Major tech platforms should be democratically accountable public utilities

For years I muttered about recognizing the big tech stacks — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter — as utilities for a Socialist Data Not Quite Utopia, and in 2019 I started a long-running Twitter thread about it, pointing to examples which demonstrate the need.

At the head of the thread I initially talked about “nationalizing” these resources, but I changed gears to a more fundamental framing of making them democratically accountable public utilities, implying that forms of governance other than turning to Westphalian nation-states would be suitiable (and indeed preferrable to many examples of government we have now). With that substitution, the pitch goes like this:

A proposal

I am not a policy wonk so this is a provocation; I imagine that it likely is wrongheaded in important ways. I offer it not as the thing I think is right, but rather as a set of ideas to respond to, exemplifying my principles.

I hesitate to strangle tech industry innovation, so I do not necessarily want to make all tech publicly controlled. For big tech stacks which present a problem, I would make a policy of issuing them a warning:

“You have not been acting with sufficient care for the public interest. In 18 months you will undergo a forced buyout at your current valuation … unless you do better. Here are our concerns …”

If they get this wake-up call and find ways to justify their existence as private entities, great! Leave them alone. Threat of being converted into public utilities might work on some existing companies. But the more I think about the option, the more cases I see where converting private platforms into public utilities is obviously better.

Why this is good

Converting platforms like Amazon & Google into utilities enables us to kill the worst of the ad-supported model with all it implies. We could simply substitute the public treasury for the equivalent ad revenue without changing a thing. And having done that, it opens the door to more thoughtful choices.

Publicly-subsidized compute services promote free speech and entrepreneurship, just like roads and the Post Office do. (Indeed, I submit that Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution gives the US Federal government a mandate to do this.) Publicly-provided compute resources could easily be more fair, open, and equitable than their private equivalents.

Publicly-owned search tools should be actively managed as public policy. Tune the algorithms to hide lies, scams, incitements to violence, et cetera. Yes, that politicizes the choices in those algorithms. But they always were political. You do not trust the government with the power to make those choices? All the more demonstration of the need for effective, democratically-accountable public institutions: we have to solve that problem anyway.

Amazon as an example

Turning Amazon into a public utility could mean:

• A perfect universal public library, with …
  • Kindle books free for all
  • Authors compensated fairly (by whatever standards we choose democratically) rather than by how they perform in the Amazon marketplace
  • Excluding from the free library material which is fraudulent or otherwise not subject to free speech protections
• Publicly-accountable product reviewing processes, to ensure that crap products cannot scam people
• A unified library of public-domain legacy media, so old movies and stuff do not vanish
• A truly level playing field for product marketing & distribution, undercutting the grip of advertising and big players’ other advantages over smaller ones
• Making Amazon Web Services resources free to entrepreneurs, to foster experimentation and projects worth doing which have no revenue model to dazzle investors. If something starts to put significant load on the public network — media traffic or computing services — regulators can then inspect what it is doing:
  • If it is lying, scamming, or committing other crimes with public resources, it gets cut off
  • If people benefit from it as a public service, it stays a free utility
  • If it is business, using public resources to profit honestly, it starts to pay for the use of those resources

Why we cannot go on as we have

If we do not turn the tech stacks into public utilities like this, Metcalfe’s Law and other winner-take-all dynamics will give us neo-feudalism instead: all of us dependent on a narrow oligarchy who own and control the resources which we depend upon.

So instead of resenting the big tech companies trying to create monopolies, I like to think of them as building utilities for us to seize in order to move us toward fully automated luxury gay space communism.

Food for thought

Big ideas

My favorite commentaries and projects

• The Democracy Laptop (a provocation of my own)
• “ On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other ”
• Digital Public Goods Alliance
• Make internet protocols & standards democratically accountable in the public interest
• “offer every EU citizen, paid for by EU taxpayer money, a basic virtual private server with a basic amount of resources to host an always-on node in a peer-to-peer system”
• What Is Digital Public Infrastructure?
• A Case For Universal Music Access
• A View Of The Future Of Our Data
• Saving Journalism Will Require Some New Thinking
• “The question is not so much whether AI should be democratized but how”
• “The idea that you can solve the social issues connected to the internet with anti-trust intervention is rather like thinking that you can solve the social issues that come from cars by breaking up GM and Ford.”
• Revisiting the public commons
• “reading anything by or about tech companies, I replace uses of the word ‘infrastructure’ with ‘means of production’”
• “The Unknowable Distortion Field has harkened the Digital Dark Ages era putting our nation’s very Democracy at risk. What went wrong and how do we fix it?”
• “frustrating to see how several decades of neoliberalism have curtailed the collective imagination to such a degree that things that should obviously just be public services have to instead be approached with market solutions to market problems”
• “i am pretty confident any information product/service has to spend a non-trivial amount of time being free in order for its value to be understood by the people who value it”
• Salon: If Twitter is to be a true “town square,” it’s time to socialize it. Profit motive fuels the worst parts of Twitter — the trolling, the racism, Trump's account. What if it didn’t?

Observations from Cory Doctrow

Doctorow has a vision different from but parallel to my Socialist Data Not Quite Utopia

• On “if you are not paying for the product, you are the product”
• On the inherent difficulty of regulation
• On deceptive tech-driven predatory capitalism destroying industries
• Fighting fiber was the right’s dumbest self-own
• “the single wire that delivers free speech, a free press, free assembly, education, family life, employment, health, opportunity, civic and political engagement, and every other necessity for a decent and dignified life in the 21^st century”
• “Amazon retail business today is as an intermediary, a #ChokepointCapitalist marketplace”
• Interoperable Facebook

Google

• Changing their policy about storing photos
• Google Has Been Allowing Advertisers to Exclude Nonbinary People from Seeing Job Ads
• “I just read through all 173 pages of the unredacted Google antitrust filing and I have to say that either Google is screwed or society is screwed”
• “Google kicked Bannon off YouTube because of his violent rhetoric but still sent ad dollars to his website that promotes misinformation about the election and the pandemic”
• “I asked a search engineer how come search kept making ads look more like search results when there was this prior work showing that this was very confusing to users and the answer was basically that it was worth too much money to not do it”

Amazon

• Fake child car seats for sale
• The Boogaloo problem
• “they are already duplicating aspects of the post office, and the business intelligence they use to drive things like Amazon Basics and put people out of business could be instead leveraged to help small businesses start”
• How Amazon Wins: By Steamrolling Rivals and Partners
• “Amazon achieved its world-historical dominance thanks to failed policy and government largesse”
• Amazon is reportedly working on a smart fridge that tracks what’s inside

Facebook

• 7,000 pages of leaked documents show how Facebook treated user data as a bargaining chip with external app developers
• Electoral influence
• Mark Zuckerberg is the most powerful unelected man in America
• Facebook Seeks Shutdown of NYU Research Project Into Political Ad Targeting
• Tim Cook Implies That Facebook's Business Model of Maximizing Engagement Leads to Polarization and Violence
• “Mark Changed The Rules”: How Facebook Went Easy On Alex Jones And Other Right-Wing Figures
• “The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem.”
• Breaking Up Facebook Is Not The Answer
• Facebook Rolls Out News Feed Change That Blocks Watchdogs from Gathering Data
• “Internal documents show the company routinely placing public-relations, profit, and regulatory concerns over user welfare. And if you think it’s bad here, look beyond the U.S.”
• Why is Facebook Mark Zuckerberg’s personal kingdom?
• Facebook exec blames society for COVID misinformation
• How A Facebook Fight Over Wind Power Predicts the Future of Local Politics in America

Miscellany

A bunch of news items & comments which whet my appetite for turning tech stacks into democratically accountable public utilities

• Yelp is Screwing Over Restaurants By Quietly Replacing Their Phone Numbers
• Medical data in private hands
• Disney owns a lot of culture which should belong to all of us
• “We should have bought the DVDs” — keep media available
• Why are internet domain names privately controlled?
• Etsy screwing sellers on ad fees
• Food delivery apps & services
• The Pandemic Shock Doctrine as tech stack land grab
• https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/technology/facebook-election-chaos-november.html
• “if there is an industry that is so vital to the social fabric that it requires public money to keep going even if it can't turn a profit anymore, because society collapses without it, well then there you have a public utility”
• “‘We might hope instead for what Hwang calls a ‘controlled demolition’ of the [advertising technology] business model, in which it unravels gradually enough for us to manage the consequences.”
• “Focus on user needs, challenge assumptions, distribute power ... it doesn’t say ‘focus on profit above all else’. It’s a socialist manifesto. Good business is socialism, always was.”
• “I wonder if there’s a government anywhere with the literacy, savvy and bureaucratic agility to produce a strategic asset programming language”
• “behemoth American platforms are consolidating activity such they act and behave like sovereign states; indeed, CEOs like Zuckerberg have long been received during travels as if heads of state of other countries”
• “it strikes me that there are folks who maybe don’t realize just how much stuff the federal government publishes and makes freely available”
• “a public interest obligation for communication technology companies that ensures we are protected from the arbitrary decisions of CEOs, and is accountable to our elected representatives”
• Nested Twitter threads: “Two friends and I created a new thing to steal content from writers/creators and demonetize their platforms with the goal of enriching ourselves, likely never considering the implications because to us domestic labor isn’t real labor”
• “What world would you want to live in?”
• “thinking about how responsibility is shifted away from gov — to you — to the market — to the contractor — to the black box algorithm”
• Imagine the Covid-19 Economy Before Zoom and Amazon
• Communities building broadband
• What App Stores Have Cost All Of Us
• Make Zillow a … wait … actually … make the entire real estate brokerage industry a democratically accountable public utility
• Make identity verification a democratically accountable public utility
• Seriously, make identity verification a democratically accountable public utility
• “Future-proofed update will let coders ‘repurpose the hardware for more things’”
• “We need an independent source of government funding to nourish independent AI research institutes that can be alternatives to the hugely concentrated power of a few large tech companies and the elite universities closely intertwined with them”
• “Some (not very well thought out) thoughts on government^* funding of open source”
• “at every step of the way we’ve let the digital commons be overrun by corporate interest and now we stand inside each of our fenced off spaces yelling across the divide, hoping it’s better in someone else’s pasture”
• “It’s embarrassing that we’ve been willing to have our public, civic conversations on platforms controlled by corporate boards”
• Publishing needs to be a democratically accountable public utility
• “‘Twitter should be a public good, so I gave control of it to the wealthiest man in the world’ is a pretty good summation of the philosophy that fucked up the entire world”
• “The lack of democratic accountability in the Soviet Union was one of the problems, but as an anarchist I think that democratically-accountable state power is, well, still state power”
• How To Fix Social Media
• “Twitter is an amazingly efficient hatred amplifier—easily gamed by small groups with a political agenda. This is an inevitable side-effect of design that prioritizes media engagement.”
• A bushy Twitter thread which exhibits the awkwardness of thinking about regulating private social media rather than making it into democratically accountable public utilities
• “force any work this happens to into public domain and made available freely”
• Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why.