Why the world needs Sovereign Internet and Identity ?
In the ownership and control battle between Governments and Tech companies, the rights of internet users have been sacrificed.
Connecting people across borders, allowing anyone to become a publisher, and to democratize access to information were the big promises made by the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. However, today the web is not private, secure, equal or unifying. It is easy to connect but hard to trust on the internet, easy to create content but hard to get credit for creating value without an audience or following for it and easy to access information but hard to know its provenance.
Why?.. because..
Monopolies rule the internet.
Alphabet owns search; Amazon runs e-commerce; Apple has the hardware; Meta controls social networking; and Microsoft dominates business software.
The internet has, in large part, ended up centralizing access and power in the hands of a few dominant platforms that created monopolies. There’s nothing wrong with it because these monopolies have also created new opportunities, and pathways. These companies earn their profits by exploiting their environment. Under the blanket of playing a liberating and innovative role, they influence (or rather control?) how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. The network effect is truly unprecedented and transformative, but it is also unsustainable (winner takes all kinda mindset?).
This is the fundamental cause of unequal distribution, persistent poverty, disappearing small businesses, racial oppression, failing family farms, fraying community institutions, and entire cities and towns that have been marginalized and left behind.
Wealth is a prime example. The Pareto Principle states that in a given nation, 20% of the people own 80% of the wealth (the actual figures are 15% and 85%.) However, the Pareto Principle goes deeper than that. We can look at the richest 20%, then calculate the wealth of the richest 20% of that group. Once again, the Pareto principle applies. So roughly 4% own 64% of the wealth. Keep repeating that calculation and we end up with about 9 people. By some estimates, this tiny group has as much as wealth as the poorest half of the world.
Human’s ability to harness the forces of nature, both for constructive and destructive purposes, continues to grow, while our ability to govern ourselves properly fluctuates, and is now at a low ebb. Open societies are in crisis, and various forms of dictatorships and mafia states, exemplified by Putin’s Russia, are on the rise. There are many drivers of these trends. But there is one phenomenon in particular that has profoundly shaped all of these dynamics, and every single sector of our economy — the consolidation of corporate power.
FDA was set up to regulate Merck and Pfizer, not 1 million biohackers; FAA was built for Boeing and Airbus, not 1 million drone hobbyists; and the SEC was created to go after Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, not 1 million crypto miners. The people running these institutions typically have career tenure; they were not democratically elected and are not easily fired. They are thus not obviously accountable to the public they claim to serve.
The 21st century belongs to the internet and will break the power laws of China, the United States, or Silicon Valley Big Tech Co.
As we transition from an age of geopolitics to one of techno-politics, thanks to the reducing cost of compute and information access, what we need to care about is the protection of free expression, identity and data privacy rights; and digital governance from both legal and extralegal repercussions arising from such online activities or AI generated actions.
A vibrant democracy requires laws and institutions (public policies) that guard against the accumulation of power in the hands of a few, whether in government or the private sector. The current drive for greater tech regulation raises the risk that instead of curbing and decentralizing the power of tech companies, governments will attempt to wield it for their own purposes and further infringe on users’ rights. The most promising legislation seeks to address online ills while bringing both corporate and state practices into compliance with international human rights principles such as necessity, transparency, oversight, and due process. But the danger posed by the worst initiatives is immense: if placed in the hands of the state, the ability to censor, surveil, and manipulate people en masse can facilitate large-scale political corruption, subversion of the democratic process, and repression of political opponents and marginalized populations.
The internet was supposed to fragment audiences and make media monopolies impossible. Instead, behemoths like Google and Facebook now dominate the time we spend online — and grab all the profits from the attention economy. The Internet Trap explains how this happened. The internet has not reduced the cost of reaching audiences — it has merely shifted who pays and how. This has given rise to inequality and skewed wealth distribution.
Now, can we build something better, sustainable, equitable and global? If so, how?
Public policy should effect these changes. This can’t be a new startup idea or yet another tech giant to compete for similar power laws. This situation represents an incredible subversion of our democracy. Competition must be restored and a more dynamic, digitally governed decentralized internet needs to be created.
Unsurprisingly, the economics of digital markets are novel and complicated. In a comprehensive report, U of Chicago’s Stigler Committee concluded that the tech sector “exhibit[s] several economic features that…push these markets towards monopolization by a single company”
These days, regulating the tech sector is a hot topic, and many ideas — some better than others — are in the conversation. For instance, recent years have seen many calls to break up big tech into smaller companies, but unlike the slew of 20th-century break ups, there’s no obvious or easy way for platforms to be separated. Standard Oil and AT&T were broken up by geography, but it makes little sense to create a separate mini Facebook for, say, Florida and California. More importantly, breaking up the large tech companies won’t address the fundamental economic factors which underpin their dominance. The mini Facebooks would still be able to employ anti-competitive tactics and exploit the barriers created by large economies of scale and scope as well as network effects.
Reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — which shields tech companies from most legal liabilities for content posted by their users — won’t address these issues either. In fact, this would probably make them worse. Bigger companies would find it easier to weather the costs of compliance and legal liabilities than their smaller competitors. While there may be compelling reasons to reduce liability protection for digital companies, reforming Section 230 is inherently anti-competitive. Hoping to take advantage of this fact, Meta recently launched an advertising campaign calling for changes to the act. Break-up and expanded legal liabilities won’t solve the most fundamental problem of big tech: it’s big.
Competition policy for the tech sector must directly address the economic problems that reduce competition. When markets are competitive, companies work hard to keep customers from switching to competing services. Thus, the primary aim of tech regulation should be promoting competition.
Policies that can rewrite the rules of competition, such as updating antitrust laws, requiring data pooling and portability, open application database layer in programming and mandating interoperability, are a much-needed remedy for monopolistic concentration. Greater competition is not a panacea, but it does strike at the core of the problem. While much good furnished by the internet is plainly non-commercial, the structures which have closed it are profoundly economic.
Competition breeds innovation. When companies have to win the patronage of their customers, they invest more in research and development, create novel products and services, and glean better insights from the data they collect. Now, because monopolies dominate most digital markets, disruptive firms struggle to find funding, and overall investment is lower and directed toward refining existing technologies. New forms of entertainment and community have failed to emerge due to the dominance of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. If the federal government were to require more sharing of information, the internet would be a richer and healthier place.
It is time to move fast and fix things. While risks do exist, the status quo is broken; monopolies rule the internet. Technology isn’t inevitably good for democracy, and the current concentration attests to this fact. The internet is a powerful force, and used for pro-social ends, it would help revitalize sovereign identity on the internet. A more open internet would relieve numerous social harms, from geographic inequity and violations of privacy to abusive working conditions and capture of government. Policymakers must strive to make the web work for democracy, and the best tools at their disposal involve promoting competition. People should rule the internet, not monopolies, and policy can make that a reality. Democracy would be better for it.
