Internet for the People
An interview with Ben Tarnoff on the history of the internet, consequences of privatization, the pursuit of profit, and the process of experimentation and imagination.
A few years ago we did a series of interviews about energy and the grid. A completely ubiquitous thing that no one understands. Something The Grid author Gretchen Bakke (whose interview we will republish this week) calls “awesomely complex”.
So too is the internet – a central tool for almost everything, that most people don’t fully understand – operationally, historically, economically, socially, morally etc. How could you? How do you even begin trying to untangle it all?
Might we suggest starting here, with our new interview with Ben Tarnoff, author of Internet for the People.
This interview was conducted and condensed by Noelle Forougi for franknews.
I'm a tech worker. I'm also one of the co-founders of Logic Magazine. I've written about technology and society in a number of different places over the years. In 2016, I started writing about the history of the internet in pieces for The Guardian and Jacobin, and that was the origin point of the project that became Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future. I think at the time I was trying to understand where these crises, which would later be called the “techlash”, came from. That's what propelled me into this line of inquiry that eventually produced the book.
In a way, the history of the internet and the social history of the internet in particular, feels inevitable to me. But, one of the key points you make is that a very specific series of decisions created the world that we know today.
"Decision" is a complex word because, on the one hand, I want to emphasize that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the course that the internet took. On the other hand, I don't want to suggest that the course that the internet took was simply a matter of individuals choosing freely. Choices always took place within particular sets of constraints and incentives. The choices could have gone differently, but in order for them to go differently, those sets of constraints and incentives would've had to be different.
What are those constraints and incentives?
Well, profit-making as the organizing principle of the modern internet is a theme of my book. That might seem fairly obvious, but the internet was not always organized around profit-making. That principle had to be introduced and the internet had to be reprogrammed around that principle, generating constraints and incentives for the individuals and firms who were responsible for creating the modern internet.
Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg didn't just wake up one day and choose entirely freely how to build their products. They built their products, and continue to build their products, with particular ends in mind. This may seem obvious, but the history of technology is often told as a narrative that is populated exclusively by Great Men choosing freely—which is because the social structure has been evacuated from that narrative. So, yes, choices were made, but the choices had to take place under certain conditions.
Now to be more concrete, in very broad strokes, the internet originates as a protocol, a set of rules for how computer networks can interconnect, in the mid-1970s. The original pretext for creating that protocol was to link the Pentagon’s networks into a global network of networks that would enable them to bring computing power into the battlefield. That was the pretext for the research that produced the first internet protocol.
But the protocol is not actually used for that purpose. It is used to interconnect various fixed-line networks that the Pentagon has in the United States. And by the mid-1980s, there is a network of networks called the internet. Over the course of the 1980s, the internet remains under federal control but becomes civilianized under the leadership of the National Science Foundation. It is used primarily by academic researchers around the country to communicate with one another and collaborate with one another. And then in the early to mid-nineties, privatization begins. A series of steps are taken to enable the physical infrastructure of the internet to become the property of the private sector. And that initial moment of privatization occupies a large part of my book.
Why did the internet move towards privatization in the 1990s?
The important point to emphasize here is that privatization was the plan all along. The federal government never had any intention of running the network indefinitely. The question was, when would they pass it to private hands, and what would be the terms of the handover?
The decision to pass the internet into private hands was made sooner than expected. The timetable was accelerated because of capacity issues. In the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation sees that there are far more people who want to get online than they have the infrastructure to sustain. What they decided to do is to accelerate the transition to the private sector in the hopes that private investment will lead to greater capacity, which will be able to accommodate all of those new users.
Now, what is significant about this phase of privatization, which is completed in 1995, was its terms. There were various proposals around what exactly privatization would look like, but the form of privatization that was selected, thanks to extensive industry lobbying, was one in which the private sector would gain unilateral control of the infrastructure. There would be few conditions on how the private sector would be able to use that infrastructure. There would be no rules for how these different private networks could interconnect with one another, and no enduring federal or public foothold in the new network. And of course, there would be no compensation—because the internet itself, it goes without saying, was the product of billions of dollars of public money over the course of decades. So it's a particularly extreme and comprehensive form of privatization.
I'm curious why you think that it isn’t inevitable for the internet to become a profit-driven market when everything in America seems to be. Why do you think the internet is different or could be different?
I think the only way that it could have gone differently is if a social movement had emerged to demand an alternative. There were a variety of possible paths forward in the book. I talk about a proposal by Senator Daniel Inouye, which would've reserved a portion of the network for non-commercial uses. But a social movement never emerged to provide the kind of counter-power to industry lobbying that would be necessary to make such a proposal feasible. There have always been good ideas about what a better internet could look like, but change is not simply or even primarily a matter of ideas, it's also a matter of power. At no point did enough power exist to make those ideas active, to overcome the opposition of the private sector and their representatives in government. As always, it's a question of the balance of forces.
What do you lay out as some of the most pernicious effects of the internet being private? And why do you think these effects haven't been enough to garner a large enough social movement to make demands for the internet to change?
Well, when we think about the consequences of privatization, and in particular the social harms of privatization, we have to talk about the internet as a set of distinct layers. In the book, I divide the internet into the pipes: the bottom of the stack, the physical infrastructure of the internet and the platforms, and the upper end of the stack, the application layer, where we actually experience the internet. This is a bit of a reduction, but I think a useful one when we think about the social harms of privatization.
At the level of pipes, there are extreme inequalities in broadband access in the United States. We pay some of the highest rates in the world for some of the worst service in the industrialized world. Our average monthly bills in the US are higher than those in Europe or Asia, and we currently rank 14th in average connection speeds, below Hungary and Thailand. There are large portions of the country without broadband access at all, primarily people in rural areas and low-income areas. From that perspective, the privatization of the pipes has been disastrous. There are organizations that have drawn attention to this crisis, particularly during the COVID pandemic, when so much of life moved online, and these severe inequalities had very concrete consequences for people's quality of life. If you think about applying for unemployment benefits, having your kids be able to attend school remotely and do their homework, or just staying in touch with loved ones during a stressful time — I mean, we had Americans flocking to the parking lots of churches and community organizations to try to get a Wi-Fi signal because they didn't have decent internet at home. I think the pandemic made people more aware of the depth of the social crisis around connectivity.
Moving up the stack, the harms of privatization become more varied and more complex. We could talk about Facebook's role in proliferating right-wing propaganda and bigotry. We could talk about the role of the so-called gig economy companies like Uber in facilitating the exploitation of workers. We could talk about the role of Google in perpetuating racist stereotypes. In each case, the production of harm is inextricable from the pursuit of profit. The harm exists because it is profitable for it to exist. Of course, there are different kinds of harm and different kinds of profit to be extracted. The point for me is not to provide a monolithic, monocausal explanation, but rather to detect the presence and the prominence of profit-making in all of these different types of harm.
This might be the more cynical question, actually. Facebook adjusts its platform to serve us what we give attention to – obviously, because that’s what makes them profitable. I guess, I wonder if the harms that come from the private models are also just a result of what we want, our most base instincts. If you take the news, for example, people respond to what is quick and sensational. So, I do wonder, if the way the internet is structured now might have consequences yes, but is it also what we want?
Well, I would say a couple of things. First off, needs are produced. We're not born with the need for sensationalistic content. That is a need that is generated in us through a series of mechanisms developed by firms poised to profit from it.
But to your point, I would say that the appetite for sensationalistic content is not specific to the internet. This is an appetite that long predates the internet. The tendency to promote sensationalistic content is one that is built into commercial media as a whole. It is true of commercial radio, commercial television, commercial print, and so on. So to that extent, it's important to see social media as part of a long legacy of how commercial media, in order to prioritize profit-making, privileges content that is provocative, that is sensationalistic, that is often misleading. What is specific about Facebook is the extent to which that process is algorithmically driven, whereby certain types of content gains prominence and circulates more widely than others.
I think it's important to emphasize that this process is not an automatic one. In some accounts of how social media functions, the following theory is put forward: someone produces a piece of content that is sensationalistic, provides it to Facebook, and then Facebook, through the automatic mechanisms of an algorithm, promotes that content. It's almost a conveyor belt metaphor. Now, acknowledging that Facebook has been engineered to maximize user engagement—because that's the basis of its business model and its filtering algorithms have been designed with that imperative in mind—it's also true that one has to develop a set of specialized techniques in order to get content to circulate widely on Facebook. In other words, it typically requires some skill and thoughtfulness in order to create viral content on social media. It's not automatic.
And the reason I mention this is because there are indeed many people who specialize in this sort of thing—in particular, right-wing operatives who have become very successful in developing a set of techniques specific to different social media environments, whether Facebook or YouTube or Twitter. The type of techniques that such operatives would use to promote their narratives on YouTube are different than those that they would use to promote those narratives on Facebook. If it were just as simple as putting a piece of provocative content on the conveyor belt, then all of that strategy wouldn't be needed.
What do you think a more public non-commercial internet could look like? It’s almost hard to imagine – which I am assuming is part of the problem.
I think we have to provide a different answer depending on which layer we're talking about.
When it comes to the pipes of the internet, we already have a very successful alternative model for how to organize infrastructure, which is the community network. There are more than 900 publicly and cooperatively owned networks in the United States. They tend to provide better service at lower cost than corporate providers like Comcast, because, unlike Comcast, they do not exist to enrich shareholders and investors. They are able to prioritize social ends like universal connectivity. They're also able to empower members of the community to participate in decisions around how infrastructure is deployed through democratic mechanisms.
As we move up the stack to the so-called platforms, the building blocks of a better internet become more various, because this is a more complex and more diverse realm of the internet. Facebook is more complex than Comcast, and Facebook is much more different from Amazon, than Comcast is from Verizon. So our strategies for building a better internet—what I call deprivatization—have to adapt to that new terrain. As a result, the experiments for a deprivatized internet at the level of the platforms are less mature. In the book, I point to a handful of different online communities that are developing experiments that I believe represent promising points of departure for imagining a better internet.
At the level of the platforms, I refer to the decentralized web community, which is developing ways to build decentralized social media networks. I refer to the work of the platform cooperativism community and their efforts to develop app-based services that are owned and operated by users and workers. We also need to create new spaces where new experiments can be developed.
In particular, we need to create materially provisioned collective spaces where ordinary people can come together to build new online services. And that's where I put most of my faith, in that process of experimentation and imagination.