A Better Way To Share: Turning the Internet Into a Public Utility

It is not a mistake that you and I, and people across the world, are retreating into caves of isolation, hearing only what we want to hear and growing farther and farther apart from one another. While the Internet allows us to perform tasks without going places, access knowledge with unprecedented speed, and communicate with each other without face to face interaction, the Internet has come under the control of individuals and corporations who seek only to profit from the networks that we all rely on to live, learn, and communicate with one another. To blunt the worst societal impacts that the internet is having on us, we need to turn the Internet into a public utility.

Our wants, our choices, our needs, our ideas, and our creativity are now all for sale. These pieces of our identity are bought and sold by data brokers and marketers in order to be collected by large corporations that build digital profiles of each of us. We are told what we want to buy, fed the news that we want to hear, denied information that could make us think, addicted to tailored entertainment designed to keep us funneling money to the wealthiest people on the planet, and controlled by self-interested companies who only want more and more of our money to keep us reliant on them. Each service that we use online relentlessly tracks our patterns of behavior in order to better predict what will capture our attention and keep us engaged with their services.

Not only does control of the Internet’s underlying information transportation networks reside in the hands of exclusively self-interested parties, but control over what information we see and don’t see is in their hands as well. The largest tech companies today censor, promote, and alter our perceptions of the world in order to benefit their economic and, increasingly, their far-right political interests. They deny certain thoughts from passing through their networks, promote ideas favorable to the highest bidder, and allow the spread of misinformation that warps our perception of reality in order to profit off of our engagement. This unprecedented control over the movement of our ideas through digital transportation networks, paired with the intent to derive profit from those networks, has turned information into a fourth dimensional commodity, the control of which we must return to the people.

The power of the Robber Barons of the Industrial Age was eventually curtailed as their monopolies were broken up, workers organized into unions, and essential resources were turned into public utilities. The same efforts must be made today with the Internet’s infrastructure. The data centers, transmission lines, satellites, and other infrastructure that form the backbone of the Internet should be a public utility, like water or electricity, as the sharing of information and the access to knowledge are undeniable requirements of human existence, progress, and stability. Our thoughts are our inherent resource which fuels the progress of humanity. The Internet is only valuable because we use it, put our lives into it, and share are information through it. Equitable access to the Internet will remove the underlying economic incentives that keep us online, afford access to those whom large companies have deemed it unprofitable to reach, and facilitate better in-person social, economic, and political interactions free of the market forces competing to capture our attention.

Re-imagining the Internet as a public utility would allow us to more easily enforce moderation in the public’s favor, not corporations’, by better posturing us to prevent criminal behavior online; stopping the spread of harmful information; preventing companies from addicting us to their content; and halting the exploitation of our time, attention, and money. In this way, privacy and the freedom of speech are no longer Enlightenment ideals, but acts of revolution against a tech oligarchy that controls our very lives. To free the Internet is to free the world.