The Open Internet is Dead. What Comes Next?

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

For this week’s podcast, I spoke with Mallory Knodel, executive director of the Social Web Foundation and founder of a weekly newsletter called the Internet Exchange, and Burcu Kilic, a senior fellow at Canada’s Center for International Governance Innovation, or CIGI. The conversation revolved around a post the two wrote for the Internet Exchange titled, “Big Tech Redefined the Open Internet to Serve Its Own Interests,” which explores how the idea of the ‘open internet’ has been hollowed out by decades of policy choices and corporate consolidation.

Kilic traces the problem back to the 1990s, when the US government adopted a hands-off, industry-led approach to regulating the web, paving the way for surveillance capitalism and the dominance of Big Tech. Knodel explains how large companies have co-opted the language of openness and interoperability to defend monopolistic control.

The two argue that trade policy, weak enforcement of regulations like the GDPR, and the rise of AI have deepened global dependencies on a few powerful firms, while the current AI moment risks repeating the same mistakes.

They say we must call for coordinated, democratic alternatives: stronger antitrust action, public digital infrastructure, and grassroots efforts to rebuild truly open, interoperable, and civic-minded technology systems.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

I'm excited to have the two of you here today to talk about this piece that you both authored this summer in Internet Exchange. But Mallory, I want to ask you just, what's going on in Internet Exchange. I've seen some announcements out of the organization lately. It looks like things are moving forward and you've got some things to share.

Mallory Knodel:

So we've been doing the Internet Exchange now for two years, and I say we because about a year ago, added a couple of folks to the team. But there's been a shift in terms of sustainability model, so we want to now keep the newsletter going. We're going to, rather than try to fund it in and of itself as a philanthropic project, we're really a communications and technology collective now. So Audrey Hingle, the editor in chief, does a lot of our publications and editing work. We have Rama Shahid, who is an excellent public relations and promotions partnerships expert, and we also have Nadej Lucas, who does a lot of the tech and website work. So yeah, we're a crack team and we're out there to help support all organizations, as well as keep this newsletter going.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, I am always interested, of course, in the sustainability of independent media ventures, so we'll be paying attention to that and looking forward to opportunities to working with Internet Exchange, which I think of as being in a, well, I'd say a small community of entities that I think of as very congruent with Tech Policy Press and its interests, and have appreciated our chances to collaborate in the past. And I think Tech Policy Press listeners for the most part will know your background, Mallory. They'll of course have seen your byline on our site, but in many other contexts as well. Certainly, most recently at CDT, Center for Democracy and Technology. All the work you've done across so many different groups and standards bodies and popping up at all major conferences across the world.

Burcu, you also are someone who is well known to the Tech Policy Press listenership, and quite an extensive resume and worked across various entities that folks are familiar with, including all the academic affiliations you just mentioned and think tanks, but also groups like Minderoo Foundation and Public Citizen. Can you just give us a little bit about the focus area of your research generally?

Burcu Kilic:

It's an interesting question, I have to say, because people keep asking me, "What is your focus area?" And nowadays, my focus area is quite broad because the issue became really, really interesting thanks to the Trump administration. My expertise starts with digital trade, and until very recently, it was a very niche topic. No one cared. I've been saying for the last 10 years, everyone in the community that guys, you need to pay attention to the trade rules because trade rules shape the policies and they shape the regulations. So nowadays, like now, it's a very popular topic because all the tech policy issues became part of the tariff discussions. They were part of the trade negotiations, but no one cared at that time because those trade negotiations were taking place behind closed doors. Now, everything is out there thanks to President Trump and his tweets, and we can see that, what's happening behind the closed doors. So yeah, now I focus on digital trade, but as I said, it's very broad, like broader tech policy issues like AI governance because that's the highlight of today now, but my expertise is in digital trade.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, I want to try to weave that back in perhaps as we talk about the open internet and we talk about what's going on at the moment. But you all got in touch with me, Audrey got in touch with me related to this piece that you published, well, gosh, back in July now, called Big Tech Redefined the Open Internet to Serve its Own Interests. In it, you take apart that theme and exactly what has happened over the last few years, but you pose this question, what if the internet as you know it is already gone? First off, Mallory, what do you think is the internet as we know it? What do you think most people are thinking of when they think of the internet, and why is it already gone?

Mallory Knodel:

Well, I think a lot of people have a pretty simplified model of how the internet works, and we think of these core internet protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS, and if you think of the internet in those terms, it does feel like a very open and interoperable system. Any software or service that's speaking those protocols ostensibly is on the internet and you can do a lot with it, but that isn't really. That's the oversimplified model. We're well beyond that, and to the point where we're not even using exactly those same protocols anymore. The major services that are on the internet and make up the internet are highly consolidated, so a lot is left to what we say in the standards world, implementation, taking these protocols that are standardized but then implementing them in very specific ways, working with certain partners and not others.

And so I feel like for a while there, and we've gotten over this bump a little bit, for the last couple of years, people were talking about fragmentation all the time. Internet fragmentation and internet governance circles was a huge topic. We don't hear it as much anymore, and I think it's because we've untangled what that actually means and unpacked the euphemism of fragmentation. I think it is really a symptom of highly centralized services on highly centralized networks, and then the ways in which that gets tangled up with state power and other things.

So this piece I think really helps, we're hoping, helps just take this analysis a step further and understand how we got here, and it wasn't by accident. And we have to be careful about our advocacy when we are advocating for open and interoperable systems so that it doesn't reinforce some of these dynamics. So that's what I think the open internet isn't basically. It's what we have now, so I answered your question in the negative, but hopefully that's helpful.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, you write that today, the quote, "wide internet" is effectively gone. True openness and actual interoperability have all but disappeared. Internet providers limit connection, hide systems behind proprietary walls, and treat people in society as data resources to extract. And you put a lot of the blame for these phenomena at the feet of big tech. Burcu, why is big tech killing off the wide internet, the open internet?

Burcu Kilic:

I can talk about it for five hours, but I think the issue goes back to the mid 1990s. And this is a story that I heard from Shoshana Zuboff, the author of the Surveillance Capitalism, and she coined the term surveillance capitalism. And last year at Harvard, I worked with her, and this is a story she tells and I'll try my best. I don't think I will be good as her, but when we look back, 1990s, the Clinton administration, and at that time, the Clinton administration came up with this global framework for e-commerce, and that global framework really determined US approach to internet. And of course, at that time, these are the early days of the internet and Silicon Valley, but that framework was so interesting because the author of that framework was an advisor and a good friend of Clinton's, and his friend, Ira Magaziner, he spent maybe six to eight months in Silicon Valley, and when he came back to Washington, D.C., Clinton asked him because Clinton sent him to California to get to know what's going on with this internet thing.

And when he came back, Clinton asked him, "So what are we going to do about the internet?" And his response was, "Nothing. We are not going to do anything because we will let the industry to regulate itself. The industry will take the lead and we'll support them, and if other countries try to regulate the internet, we'll stop them." So that was the beginning of the US tech policy and US trade policy, so digital trade policy. So it goes back to 1990s, and from 1990s until very recently, we talk about open internet, but I was always skeptical about this term because I knew what was going on in trade agreements. I knew the US trade policy, I knew the priorities of tech companies.

And then starting with the mid-2010s, people started to question the surveillance capitalists, the business model, and then there were more and more concerns raised about the business model and the open internet, because we all believe in open internet, but the internet was not open. There's a very good example of this. Not an example, but let me put it in another way.

When there was the competition, the antitrust case was going on between Google and the FTC and some of the states, the Microsoft CEO testified, and I think this was 2023, and he said that there's no open internet. There's nothing like open web, this is Google's web. That was the point many people realized we lost the open internet, because of all the data it's collected and processed and the structure of the surveillance capitalism. But it's not only the tech companies. There are many other actors and institutions supporting this system, and now it became clear that open internet is no longer about decentralization or user agency. It's more about the tech companies use openness as a way to resist regulation about accountability and cultural global infrastructure and monetize data, so it's very hard to talk about the open internet.

Justin Hendrix:

So you pointed to 2023 as perhaps another end date, so we have somewhere along that trajectory from the nineties, Clinton administration, internet freedom as the dominant policy of the US, the laissez-faire approach to things. Mallory, another question you ask here is when did open stop meeting open? So might ask you to try to put a date on that perhaps or at least indicate when that might've happened, but maybe also just respond to Burcu's sweeping mini history of the internet freedom movement, the extent to which it was supported by US tech policy such as it were, and where are we now?

Mallory Knodel:

Maybe I can come at it from a slightly different angle. I'm saying really the same things. I'm not going to be as good at putting dates on this as Burcu was, but I think one way to look at this is that there is the internet, regulating the internet or trying to predetermine how the internet works, and then there is regulating companies and dealing with antitrust issues, and I feel like we've done a poor job of keeping those things separate. So I think one of the big ideas of this piece is that keeping the internet protected, keeping the internet, the way it works in an unfettered way and preserving interoperability and so on has become the slogan or the rallying cry of these huge companies that are using their position as centralized services or networks to say, "We are protecting that. If you come at us, you're destroying the internet," and that's just not... So assuming that and accepting that is assuming this false narrative.

So if we look at what's happening on the internet then, setting aside regulating companies that are being anti-competitive and they're shutting out competitors and stealing all of our data and all of that, going back to the way the internet has evolved though, you can imagine there has been some shifts because of this. There have been some major changes to the way the internet works because dominant players participate in standards, dominant players work together, and the kinds of technologies they're developing, the kinds of things they're proposing evolve the internet very much suits their conditions. So that's why in 2014, 2015, people like me and others like Article 18, ACLU, several other organizations started getting involved in standards bodies because we were worried about privacy. This is post-Snowden. We were worried about consolidation of these services and free expression and all of that.

I wanted to talk about the ongoing tussle that happens in the industry. One reason the openness argument has lasted so long is that when we think of being able to do things across borders, having a common experience of the internet, we think of the services, we think of search, of email, document editing, Wikipedia, things like that, and those services are what we really have a mental model of. And they were really pushing back against the networks, which were already very consolidated because telecommunications has always been very consolidated. Telephone companies essentially evolved into providing networks, and so the services coming in to disrupt that the first time in the nineties and the early 2000s was very welcome. They were really disrupting all across, in other countries more so even in the US. You were able to Skype instead of paying huge costs of long distance phone calls. It's just a very obvious example.

So the network versus the services has been an ongoing issue for years, and so sometimes you see I would consider misguided regulation that is actually trying to reference networks over services. This would be like a fair share or some of these ideas that have come up that don't really work, or net neutrality was really trying to push back against network control so that the services could flourish. I think that this tussle is really an important part of the story because it's like we forget that there's a whole other sector of tech and big tech that are really about building networks out, and they're the ones closest to the technology, the protocols and so on that we think of as open internet, and also still consolidated. It's just a different kind of a consolidation.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, let's talk about the word open. You spent a good amount of time in this piece focused on just that phrase and how it's been co-opted. Give me the canned history of that. Where have we got to? Of course, there's the example and you do mention OpenAI, but I think the example of a company that's so often in the headlines these days called OpenAI, which in fact isn't terribly open at all, I think that's probably a hyper example but it's not all of what you mean by this.

Mallory Knodel:

Open can mean a lot of things. We're talking about the idea of decentralization, so anyone can do it. There's no central point. You don't have to ask for permission to innovate. Permissionless innovation is another proximal term or phrase. As long as, yeah, you're speaking these protocols and you're offering something on the internet, you're connected. Interoperability is another one that's somewhat wound up in this, which is that you can swap things out. You can change your internet service provider and nothing else is affected by that. It's less so with services. It's much, much harder to say, "Well, I'm going to move from a Microsoft product to a Google product," because those are basically the only choices.

This is maybe where you get into Amazon. There's nowhere else to go if you want to be part of a big global marketplace. There's this lock-in factor that's so much more severe with services. So again, I'm answering your question about what open is in the negative, but I think what has happened though is this idea of openness and the value of openness being also proximal to free flow of information, free expression. Those are great ideas, but input in terms of verticalization, capturing your audience, locking them in, that sort of thing, that's not really what's happening, so it's been really easy for, I think, the gatekeepers or these large companies to flip that meaning.

Justin Hendrix:

And I want to ask a little bit, just maybe put this in context of some of the news just recently. You talk about Google, you talk about the idea that Google has so much power over the web these days, the power to shape the behavior of users, businesses, even regulators you say, all while cloaking its dominance in the language of open access and innovation. I think there were a lot of folks looking at the Google Search antitrust remedies trial and thinking it's possible that there may be some remedy here that would shake things loose a bit, and I think those hopes have largely been dashed.

There's, I think, a growing feeling that a lot of regulation even in the EU, and you point to GDPR here as essentially reinforcing some of the dynamics you're concerned about rather than actually addressing them. There's this sense I think in the tech accountability or whatever you want to call it, the digital rights, the various civil society circles that we all swim in, there's a sense that a lot of these things have failed effectively. Burcu, do you agree with that? Is that where we're at at the moment? We're staring into the abyss? What can be done?

Burcu Kilic:

I think the issue is more about power. This company is... We started with openness, like discussing the open internet. Yeah, the internet was open at some point, but it's very hard to talk about the open internet now. That's something that we need to acknowledge, and then from there, we can talk about what's happening now. What's happening now is very interesting, both in the US and the EU, and I think for many people, this came as a shock. But the thing is I think it took a while for us to get here, but it was obvious that we were getting here. So starting with the GDPR, I have to say, I was a consumer advocate, so for many, many years, I worked as a consumer advocate. And I remember back in early 2010s, going to Brussels and talking to the European parliamentarians and telling them that, "Guys, we really, really need something coming from the EU because there won't be any regulation coming from the US, so you need to pass the privacy, data protection regulation."

And yeah, this is like 2015, 2016, and then at that time, everyone was saying that, I remember GDPR entering into force in 2018, it will break the internet, and nothing happened. It didn't break the internet. But the problem with the GDPR is that GDPR is a really great regulation on paper. The enforcement of the GDPR was very weak and very limited, and if the Europeans had enforced the GDPR back in 2018, 2019, things could have been different, but they didn't. There are many reasons. There are Ireland problems, DPA, and also they didn't have private right of action. There are many, many reasons for that, so even the GDPR became like a tool for these companies to differentiate themselves from the small businesses.

One of the concerns when GDPR entered into power was like, oh, this is not good for the small businesses. But the tech companies took full advantage of this argument, and assuming that, yeah, yeah, this is really, really bad for the SMEs, but the SMEs like Uber are on our platforms. Because if you're an SME, you can't have an existence separate from these platforms. If you want to sell your goods, you need to be on Amazon. You need to put ads on Google or on Instagram or on Meta, on Facebook, these things. We can't really separate the small businesses from the big tech ecosystem, so they built that ecosystem.

And the thing is many people missed the point that these ecosystems, I think from the 1990s, is protected by the broader trade rules and the trade agreements. So the tech companies were very, very invested in trade agreements and making sure that this business system that they created is reinforced, is protected in trade agreements, not only the US trade agreements but also the EU. So the thing is I think there were two words. There was that word that people were focusing on regulation of tech, but in the meantime, that was another word where people speak the language of trade and the tech companies built that system and limited the ability of many, many countries to regulate. Not only regulate, but also enforce the regulations they already have, and that brought us to this point.

Europeans just realized that, oh, you know what? All the regulations, we thought they were great. They were not because we couldn't enforce them, and now we want to enforce them, but the US government is threatening us. And then other countries which were inspired by the European Union, they realized, oh, we have great laws in the books, but we can't enforce them. And in the meantime, these big five tech companies, maybe now like the OpenAI, the new edition, they own the infrastructure, which is a key. Everyone is finally realizing that they own the infrastructure and they control all the data, so we came to a realization that, oh gosh, we miss that. And I don't want to say it's too late, but let's hope that better late than never.

Justin Hendrix:

So what I hear you saying is that in many ways, while a lot of folks were focused on tech regulation and focused on addressing some of the phenomena that we see from the tech firms, et cetera, there was something else going on at the commanding heights of the political economy around trade and around the more... I guess in the halls where power-

Burcu Kilic:

Infrastructure.

Justin Hendrix:

And infrastructure... is really set, and the halls where power and infrastructure are really debated, and that was the actual debate and most folks in our field essentially weren't paying attention to it. Mallory, would you have anything to add to that?

Mallory Knodel:

Yeah, I think we think of this as a layer cake. I love to think in layers as an internet person. What Burcu is talking about is the very top. We were paying attention to the middle and then I think there was something even lower, which is where we were in standards and building the technology from the ground up, and this was this whole move to privacy and to more private and user-centric security models for protocols and protocol development. Privacy became the business model. GDPR seemed to be reinforcing that from a policy perspective, but what it allowed it to do is simply business as usual, but with a lot more disclosure and maybe some transparency as well. But it didn't stop the data collection and it didn't stop the centralization of the data, and that's where we are today with these huge piles of data that are very proprietary and very valuable for companies like OpenAI or Meta with its Llama and Google with its Gemini.

But the privacy enhancing protocols didn't do it either. It just made it so that individual services could use them and keep your data private from everyone else. That you in partnership with the services that you decided to use worked together to keep your data private because they didn't want any other companies to have access to it either. They didn't want the network to have access to that data, but it's still all of the data and huge volumes of it have been siloed and kept in these silos for use now in large language models. And so taking maybe the lowest layer, the tech layer, looking then at the public governance debates, and then at the top, you have these more closed door power conversations then gives you a picture of how we've wound up in this situation.

Just folks really not paying attention and not thinking through how it isn't just about the business model, although folks like Ranking Digital Rights and so on were so good to point that out when they did... Shoshana Zuboff and her Surveillance Capitalism also really helped. It's also the political economy. You mentioned, Justin, it's the end game being quite a lot of power on the global stage in a way that is now, as you were alluding to, Burcu, very, very difficult to disrupt at this point.

Justin Hendrix:

I do want to just ask where this leaves us with AI at the dawn of the AI moment. Can you speak a little more to that? We're in for another phase change here, and this is the technology that I think of as being perhaps the greatest at concentrating power of any technology perhaps we've seen before and runs very counter to all of the original ideas of the internet, even though there are many who would probably argue with me on that and say, "No, no, we'll democratize AI and it'll be commoditized, et cetera."

Mallory Knodel:

Let me start with the tech, and then Burcu, you can end with the power. So yeah, I think there's a massive gulf I believe between how the internet was organically grown and now where we're at with AI. There is no incentive to interoperate when it comes to AI, none. In fact, it is the product of this centralization and this proprietary approach that you amass this massive amount of data and that becomes your proprietary secret and you're better than your competitors. So there's no reason why we should expect interoperability. Unlike the internet where if you want to be part of the internet, you have to interoperate, this is not how this goes.

So I'm very skeptical that open standards, I would say just drop the open for a second. Standards might be built. They will be built at the requirement of regulation and then maybe we can have some compliance frameworks that force that for some specific use cases like government or health or something like that. I think that data governance needs to go far beyond consent because the protocols are not enough, the tech is not enough. It's all left up to implementation and companies will try to get as far as they possibly can with that.

I think another thing to consider at the tech level, and also, there are pieces I know on Tech Policy Press, we've done some at Internet Exchange as well about bots and crawling. Being able to have some agency over that is really important, and I think we need to be very clear about what we mean when we're talking about it. And the reason why there's been so much written about bots and crawlers is because it's very hard to understand, and it's very hard to understand because until very recently, it was completely flat. Every agent that was scraping the web was from Meta. That's all you knew. You had no idea what the bot was for. It was just tagged with one thing, and every single bot that one company was deploying for every single purpose had the same user agent identifier. It was impossible to tell the difference if you're an admin on the web.

Now that we're coming up with more fine grained agent controls, that's going to change hugely what people post. The agency they have over at the platforms that they're posting on can give them hooks and all that's going to change, but it's going to make a tiny dent, I believe, unless there's some awareness about that and some ways to hook into norms and regulatory action.

Burcu Kilic:

So just to follow up on what Mallory said, at policy level, I think we're having a déjà vu moment, and when we first started our chat, I mentioned the Clinton times, mid-1990s when internet was new and no one knew what it was about, and there were all these questions about the future of the internet and how it will shape the world. And at that time, the US government, the Clinton administration made a decision that they were not going to regulate the internet and the private sector should lead. And I'm just reading the five, the core principles of the framework for global e-commerce. Governments should avoid undue restrictions on electronic commerce, and when there is a government involvement needed, the aim should be to support and enforce a predictable, minimalist, consistent and simply legal environment for commerce. This is electronic commerce, it's the internet.

And this is the interesting part. Governments should recognize the unique qualities of the internet. So it's the same discussion. We are having the same discussion. In 1990s, the internet was new, no one knew what it was about, and these companies at the time, the Silicon Valley, the good boys of the Silicon Valley made us believe that this is so special. This is so different than anything we knew and no one could understand, so we should let them regulate. And that the SAF regulation became the US policy and the global policy, and then countries try to regulate. The US was very critical of those countries. So the thing is it's almost like 30 years later, we are at the same point. They keep telling us that AI is so special, it's so technical, and you don't understand and let us self-regulate.

And the current trend is not only in the US, even Europeans are like, "Yeah, we need to be pro-innovation, not pro-regulation," because they made all of us believe that innovation and regulation, it can't go together. And every country is pro-innovation, every country is so big on AI driven economy and whatever it means. And now, what we are doing is we are... AI is a really good technology, I have to say. I am not critical of the technology, but I'm very critical how we're approaching to this technology, and we are making the same mistakes again. And we should learn from more history and we should be more skeptical, but now you see that we are transforming everything. We are transforming all the public services. We have digital transformation going on, AI transformation. AI is part of the curriculum in the universities, but not only the universities. Even middle schoolers, they are encouraged to use AI.

And it is very, very concerning because the current trend is we create dependencies, and then when we realize, oh gosh, we need to do something, it'll be too late. Just like it was late to regulate the internet, regulate the social media, it will be late to regulate AI. When I say regulate, it's a very broad term, I have to say, but we shouldn't let companies to take the lead because they failed us many, many, many times. We should learn from our own experience, and this time, we should be like, okay, it's a very complex technology. It's very unique, but let's do, let's work together. Because there is a huge community out there which can really, really help not only the policymakers but also tech companies to better build this system.

But I think nowadays, the narrative out there is this is innovation and we should be supportive of innovation, and unfortunately, when you raise questions about these ongoing innovation discussions and everyone is like, "You don't understand. You don't know what's going on." But I think I'm very concerned that we are, not us but also the countries, the governments all around the world are creating dependencies, technological dependencies. And Mallory can chime in more on that, but it is very concerning because there are only maybe three, four companies out there, and maybe some Chinese too, but we can't even talk about 10 companies out there. So it is very concerning and I'm very concerned about what's going on now.

Justin Hendrix:

Same precarious moment to me as well, but I guess one of the things that brings it into focus for me is that the US government under the Trump administration has more or less completely turned away from the old internet freedom policies and some of the positioning of the US on these issues, which many people argued for a long time weren't all completely about values and principles and democracy to begin with. They were more about protecting US trade interests. But the Trump administration has really taken it very much in that direction, very baldly so. I suppose on some level, we could at least be thankful for the honesty. They're very much out there selling American AI and working on behalf of American big tech firms to remove regulation and to implant the AI infrastructure and products that we create in Silicon Valley across the globe. Mallory, I don't know, can we find any silver lining in that, that there's a just baldness about it now?

Mallory Knodel:

I think you're making some solid points and definitely worth thinking about. The silver lining is that maybe other countries will step up to fill those gaps, although I think we have yet to see really bold action on that front. I'm really keeping hope alive. I just note that in my work in technology and the technical standards work especially, we are actually still seeing the US engaged. So they're pulling out of a lot of soft power and diplomatic spaces, but they are sticking around in the International Telecommunication Union, they're sticking around in the Internet Engineering Task Force. They're still there building the tech, no question, and the US industry of course is dominating still in those places. I think it's worth thinking about though whether the center of gravity goes to those places, because from my perspective, I've always had this analysis front of mind that although these places are certainly important fronts of struggle and places of power, we have to be careful to characterize political and social issues in the terms of tech, because technocracy is not a great alternative to whatever we're dealing with now in this pseudo-democratic neoliberal space.

Also, Russia and China are super active in these places because as authoritarians, a technocracy is a dream. You get to just translate the messiness of humanity through the terms of debate over technical requirements and amortized constraints and all that. So it's not great, but I think it is worth noting that those places are actually still intact and they're still producing standards and they're getting... The security council can't get anything done and hasn't for 10 years. Those same countries, when they come to the ITU or when they come to these other tech standards bodies, they manage to turn out together, so I just want to point that out. I'm going to continue to follow those spaces, I think they're important, but as I pointed out previously in this podcast, tech alone is really not enough. It's actually a far cry from that, and we need to be careful about relying on that as the only functioning form of diplomacy we have going forward.

Burcu Kilic:

And I have to say, many people believe that what's going on, especially with the tariff discussions, is something new and something like Trump's administration's position, but as I said, since the 1990s, this has been the US policy and the US trade policy. There was a time during the Biden administration when USTR started to question some of these positions, but then apart from that, even then, USTR was all alone. The broader US government was very into this approach to the internet and their narrative around tech innovation, but the thing is what we are seeing now has been happening for many, many, many years behind closed doors.

Now, it's just out there and people are finally realizing, but the thing is that US trade negotiators have been threatening the countries for many years behind the closed doors when they want to introduce regulation or when they want to enforce regulation, because they thought that these are American companies, we need to protect the interests of these companies. That's what the trade negotiators do. So it was all about American industries and they had to push back on any regulation coming from any country around the world, and as I said, this has been the US policy since the 1990s.

So I think the good thing is, the silver lining is finally, people are realizing, they can see that top layer. Even with Europeans, there is now a realization that, oh, we are not that safe because Americans can threaten and they can bully us about our digital regulations. And then what we see from European officials is they had to make a choice between protecting their industries, like cars, which really contributes to the European economy, or the tech regulations, and then the choice is very clear. So I think the good thing is, this is what I've been telling people, finally, this is happening out there, not behind closed doors, and we can see what's happening and we can really adjust according to what's happening out there and then really pay attention to the issues which we need to pay attention.

Justin Hendrix:

You point out various alternatives for reclaiming openness. Some of them, I think we've discussed in various ways here. Of course, you say policy has to go beyond symbolic gestures to drive structural change. You want to see more antitrust enforcement that reduces market dominance. You want to see, of course, more investment and effort in public infrastructure. You talk about expanding the number of Internet Exchange points, investing in alternative AI. You talk about interoperability and you talk about, of course, decentralized digital civic spaces, the Fediverse. I'm sure folks out there working on open protocols will be buoyed by that. Is there anything else that you think we can do, that the listener could do? What would you dispatch the listener to go and work on if they take on your diagnosis of the problem, that the real threat to the open internet is not trade barriers or state censorship, it is big tech? That is what you write. What should folks go and do?

Mallory Knodel:

I just love to see the folks we're working with, and that includes the folks that work in these big companies as well, just have a lot more analysis and language for this moment in the political economy where we are just very much stuck with these big tech companies, to try to dismantle that, because it isn't even good for the companies. They are in some sense starting to ossify, starting to internally cannibalize their teams for bits and parts that can be used just for AI. The innovation is slowing down, we're going in reverse, so I think we really need to get on the same page again about what we mean by open, what we mean by interoperable and what's good for users, and I do think that means we have to start dismantling these two centralized, two big companies.

Justin Hendrix:

It does seem to me that that idea that in the long run, they'll be less innovative. The technology itself will experience less change, less innovation because of the lock-in. In the long run, that's certainly not in the US's best interest or perhaps in any democracy's best interest for that to happen. You think of this in terms of a global competition with another form of governance. Personally, I don't know why more people don't see that. It strikes me as somewhat obvious, but it appears that so much of our policy in the US is built on doing what's best for Google and Meta.

Burcu Kilic:

Yeah, and I always say that the surveillance capitalism is just not a market problem but it's a governance problem. It's a democracy problem, it's a global problem, and I think many actors across sectors, governments, academia, continue to benefit from the system as it is, but there are cracks. The cracks are showing and there is growing resistance, but what we need now is not just a critique but a coordination, not just opposition but alternatives, as Mallory said. So if you are going to replace surveillance capitalism, we need to build something better than what we have now, and how we do it, I don't know, but I think there are so many brilliant minds out there. We just need to have that conversation. Rather than criticizing the system, we should be like, okay, how we can build the alternatives? We can start small. We don't necessarily need to be the biggest LLM or something like that if we are talking about AI, but I think there is still a possibility to build alternatives and come up with a governance model that serves the people and the environment.

Mallory Knodel:

I think, oh my gosh, I couldn't agree more. The alternatives work is so huge, and there are some. There are actually some providers out there that have been around since the early 2000s. They've been trucking along, fighting against Google this whole time. They still exist and you can go move your email to them or move your document editing to them. There's a great group called Infrared, so red being the top level domain. You can also search for it, but yeah, it's a lot of different collectives around the world actually, some in Europe, some in Asia, some in Latin America and the US that are providers of the same things that we get from big tech. And we could start with civil society organizations migrating, but we also have to be good at business and growing these things to be resilient and always available, and sometimes those are challenges, but I just want to love on your idea of building alternatives. I love that.

Justin Hendrix:

That's the lesson to the listener. Go out and build. I like that, perhaps a positive place to end our conversation. Mallory and Burcu, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. The article that we've been discussing will be linked in the show notes. If you search Internet Exchange, Big Tech Redefined the Open Internet to Serve Its Own Interests, I'm sure you'll find it. Would recommend you all to it, and I thank you both for joining me.

Mallory Knodel:

Thanks, Justin.