Ben Tarnoff, technology writer: ‘People need to participate in what affects them most, and that’s impossible in a privatized internet’

“If the internet is broken, how do we fix it?” This is the question posed by technology writer Ben Tarnoff in Internet for the People, a 2022 book that offers a historiographical examination of the internet’s origins, with a focus on the ownership of the infrastructure that enables it. Tarnoff provides a critical yet informative review, tracing the internet from its roots as a project funded by the U.S. government to its current state, dominated by tech giants, while also addressing the primary issues facing it today.

At the same time, the book serves as a manifesto advocating for alternatives to the current oligopolistic model. Tarnoff highlights various experiments and initiatives exploring different approaches to network design, ownership, and governance. These efforts shed light on a relatively unexplored path where the very people who use the technology daily can actively and democratically participate in its management and development.

Question. The title of your book speaks of “the people.” Does the word “people” rather than “users” help to reclaim a certain sense of citizenship?

Answer. As users, we are conceived in a somewhat passive role in our capacity. This constrains our imagination of what relationship to the digital sphere we could have. The idea of talking about people instead of users is to generate the concept of digital citizenship, but it also evokes a political collectivity. The plural versus the individual. The internet typically interpolates us as isolated individuals at home in our screens, but I don’t think that’s the only type of way we have to encounter the internet. Most of the words that we use to describe different aspects of our digital environment are given to us by the industry: platform, cloud, even artificial intelligence. The industry is already politicizing language. I wonder what would happen if we did the same by developing different metaphors.

Q. You begin by using the metaphor of pipes — the infrastructure that makes the internet possible. Why is it that, despite their crucial role, we rarely discuss them?

A. We just assume that they work. It’s a bit invisible until you get your monthly broadband bill and you’re like, “Why does this cost so much money?” The United States pays some of the highest rates in the world for some of the worst internet service, which has to do with how thoroughly concentrated our market for broadband service is in the United States. We need to pay more attention because there are quite important concentrations of power that exists at this layer, and there are opportunities for constructive interventions that can push the internet toward a more democratic alternative.

Q. Should the state guarantee universal access?

A. I certainly think so. These discussions feel very granular. But as you discuss them, you realize that there are all these higher order questions that they rely on. For example, the meaning of democracy. It may seem out of place, but for me, it feels important because I wanted to ground my arguments not as the most sufficient policy intervention in some very narrow technocratic sense, but as these broader moral and political values that I think we really need to be conscious of when we are thinking about governing the internet.

If we define democracy simply in the original strict sense as the possibility that people can rule themselves, then we need two things. The first is that people need to have the resources available to them to lead self-determined lives. You can’t lead a self-determined life if you’re hungry and homeless and sick. If we were to apply those principles to the matter of internet access, we could say that a high-quality, high-speed, reliable connection to the internet is a basic precondition for participation in a modern society. We saw that during the pandemic in the United States, where people were gathering in community parking lots to get internet access because the kids needed to do their homework, the parents needed to access unemployment benefits, the grandparents wanted to Skype with their grandkids.

Q. And the second principle?

A. People need to have a degree of participation in decisions that most affect them. That is impossible to achieve in a privatized system. That’s how we would democratize the internet pipe.

Q. Are you betting on a community infrastructure model?

A. We have in the United States several hundred so-called community networks that are either publicly or cooperatively owned, such as the rural cooperatives in North Dakota. These cooperatives have managed to provide higher speeds at lower cost than the monopolistic giant. But also, crucially, they are able to encode democratic participation into their everyday operations. These rural cooperatives emerged during the New Deal, when the United States was trying to electrify poor parts of the countryside, and receive a federal tax exemption. In order to get that exemption, they have to abide by certain preconditions. One of those is to hold regular elections for their board. These are democratically governed entities that are providing service to member owners. Now, that’s just the United States. These community networks exist all over the world, such as Guifi.net in Catalonia [in Spain].

Q. How does the partnership between President Donald Trump and Big Tech impact the political landscape in the United States today?

A. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter illustrated the dangers of having our informational ecosystem be so vulnerable to market pressures. There’s a tendency to acceptionalize when it comes to the internet. The algorithmic nature turns these platforms into mechanisms for information dissemination. The current landscape is bleak in many ways. There’s an increasing perception of this scammy, sloppy aspect of much of the contemporary internet. It feels as if the quality of our online experience has degraded over the past few years. And I think part of that is the proliferation of AI slop. I’m not sure that I feel particularly optimistic about the prospects for mobilization around the internet as an issue, but I am also not optimistic about the prospects for broader social mobilization in the United States. Trump’s first term proved quite politicizing for many people, but the atmosphere is quite different now.

Q. You compare the large platforms to an online shopping mall. Do we have a sense of being consumers when we use them?

A. The architectural aspect inspires this metaphor. Shopping malls are designed to make you shop, and there are certain aspects of the layout of the platforms that encourage particular behaviors that can be monetized by these firms. But the shopping mall is a space where people have a degree of freedom, and that’s important. Sometimes these platforms are presented in a rather conspiratorial way as brainwashing machines. That’s not quite how they function. It’s actually quite important that people who use these platforms have a perception that they are autonomous. That perception may, in fact, not be the whole reality, but they are afforded degrees of freedom that make the experience of the platform pleasurable.

If you were an American teenager growing up in the suburbs, going to shopping malls, you know that there’s a degree of freedom in a shopping mall environment. There are kids skateboarding where they’re not supposed to. There are teenagers not buying anything and doing drugs in the bathroom. There are all these nooks and crannies in these digital structures where a certain amount of agency and creativity is possible, which should be celebrated. The question, however, is, how do you begin to develop alternative architectures that can displace these online malls or shrink the space that they occupy?

Q. What is the difficulty in making these more horizontal digital spaces work?

A. There are very deep-rooted problems. In the United States, it is related to the decline of associational life, civic life, unions, neighborhood associations, clubs... There’s a hollowing out of society and accompanying rise in social isolation that makes it difficult for certain forms of association, and particularly political association, to cohere in ways that they did throughout the 20th century.

Q. What role does regulation of the sector play in the democratization of the internet?

A. Internet regulation can produce all sorts of different effects, so we need to be precise about the objectives. My objectives are the creation of publicly and cooperatively owned entities that can encode the principles of democratic participation into their everyday operations and begin to assume certain functions in our digital sphere that are currently performed by large for-profit entities, whether that means at the level of internet service provision in the so-called pipes or further up the stack in organizing our online activities at the level of the platforms. That would be my mission statement.

Public policy could be a very powerful implement for promoting the development of these alternatives and perhaps provisioning them with resources that are extracted from the big firms. I’m all for that form of redistribution. But to my mind, European regulation proceeds from a starting point of assuming that the internet will remain a for-profit, privately run domain, and that the purpose is simply to establish the rules of the game and to punish certain corporations who violate those rules. I don’t deny that it could have some good effect, for example, on data protection. But we need to broaden our imagination on how we could use the levers of the public sector in terms of budgets, subsidies, tax breaks, and so on, to cultivate the proliferation of this alternative sector. It is not something that’s going to happen on its own. It really needs various forms of state support.

Q. Is solving internet problems a test of the imagination?

A. I am a big believer in the political power of imagination, but imagination is not something that occurs within one individual mind who’s alone in their bedroom tinkering. Imagination at its fullest is an embodied collective practice. That is the imagination we need to develop an alternative set of institutions for our digital sphere. The privatization of the internet as it took place from the mid-1990s, through the present, required taking this network that had been constructed by the U.S. government and remolding it into a network that could serve the principle of profit maximization. So if we want to develop a different type of internet that isn’t private, or de-privatize a portion of the internet, that process needs to be no less creative. It’s about finding the proper forms of social and organizational life that can govern the internet democratically.

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