Cristina’s Introduction

(note: this owes a lot to Robin Berjon & Maria Farrell We Need To Rewild The Internet  – Longreads)

Digital regulation in Europe is progressing slowly and will at best make only a marginal dent into discrete aspects of gatekeepers’ business models. The existential threats to information, economic opportunities, safety online, security, ultimately democracy are well summarised in Johnny Ryan’s and Pencho Kuzev’s piece Six Horsemen of the Digital Apocalypse | LinkedIn – a letter addressed to “the next (European) Commission”, but of broader relevance.  Regulation will not save us. AI (wherever we think we are in that fever dream and hype cycle) is an accelerator which will make things worse – from market power entrenchment to disinformation to threats to identity, security, elections and democracy. Regulation there is only just beginning.

And frankly, governments and regulators have just stood aside for 20 years with laissez-faire attitudes as the tech giants stormed the internet into their own domain.  We are now hopeful it we are finally “doing something” putting in place restrictive regulation – we’ll see.

But the reality as of today remans the Internet descended into the current hellscape as a handful of tech giants (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon) consolidated their control deep into the underlying infrastructure through acquisitions, vertical integration, building proprietary networks, creating chokepoints and concentrating functions from different technical layers into a single silo of top-down control – that no one did anything  about.

The original internet had an open interoperable core, and that allowed the tech giants to scale globally – exploiting and harvesting for free our collective global wealth – data.  They succeeded in turning that original vision of the Internet into concentrated and controlled environments where a few effective duopolies/monopolies (in mobile devices, in operating systems, browsers, search, social networking, cloud etc) set the rules everyone else needs to abide by; and where the direction of innovation is entirely driven by their interest and incentives.

The shutters have effectively come down: in environmental terms, with concentration and consolidation of the internet’s technical architecture as the equivalent of “‘climate change”: where a dynamic landscape with distinct “players” and “layers” has “hardened into a continent-spanning system of compacted tectonic plates” (h/t Berjon & Farrell). That consolidation has meant network structures are “ossifying throughout the stack, making incumbents harder to dislodge and violating a core original principle: that we should not create permanent favorites.”  

Again as Berjon & Farrell put it, “consolidation doesn’t just squeeze out competition. It narrows the kinds of relationships possible between operators of different services…The more proprietary solutions are built and deployed instead of collaborative open standards-based ones, the less the internet survives as a platform for future innovation. Consolidation kills collaboration between service providers through the stack by rearranging an array of different relationships — competitive, collaborative — into a single predatory one”.   “The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.”  “As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.”

What does this mean in practice?

That the physical infrastructure is in the hands of the very few (today much traffic passes through tech firms’ private networks, e.g. Google/Meta’s own undersea cables; internet traffic is served from very few dominant content distribution networks with their own proxy servers and data centres; that traffic goes through a small number of domain name system (DNS) resolvers linking website names to their numeric address). Then there are internet protocols which the Big Tech firms subsidize and profoundly influence.

There IS some residual common-pool resource management (e.g. internet exchange points (IXPs) where internet service providers (ISPs) collectively agree to carry each other’s data, as having to contract for this separately would be very costly), there are localised broadband networks (“altnets”). There is in principle a toolbox of collective action that could be deployed.  There are some residual technologies developed before the time of encroachment and hardening of the moat that could be retrieved. But it’s all very marginal.

What are our options?

Regulation that is short of breakups or true common carrier rules is not going to undo those deep controls into the infrastructure.

We need to diversify the infrastructures, so that there is scope for different, dynamic ecosystems to get established. The future cannot just be playing whack-a-mole with the current kings.  The list of infrastructures that need to be diversified is long in principle: pipes and protocols, operating systems, browsers, search engines, the Domain Name System, social media, advertising, cloud providers, app stores, AI companies and more. And these technologies also intertwined. So we have a job.  Is it possible?

The speakers at this roundtable today are among the most important voices globally to push for an alternative vision, in which we don’t just struggle to open a chink in the vertical fortresses of the tech giants which own the current infrastructure but think about what it takes to build alternative infrastructures that are open, collaborative, democratic, and where people and businesses can operate online without being exploited and captured, in the public interest.

What does it take and who should do it?? We need vigorous, pro-competitive government policies around procurement, investments and physical infrastructure. Is the state going to drive it, how far? This is not going to work as a state enterprise in a vacuum, we need to move beyond tech firms extracting and selling people’s personal data, and think of different payment models to fund the infrastructure. Are there opportunities for businesses to fund and scale???  What are they?  How do we reorientate innovation on the path to the public interest, instead of being determined by tech giant’s benefit? Particularly now in AI?

This call has gained salience in Europe because in the last month in the runup to the imminent European elections all of Letta/Draghi/Macron have included in their various reports and speeches a call for public good investments in digital infrastructure. They realise regulation is only part of the answer.  And we have examples around the world where key elements of the “stack” have been established anew – take India Stack with its combination of a giant digital identity project rollout (Aadhar), free Unified Payment Interface system and data ownership & control (I know there are reservations around state control etc., but it’s a remarkable development).  Take Taiwan. There are other examples (Estonia in Europe).  We need to move in that direction, not live in a monoculture “digital regulation” fixation.