen social media as a threat to their rule. On the other hand, these dictatorships also could not close down the very popular social platforms for fear of encouraging a general uprising against the closure of a media that the population itself perceived as apolitical. These conditions made social media into powerful activist networks that could harbor public opposition, bypassing the established, state-controlled media.

The Internet as social infrastructure

Today, the indisputable success and enormous spread of social media worldwide has made the Internet a fundamental part of social life. Our telephones have become computers, and our FM radio signals into DAB ( Digital Audio Broadcasting ). Our television can increasingly go online.

The Internet's media therefore constitute a form of infrastructure. In contrast to previous digital platforms, which could be used as an alternative to other communication channels, an infrastructure is the very condition of possibility for something to work. We know other infrastructures: the electricity grid enables the current in our lamps, the water supply makes it possible to live far away from the water source itself. Our sewage system supports other, necessary tasks. And often we don't see the infrastructures that hide behind the socket, the tap or the toilet.

Ten years ago, Facebook and Google were platforms, but research says that they have undergone an infrastructuralization (Plantin et al. 2018; see also Helmond, Nieborg & van der Vlist 2019). They have made themselves indispensable to the basic functions of social life. Google includes Gmail, Drive, Chrome, Maps and YouTube, while Facebook includes Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. You can do almost everything you need within the digital universe that these infrastructures offer.

This leads us to the question of what internet we have got today. More and more people have access to the Internet, and humanity has never been so communicatively connected. Never have humans been able to coordinate protest movements so effectively. But the question is whether the large private tech giants should control a significant part of digital, social life? Should the Internet serve public life instead of private economic interests?

Surveillance capitalism

These companies not only provide an arena for political discussions, but make money by harvesting personal information in order to be able to sell fairly tailored advertisements to users. It is a form of new market power, called surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019). It collects data about (that is, monitors) users' behavior, purchases, relationships, and so on, and resells it. This is what they make money from.

The question is whether these digital infrastructures, by virtue of their central place in social life, have become too important to be left to private companies?

The Internet as a public good?

Could one imagine that the state could develop such an infrastructure to ensure that economic interests did not gain (too much) power over a significant aspect of life ? Just as Danmarks Radio delivers and curates content for Danes' everyday lives, could one then imagine a digital and social infrastructure at the service of the public (cf. Zuckerman 2020a)? An alternative arena where surveillance capitalism has passed away?

These questions can be answered in many different ways, and one could imagine different solutions. And you can think about them with the school classes. Firstly, one could imagine a "public service" model where the state develops an alternative social media platform. The problem with that, however, would be that the state would also acquire (yet) a position of power from which it can collect sensitive personal data and monitor its citizens.

One could also imagine that the state would be able to regulate the conditions for the current social media: You could develop legal regulations that issue conditions for data collection, such as the EU's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation ) . One could imagine that the state could force social media to give users control over all personal information. Or that the user must be able to take his concrete social network over to other social network providers if he chooses to change platforms. Just as you can take your phone book with you when you change phones.

But one could also point to private initiatives that try to create social networks without financial interests controlling the social platform's internal drive towards advertising and sales. For example, Planetary.social or WT.social are social networks that try to create alternatives to the best-known social networks in different ways. Civic Signals is another project that tries to think about how digital public spaces can be more community-oriented than selling goods. I can only encourage you to investigate these and many other platforms more closely (e.g. Solid or Gobo.social).

Ethan Zuckerman (2020b), who also directs The Institute for Digital Public Infrastructures , suggests that a digital public social infrastructure must be decentralized while being anchored in one cohesive entity. This means that you as a user must be able to control all your different networks from one central point (a browser, for example), and that it is the user who must be in control.

A digital, public social infrastructure is also interoperable , which means that any single social network aims to be able to work in interaction with other platforms. This means that the systems are compatible with each other, so that you can transfer your data from one network to another. It would create a whole landscape of different social networks, and the user can thus decide for himself which network he wants to use. An infrastructure of many parts.

Furthermore, according to Zuckerman, each social network must be self-governing and self-moderating, so that it is the community that makes up its own rules. However, no recipe for a golden mean has yet been found: if there are (democratic) framework conditions for which rules each community can equip itself with – which Zuckerman assumes – is each community really self-governing? This is a central problem for the idea (or dream) of self-governing communities – what happens if they themselves choose to rally around anti-democratic values?

Outlook

The issue of a public Internet is not straightforward. Because the internet is chaotic. But the Internet is no longer the Wild West: both states and citizens are beginning to pay more attention to regulation and to inventing social networks that support different structures than those we see dominating today. The question is not a solution, but a guideline for the imagination: How could one imagine the social internet of the future?

Crediting

Joachim Wiewiura, PhD in political philosophy from the University of Copenhagen.

 

 

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