Internet for the People: A Conversation with Ben Tarnoff

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

This episode of the podcast features a conversation with the author of a new book that makes a compelling argument for the substantial deprivatization of the Internet. In Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, Ben Tarnoff says to create a more democratic and equitable society we need to diminish the role of the market in the future of the internet, and reduce the power of profit motive to define our online experience.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

You start this book at the bottom of the ocean. Why do you start there?

Ben Tarnoff:

Yeah, so we open 'Among the Eels,' which is the name of the preface, and we're looking at MAREA, which is an undersea fiber optic cable that runs across the Atlantic Ocean. And I wanted to open somewhere strange, because I think the thing with the internet is that we all assume that we know what it is because it's such a big part of our lives and indeed increasingly a big part of our public conversation. But when one scratches the surface and digs down a bit deeper, it turns out that the internet is much weirder and more complex than we would assume. So, I didn't want anyone to take anything for granted. I wanted to plunge people into a place that felt unfamiliar to try to denaturalize the internet as a way of opening into its history.

Justin Hendrix:

So in this introduction, you not only take us through the history of the emergence of the internet and in particular, the role of the US government through both ARPA and DARPA and then ultimately, the National Science Foundation, but you also present your thesis, which is that the internet's privatization is ultimately a bad thing or a necessary precondition for a lot of the problems that we consider to be made up in the tech clash today.

Ben Tarnoff:

So, as you point out, the book is mostly a history, but it's a history with a polemical core, which is that the story of how the internet was privatized, which is to say how a network and a technology that emerged through decades of public management at the cost of billions of dollars of public money, how this network and technology was turned over to the private sector, how the profit motive was programmed, if you like, into every layer of this network.

This story of privatization, which is complex, which has different phases and composed of different interventions, nonetheless lays the foundation for the various problems that plague the modern internet. And these problems, of course, have come to greater public attention through the so-called tech clash of recent years. So, the main argument here is that the tech clash is nothing if not a belated reckoning with the legacies of privatization.

Justin Hendrix:

So, you say that naturally, industry insisted that the internet's privatization was a precondition for its popularization, this idea that it was really the only option that we had to privatize things in order to take it to the masses, but you call this a false choice. Why?

Ben Tarnoff:

Well, I think it helps in trying to answer that question to frame the history of the internet in the early '90s a bit for us, which is by the early 1990s, the internet is still a federally managed system, but it now is under the control of the National Science Foundation rather than the Pentagon. So, it's a civilian network. It's used primarily by academic researchers who are accessing it from university campuses all across the country. But the thing with the internet in the early '90s is that increasingly more and more people want to get online. The worldwide web appears in the early '90s. The first graphical web browsers, Netscape navigator being the most popular, appear. And this makes the internet more appealing, richer, more interactive, a bit closer to the internet that we know today.

So, in some, more and more people want to get on the internet and the National Science Foundation determines that they're going to privatize the network sooner than expected. So, crucially, privatization was the plan all along. The federal government at no stage had any intention of running the internet indefinitely, but the question was when. When was the internet going to be privatized? And also, how was the internet going to be privatized? What would be the terms of the transition?

Briefly, what happens is a very fast and very extreme form of privatization. And this is, as you pointed out, argued for by telecom lobbyists, who as you might imagine, have a lot to gain from a particularly extreme form of privatization that ensures a total corporate dictatorship over the infrastructure of the internet. This is presented by telecom lobbyists as inevitable. In other words, the only way to popularize the medium was to put it under full private sector control. And in the book, I argue that this was in fact, a false choice and there were a number of proposals at the time that would have popularized the internet without entirely privatizing it.

There's one proposal in particular that I point to by Senator Daniel Inouye who introduces a Senate bill that would've reserved up to 20% of telecom capacity for public uses. This capacity would've been provided free of costs to qualifying institutions like libraries that serve the public and of funding stream. It would've been provided to these organizations to develop their own content and programming. The major model here was the model of public media. If you think about radio and television, we've always reserved a portion of the spectrum for non-commercial uses.

Admittedly, public media in the United States is much weaker than it is in other advanced capitalist countries. But nonetheless, there's a precedent here of public media that figures like a Inouye and a handful of other activists at the time could point to. Of course, as we know, telecom lobbying defeats that proposal and extreme privatization takes hold, but nonetheless, there were alternatives. There were other paths that the internet could have taken.

Justin Hendrix:

So, in many ways, you take us through the history of the internet then and the development of various applications and business models on top of it, but you take a detour to considerations around democracy in the way that the internet interacts with democracy. You say the present order of things is not merely unfair. It's also fundamentally undemocratic. What is at stake is nothing less than the possibility of democracy, a possibility that an internet organized by the profit motive precludes. Now, a lot of folks who are listening to this podcast, of course, they know it's about the issue of relationship between technology and democracy. Why do you see this in such stark terms?

Ben Tarnoff:

It's funny, I try to avoid or I tried to avoid talking about democracy and capitalism in this book, because when you write about the internet, there's a terrible scoping challenge. Where does the internet start? Where does it end? How do you write a relatively short book about the internet without writing about literally everything? Because the internet is entangled with literally everything. So, I allowed myself, as you said, a brief detour to try to define some of these terms, because they are important for my argument. They provide much of the moral thrust, if you like, of the polemic.

The passage that you quoted appears in particular when I'm discussing the severe inequalities in broadband access that exists within the United States, I could give you a litany statistics on this, but just one in 2018, Microsoft researchers found that more than 162 million Americans do not use the internet at broadband speeds. Now, that is nearly half the country. It's an astonishing number. And it has to do briefly with the fact that internet service is quite expensive in the United States and infrastructure is sorely under-invested in. So, without going into excessive detail on why that's the case, although we could certainly go there if you like, what I want to argue in the book is that this is not merely an unfortunate thing. This is actually a deeply anti-democratic thing.

And I define democracy as having basically two components, a component of self-rule and a component of collective rule. The self-rule component of democracy being access to the resources that you need to lead a self-determined life. The ability to rule yourself is predicated on access to certain things, let's say housing, healthcare, food that enable you to actually live a life of your own determination. Internet access has become one of those essential preconditions of a self-determined life. People need it to apply for unemployment insurance. They need it to be able to work from home. Kids needed to be able to take classes from home. We saw how essential a broadband connection is in the early stages of the pandemic.

Among the many layers of crisis that that pandemic illustrated for us, one of them was this crisis of broadband access. The other component of democracy that I talk about is collective self-rule, right, which is the ability to rule ourselves together. And we could gloss this more concretely as the opportunity to participate in the decisions that affect you. The ability to participate in those decisions is in fact how we secure the conditions of individual self-rule, because of course, those conditions are about social choices of how certain resources are distributed.

So, people need to be able to participate in those choices to ensure that the resources are distributed in such a way that everyone has an opportunity to lead a self-determined life. So, I apologize for that being a bit abstract, but I do try to ground it in the nitty gritty of the broadband crisis in the United States.

Justin Hendrix:

I think you do try to make it a little more real when you get on then to what you see as a potentially alternative vision for how the internet might look around community networks and in much smaller ISPs that aren't primarily motivated by profit. I don't know how to ask this question. There have been collectives and cooperatives and various other ways to provide internet access for a long time. What do you think is new about your assessment of them as a potential alternative?

Ben Tarnoff:

Well, look, as you say, there are more than 900 so-called community networks across the United States. And just to define this term for our listeners, this refers to publicly-owned and cooperatively-owned broadband networks. So, it could be owned by a municipality in the case of public ownership. For cooperative ownership, what that means is it's owned by the users themselves. So, there are, for instance, a number of so-called rural electric cooperatives in rural parts of the United States who have expanded into the provision of broadband access. Now, I could walk you through the research on these networks, but suffice to say, they tend to offer much better service at much lower cost than the monopolistic giants like Comcast.

In terms of my argument, though, what I'm interested is not just the consumer reports version of these networks of like, "Oh, yeah, these are better than the other market actors," but rather to frame it in this somewhat more elevated discourse of democracy, which is to say community networks point the way towards a more democratic arrangement of the pipes of the internet, because they help satisfy those two components of democracy that I mentioned earlier.

On the one hand, because they're able to offer better service at lower cost because profit maximization is not their sole priority because they are often motivated by social goals, such as universal connectivity, they are able to provide resources that people depend on in order to lead self-determined life much more effectively than their corporate counterparts. In terms of the second component, because of these alternative ownership models, they are also able to enable people to participate in decisions around how infrastructure is going to be deployed locally. Those cooperative-owned networks that I mentioned earlier, these are democratically-run organizations.

In fact, in order to retain their federal tax exemption, they have to hold regular democratic elections for the board. So, this gives members of communities opportunity to actually determine collectively, "What's this network going to look like? What kind of technology is it going to use? Do we want to integrate it with a smart grid and so on?" So, these are decisions that are taken away from the executives and investors of Comcast and placed where they belong, which is with the people themselves.

Justin Hendrix:

After you posit this potential alternative to the way we access the internet, you move up the stack and you take on the woes of the platforms, a number of different types of woes, but you also argue-- drawing from folks like Tarleton Gillespie-- that platforms don't exist. What's so dishonest about the idea of platforms that has nested in our imagination?

Ben Tarnoff:

Well, this is a point I hope is not too pedantic, because I think it does have real political stakes, which is that platform is a term that originally referred to something fairly specific, which is a set of technical components that developers can build applications on top of, say a set of APIs, but over time has been extended to mean basically any piece of software running on the internet. And the reason that this term has been extended so widely and in my view, so irresponsibly is because it does work for the tech firms. It, as Tarleton's work shows, suggests values of openness, of neutrality, of being level, of even handed. These metaphorical connotations of the platform fundamentally obscure and mystify the intimate role that these platforms play in ordering our online life.

It's essentially a screen with which to hide their sovereignty. So, I in the book present an alternative metaphor drawn from the work of the scholar Jathan Sadowski, where I suggest thinking of these complex computational systems as online shopping malls, as the online equivalent of the mall where many Americans spend much of their time. And I think the advantage here is that we can refocus our thinking on the idea of a corporate enclosure. One in which various different types of interactions are taking place. Some of them social. If you grew up in the suburbs, you probably went to shopping malls to hang out with your friends. Some of them commercial. You might go to shopping mall to buy some clothing for instance.

But nonetheless, within the walls of the online mall, all of these interactions are occasions for manufacturing data. That that is essentially the defining feature of the online mall and that these various data streams that are emerging from these different types of interactions can be considered rents of a kind. Sadowski uses the term data rents.

So, if you think about malls, they're usually in the rental business, that they rent out spaces to different merchants in the mall. And the idea of extracting monetary rents of course exists online. If you take an Uber ride, you're going to be charged a fee, but data rents is actually really where the money is, because these companies have found various ways to monetize the immense quantities of data that they're able to manufacture within the walls of the online mall.

Justin Hendrix:

I quite liked the way that you blended this idea of the online shopping mall as having three elements, 'the sovereign, the middleman, the maker of network effects.'

Ben Tarnoff:

Yeah. So, I tried to identify some core signatures of the online mall, because I acknowledge that online malls are quite complex. They're entangled with a set of legal, financial, political forces. They're quite different from one another. I mean, Uber, as they complex computational system let's say is quite different than that of Facebook. So, the question here is, "Can we come up with some common signatures across this wide field of variation, nonetheless define a genus, let's say, that we can put various instances under?" And what I zeroed in on are these three characteristics that on the one hand, it's a sovereign. It writes the rules for the interactions that are taking place within it.

It is a middleman. It's the basis by which these interactions are enabled. It is the connector of different parties. And of course, it is the maker and the beneficiary of network effects that the more people that use the system, the more valuable it becomes. And then the last signature, if you like, is as we've discussed, online malls are manufacturers and monetizers of data. And that is probably their most critical function when you think about how money is made.

Justin Hendrix:

So, you talk about the online mall, the birth of the online mall, the rise of the cloud, the spread of the data imperative as the vectors for the deeper privatization of the internet, but then you get on to this maybe more recent phenomenon of algorithmic management of the machine, the network, essentially, telling real people what to do, which seems to be the direction of our economy.

Ben Tarnoff:

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, there is, of course, a long history of computers and networks being used to coordinate work, right? I mean, I quote the work of the political economist, Joan Greenbaum, who points out that when LANs and LANs were first introduced... We'll test the age of your listeners here. Those of us who remember LAN parties. When these different kinds of networks were introduced in a corporate setting, it enabled companies to distribute labor more widely and in particular, to move so-called back office functions out of the office and down the street and then out of state and then of course out of country. So, I think it's important to place the latest developments in managing by algorithm, managing by network within this broader history.

But of course, things have become much more sophisticated and frankly, more dystopian. There's a lot of great work on the subject of algorithmic management in particular of gig workers like Uber and Lyft drivers, but of course, we can also locate forms of algorithmic management within Amazon warehouses, within the world of financial workers. There's various forms of surveillance and control that is affected via software and it exists in almost every sector. Although there's of course the cutting edge and Uber is probably a good place to look at for that.

Justin Hendrix:

You referenced the shadow workforce, the human cloud of employees that these systems are able to bring together, and then the notion of predatory inclusion, the reference to Tressie McMillan Cottom. I don't know. Where do you see this all headed? If some of the interventions that you mentioned in your book aren't enacted, how far does this dystopian direction take us?

Ben Tarnoff:

Well, the major development that's occurred since I wrote this book is the so-called market correction in tech. And I think that's something that's interesting to reflect on in terms of what it means for the next chapter of this story. I mean, it is mostly affected on profitable firms, but there has been a slowdown in hiring. Even just today, Apple said that it was going to be slowing down its hiring. So, even very profitable tech firms are feeling the crunch of frankly tightening monetary conditions, a gloomier economic outlook. So, the question is beyond the obvious consequences like a bunch of firms that won't be able to secure funding anymore will go out of business.

Aside from that, what will it mean for this next chapter of the privatization of the internet, which is a process that continues and tries to find new forms. Certainly, Web 3.0 and crypto and NFTs was one proposal for how to continue that privatization story, if you like. It was one proposed next chapter that has seemed less feasible in tightening monetary conditions. Facebook for what it's worth certainly sees virtual reality as the next chapter and has put a fair bit of money into trying to make that happen. Although once again, the gloomier economic outlook and its falling share price means that it can afford to spend a lot less money than it has on VR.

So, I don't presume to make any predictions, but I'm just giving us the map of the territory. I think, the next few years are just going to look different for tech. We're very much out of the what I call the baroque phase in the book of sky high valuations, just endless amounts of funny money, investors chasing absurdly unprofitable firms, like Uber in the hopes of cashing in on the next Google. That was the paradigm for a long time and we're suddenly out of it.

Justin Hendrix:

So, by chapter nine, you're trying to think about reform. You're beginning to introduce maybe some alternative ideas about the way things might be organized, but you find, I guess, most of the major critics who are in power, both lawmakers, who you say provided the soundtrack of applause to the privatization of the internet and still do so, I think. Even at most Capitol Hill hearings, they all start off with some reverence for the extraordinary things that these tech firms have done to enable our lives in different ways. But you even, I think, chide folks like Lina Khan and the New Brandeisians for not being far reaching enough in their reformist perspective.

Ben Tarnoff:

Yeah. So, my approach to anti-monopoly in this book is one of critical support and of sympathy. I think that the anti-monopoly toolkit is indispensable for curbing the power of these firms, for shrinking their footprint. And to that end, I see myself as a fellow traveler, to some extent within the anti-monopoly project. Where I part ways with the anti-monopoly folks is in our diagnosis of what the problem is. For them, the problem is that the markets of the internet are too consolidated and the solution is to make them more competitive or at least to have what they call fair competition.

To my mind, the problem is not that markets are too consolidated. The problem is the market itself and I don't think that making markets more competitive would do very much to solve the deeper problems of the internet. I'll give you an example. One of the problems that has occupied enormous public attention, maybe the problem that is number one in terms of people's awareness of the problems with tech is Facebook's proliferation of right-wing propaganda, of so-called myth or disinformation, of bigotry, and so on. The reason that Facebook is a proliferator of these types of content is because it was built from the ground up to maximize user engagement.

There's been ample reporting that has substantiated that link. Research within Facebook has substantiated that link. Filtering algorithms are designed to favor this type of provocative incendiary content in order to maximize user engagement, which as we know is imperative for Facebook's business model, which is to try to manufacture as much data as possible in order to monetize that through the sale of so-called targeted advertising. Okay. This imperative to maximize user engagement at all costs came out of an era of relative competition. It came out of an era when Facebook was a smaller company, a startup even.

It was trying to grow as fast as possible to grab market share as fast as possible. It came out of an era of competition in other words. So, the idea that, just to take this example, simply by increasing competition, we're going to automatically guarantee better social outcomes, I think, is misplaced. I don't think a world in which we have a dozen Facebooks does very much about the problem of right-wing propaganda proliferating on the internet to take one example.

Justin Hendrix:

So, it's here, you suggest there's another alternative: deprivatization. You use what I think of as one of the better visual metaphors of the book, this idea of the birds in the food court.

Ben Tarnoff:

So, if we extend the metaphor of the online mall, we could think about what might be required to break the walls to the enclosure and to see the enclosure with all manners of invasive species. If you look at photographs of so-called dead malls, they often thrive in ecosystems, not always, but they can. So, that's a metaphor that I provide as a way forward. In terms of what that means briefly, I think there are two steps. The first is that we need to shrink the footprint of the online malls. And this is where the anti-monopoly toolkit can be quite useful. This means doing things like breaking up the firms, banding mergers and acquisitions, enforcing interoperability, number of things that the New Brandeisians folks have been advocating for for a while.

I think these would be very positive steps, but the second component and this is probably where the New Brandeisians would disagree is that I think we also need to develop publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode the practices of democratic control into their everyday operations that represent true alternatives to the corporate giants, not just smaller or more entrepreneurial versions of them, and then use public policy tools to try to make these alternatives more robust, more accessible, and more of a threat with the goal of having them eventually lay claim to the space that the online mall is formerly occupied.

Justin Hendrix:

In the book with this thought of future nostalgia and as I understand it, you're trying to find an intellectual space that maybe moves on from the, I guess, past nostalgia that we may have for the internet before it was so successfully privatized. So, you move on into this idea of future nostalgia. Let me let you explain it. What is future nostalgia?

Ben Tarnoff:

Well, future nostalgia is first of all, of course, an album by Dua Lipa. Shout out to Dua Lipa, but it's an idea that I tried to develop because I wanted to think about what are the political uses of nostalgia. There's a lot of nostalgia these days for earlier eras of the internet. There's a whole aesthetic movement online about making your website look like GeoCities in the '90s. I suspect in some cases, it's found fans among people who actually weren't old enough to remember GeoCities. But in any case, internet nostalgia, when one looks at the history of the internet is actually a constant.

You have people who are quite nostalgic for earlier eras of the internet in every era of the internet, which was surprising to me that you could feel nostalgia for say the internet of 1986, but in fact, people did. So, this is a constant. My goal here was not to try to make people feel ridiculous for feeling nostalgic, because I have my own nostalgia from my own era of the internet. It's inevitable, but rather to think about how might we use some of that effective force and channel it if it's possible to do so towards a political project. I talk in this final chapter a bit about E.P. Thompson's magisterial work, The Making of the English Working Class.

And in it, he has a discussion of the Luddites, who of course were the textile workers who smashed the machines that threatened to displace them. And Thompson talks about how the Luddites looked backward in order to look forward, that they posited an imagined past, a better past, one based on moral economy and a more communal spirit of living and articulated a great nostalgia for this past, which of course never existed, but did so in order to develop a vision of the future in which technology could be subordinated to human need. In other words, their imagined past became a set of resources with which they could imagine and articulate and struggle for a better future.

So, in this final chapter, I draw on that idea and I suggest, "Instead of feeling nostalgic for previous errors of the internet, what if we manage to find a way to feel nostalgia for all of the possible futures that the internet could have had, all of those missed opportunities, those forks not taken?" For instance, in our early part of our discussion, that Daniel Inouye idea that was floated in the 1990s, which was known as the public lane on the information superhighway. Would it be possible to feel nostalgia for those foreclosed futures of the internet and somehow then to use that nostalgia to imagine and to struggle for a better future that could actually take place?

Justin Hendrix:

Do you imagine that sabotage might be necessary for us to reach that imagined future?

Ben Tarnoff:

Well, elsewhere I've written about Luddism actually. It's not something I wanted to dwell on too much in the book. Luddism is actually having quite a moment. There are a number of interesting writers these days on the left, who are thinking about the legacy of the Luddites.

Certainly, I mean, look, I followed David Noble here and his point is that the Luddites were acute technological thinkers. They understood quite clearly what kind of world these new machines were creating and they were not against machines in the abstract because machines don't exist in the abstract. They were against very specific technological interventions that were going to cause them and their families to starve, which is indeed what happened. So, I think the Luddites are invaluable as a precedent, as a resource, as teachers.

Justin Hendrix:

We're talking in a moment. It's the summer of 2022. The midterm cycle is about to heat up. We're going into another election cycle and it's shaky whether even the anti-monopoly project that you talk about in the book will come through with the passage of any legislation in this particular cycle or not. Most other angles on tech policy reform in the US appear to be in a paralyzed state on some level. What do you think may actually happen with regard to this agenda, or direction or impetus, that you lay out here in the book? Do you see the forces coming together to push forward in a direction that you would prefer or what do you make of it?

Ben Tarnoff:

Well, again, I'd be reluctant to make any firm predictions, but I think as regards to the anti-monopoly project, there are these two bills in the Senate that have been voted out of committee. And I think it's a question whether those move forward. I mean, look, on the one hand, there is a larger and somewhat bipartisan, I don't want to use the word consensus, but understanding of the problems that are posed by big tech firms and that's a genuinely new phenomenon. It didn't exist five years ago and it's a testament to the work of figures like Khan. On the other hand, there are some real challenges in pushing that agenda through, from both sides.

The Republicans will often be blamed here, but the Democratic Party, historically and at present, has deep links to Silicon Valley. There are some pretty close alliances here. Maybe there are a little less close than they were during the Obama White House. But nonetheless, there are constraints on public policy making here that are imposed by considerations of donors and different capital interests, the kind that constrict and frankly dictate policy on any number of subjects, the internet, not alone. I think in terms of what I would like to see forward and how optimistic I am about a project to deprivatize the internet, look, I mean, I say in the book quite clearly, you're not going to get anywhere unless you have a social movement.

There were all sorts of great proposals, great ideas like the Inouye proposal back in the '90s. The reason that these ideas could not become active, become a material force in history, if you like, is because there weren't masses of people mobilized behind them. That's ultimately what's required. I'm not so ridiculous as to imagine that we're going to have a social movement whose only goal is to remake the internet and I wouldn't want that. I mean, there are other issues that demand our attention probably more urgently than the question of how to deprivatize the internet. But what I would say is the internet is connected to every issue, because it's entangled with every facet of our life.

So, I hope that as organizers say in the climate justice movement or in whatever movement as they come up against the internet, as they encounter the internet, which they inevitably will, that they can draw potentially on some of the ideas in this book in order to come to a strategic approach that is consistent with the rest of their politics. That if you're on the left, if you have a social democratic or socialist orientation, if you have a critique of capitalism and you're starting to think about the internet, anti-monopoly is actually not the best approach. It's actually not the approach that's most consistent with your tradition and there are alternatives that are possible.

Justin Hendrix:

With the couple minutes we have left, you get onto ideas around decentralization and the idea of potentially decentralized social media networks and other more decentralized services on the web. Nowhere in the book is there a mention of blockchain, of Web 3.0, of cryptocurrency. Is that on purpose?

Ben Tarnoff:

I find Web 3.0 just very boring. As a writer, you have to write about things that interest you and it doesn't really. I think my view on blockchain, which I think will satisfy no one, is that the technology is actually interesting, but that crypto is a very bad implementation of it. So, I, let's say, am holding out the possibility that there will be interesting applications of blockchain somewhere down the road. I mean, the original white paper is interesting, but what blockchain is now like a climate killing casino, right?

It's like this indefensible, obscene use of energy resources in order to produce the speculative asset, which in turn actually ruins a lot of people's lives and Web 3.0 essentially being a VC-motivated rebranding of crypto and associated abstractions like tokens in order to generate some payouts for Marc Andreeson and friends. I don't think any of this has any real social value, but blockchain, could it produce something interesting in 10 years? Maybe, but there'd have to be a different set of people working on it frankly.

Justin Hendrix:

Last question, the book is focused for the most part on the US and you explain to the reader why you've made that choice, but is there anywhere else in the world that you look to as potentially delivering on the vision that you lay out here? I mean, a lot of folks think the EU is creating a very alternative version of internet and tech governance. Does that go far enough for you or is there someplace else in the world that you admire?

Ben Tarnoff:

Well, the Europeans, they have a very liberal technocratic model of governance, which appeals to certain people in the United States, no doubt. To me, it's not particularly inspiring. First, enforcement is terrible. I mean, enforcement of GDPR has been a joke and there is this deeper problem here, which is it's hard to discipline capital when your society depend on its reproduction, right? So, this isn't just a tech policy thing. This is just frankly, the constraints, the challenges of a capitalist estate.

The other thing about European style regulation is that it's constructed around the abstractions of the individual, the personal data subject who is being bestowed with certain rights. And the reality is that it's very difficult in practice to exercise these rights. Data portability under GDPR is a great example. Sure, I can request a bunch of data in some incomprehensible format from Facebook, but where am I going to put it? If I don't have anywhere to put it, it's not portable. This I think is this excessively personalized and liberal technocratic view of what regulation should be. So, I don't put a lot of faith in Brussels and the bureaucrats there.

There are, of course, interesting experiments at the local level all over Europe. I mean, Helsinki has a free citywide Wi-Fi network that anyone can access anywhere in the city. And that's pretty cool. There are experiments of a similar kind in the United States. So, for the most part, unfortunately, where I'm looking to for inspiration are local experiments. I wish it weren't so. I'm not a localist or a decentralist in an ideological way, but these are the spaces. These are the cracks and the asphalt, so to speak, where people are able to do interesting things at the moment.

Justin Hendrix:

Once again, the book is Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future. Ben Tarnoff, thank you for talking to me today.

Ben Tarnoff:

Thanks so much for having me, Justin.