A purely decentralized internet cannot elevate itself above politics, nor can it shield itself from being co-opted by corporations.
The traditional view of the network suggests that the political nature of the internet can be simplified to the degree of its centralization: a centralized network is designed for control, while a decentralized or distributed network is democratic. Early advocates of the internet believed its structure made it decentralized, and that this decentralization would protect it from monopolies. In 1999, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote that the internet “is so huge that there’s no way any one company can dominate it.”
From the very beginning, there was clearly a misunderstanding about what the internet was: its biggest supporters believed that while empowering individuals with new tools for sharing and producing information, it would be immune to corporate or state control. But this view has always been overshadowed by the idealism of libertarianism. As Joanne McNeil wrote in Lurking, the "internet I felt momentarily nostalgic for"—where people gathered in chat rooms and forums to discuss without the influence of political, social divides, or economic pressures—"is an internet that never actually existed."
While technically no single company dominates the internet today, cloud services, undersea cables, and other infrastructures that power it are increasingly concentrated in a small number of telecom groups and network-dominating platforms: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. Looking back at the internet of the 1990s, the power of private companies was already evident. Although the infrastructure of the internet was not fully privatized until 1995, online interactions had already been influenced by commercial pressures. In 1994, Carmen Hermosillo published an article on online communities (Pandora's Vox On Community In Cyberspace), arguing that "many cyber-communities are businesses that rely upon the commodification of human interaction." Carmen Hermosillo explained that while "some people write about cyberspace as though it were a ’60s utopia," early online services—AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, and even Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL)—were all businesses that turned user behavior into products, shaping user interactions through censorship and editing to serve corporate goals and maintaining permanent records, making cyberspace "an increasingly efficient tool of surveillance." Carmen Hermosillo argued that, contrary to supporters of Wired, electronic communities benefited from "the trend towards dehumanization in our society: It wants to commodify human interaction, enjoy the spectacle regardless of the human cost."
Carmen Hermosillo is not the only voice opposing the liberal framework of cyberspace. In 1996, technology historian Jennifer S. Light compared the "cyberoptimists'" discussions of virtual communities to early urban planners' optimistic predictions about shopping malls. In the 1950s, with the expansion of automobiles in American cities, planners promised that shopping malls would become enclosed public spaces to replace main streets. But as Jennifer S. Light pointed out, the transition to suburban shopping malls brought new inequalities and limited the functionality of spaces, serving only commercial interests. Similarly, in privately owned virtual communities, "these agora function only in their commercial sense; the sense of the market space as a site for civic life is subject to strict controls." Commercial "communities" prioritize business interests over fostering participation from marginalized voices, promoting education and productive exchange, and facilitating democratic governance in digital spaces.
Jennifer S. Light used Prodigy as an example, stating that Prodigy was an "electronic panopticon," monitoring public posts, censoring those deemed inappropriate for families, and providing "continuous advertising" based on collected user information. Of course, these same issues continue to characterize commercial internet platforms. If anything has changed, the post-dot-com bubble era's commodification of the web has made matters worse. In 2005, Tim O'Reilly described "Web 2.0" as an effective web platform that enclosed all forms of online interaction so that everything users do can be captured and categorized for corporate profit.
In less than 20 years, as Jennifer S. Light warned, a small number of companies began to oversee many of our online interactions and determine their forms to serve their interests. As Twitter user @tveastman joked in 2018, "I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."
However, in recent years, we have begun to see cracks in the patterns that have allowed these companies to dominate: digital advertising has been key to subsidizing the websites, services, and platforms that attract users, and now it faces threats. This is partly due to increased efforts to hinder the industry's surveillance of users: Apple recently launched features to block advertising targeted at iOS devices, which Facebook sees as a significant threat. The effectiveness of digital advertising overall has also been called into question. "Ad fraud," or the improper manipulation of attention metrics (often through the use of bots), is considered rampant, with companies like Procter & Gamble and Uber cutting $100 million in ad spending with little noticeable impact on their revenue growth.
The fragility of the digital advertising model presents an opportunity to imagine a different internet, rooted in another political agenda; an internet that elevates social interests above corporate profits. But this will not happen automatically. Without coordinated action to build a better internet, escaping digital advertising may only further commodify our online interactions. The so-called creator economy is re-emphasizing micro-payments and subscription models, with mainstream social media platforms following suit by introducing new monetization features like Twitter's Super Follows and Facebook's Bulletin. Beyond new applications and services, there is also an effort to graft monetization infrastructure onto the internet itself: Web3, which Drew Austin describes as "a blockchain-based internet that works less like an open network circulating ‘free information’ and more like an expansive matrix of built-in ownership and payment infrastructure."
For creators, these technologies offer false promises to those without large audiences. For artists and performers, the creator economy is even more unequal, as platforms push a star economy that hollowed out the "middle class" in the profession. A small number of people with large followings can leverage these new tools to generate more income, while the majority can only make money through viral hits. Meanwhile, the monetization aspect makes the internet overall more unequal, linking access to individuals' ability to pay and making invasive forms of personal commodification more widespread, incentivizing us all to turn ourselves into commodities.
But in some circles, there is hope that Web3 can revive the promise of decentralization lost in the early internet. Crypto enthusiasts and some activists in the digital rights field assert that cryptocurrencies, blockchain, smart contracts, and related technologies will circumvent state regulatory powers and allow people to bypass predatory intermediaries like big banks. However, they underestimate how centralized these technologies have become and fail to explain how the libertarian calls for decentralization will avoid being co-opted by similar large corporations as the internet was.
Web3 is a technological solution that does not contradict the way power is distributed in the real world. Its goal is not to create a fairer social network; rather, it seeks to preempt the political struggles that are actually necessary to achieve that goal. Like other "decentralized" concepts, it is easily co-opted. Silicon Valley billionaires have openly praised cryptocurrency as a right-wing technology, while Amazon recently launched its own "distributed" network composed of its products. The infrastructure of Bitcoin is controlled by a handful of large companies, just as Google has financialized the digital advertising market, Web3 attempts to extend the logic of financialization to more digital interactions.
Calls for decentralization often fail to contend with power structures that may control so-called liberatory projects. In Your Computer Is on Fire, Benjamin Peters argues that "networks do not resemble their designs so much as they take after the organizational collaborations and vices that tried to build them." In other words, focusing solely on network design misses the political ideals and institutional practices that birthed them and have become embedded within them. For example, while anyone can still connect their server to the internet, the infrastructure is increasingly controlled by tech giants that enclose our activities online, using their services to access the web. Not to mention, so-called decentralization has not stopped the NSA or companies like Google and Facebook from massive surveillance of nearly everything we do online.
Decentralization itself is not a politics. But without a political agenda that explicitly seeks to serve the public while challenging corporate power, decentralization is not a viable strategy for decommodifying our online interactions or repositioning our networks for other purposes.
Early liberal proponents of the internet viewed individual hackers as key to challenging state power and realizing the potential for internet freedom, even as corporate giants took over the internet. Today, what we hear are individual creators leveraging the opportunities provided by an integrated internet to create profitable content for platform companies. But individual actions will never produce liberatory spaces online. This requires state action, driven by an organized public (demanding technology serve the people), to fund and build alternatives.
Beyond the obsession with decentralization, there is another option. The history of state-driven communication projects in the 20th century provides examples of how to approach the network differently and with political means.
Generally, the history of the internet begins in 1969, when the first computer connected to ARPANET. ARPANET was an early packet-switching network funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, connecting research centers at various universities. But as Peters describes in How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet, the first proposal for a national civilian computer network was made by the Soviet Union in 1959, when Soviet cybernetics pioneer Anatoly Kitov proposed an economic automation management system to help coordinate the planned economy. The network was originally designed to be hierarchical, but Kitov also empowered workers to provide feedback and criticism, giving them greater influence over the planning process. This project was stifled by the Soviet bureaucracy, but had Kitov's vision been realized, worker participation would have brought a very different beginning to the civilian internet era, one centered around economic planning rather than the dissemination of knowledge in academia.
Chile's Cybersyn project, developed under socialist President Salvador Allende, had a similar economic direction but took a different approach. As Eden Medina explains in Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile, it was a clear attempt to escape the "technological colonialism" of powerful nations like the United States, "which forced Chileans to use technologies that suited the needs and resources of the wealthy nations while preventing alternative, local forms of knowledge and material life to flourish." Its developers sought to imbue it with the political colors of the leftist government by seeking worker feedback, maintaining factory autonomy, and establishing a command center that could be used by those without technical skills. The government hoped to use the network to coordinate production as it nationalized key industries, but we will never know how it would have operated in practice, as Allende was overthrown in 1973 by a coup supported by the CIA. Medina asserts that the project demonstrated that the political process itself can guide the design of networks, rather than networks having inherent politics, and that innovation can occur outside the bounds of market competition.
Another option is the Minitel system, which was developed in France after President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing announced in 1974 that "the dominance of the United States in telecommunications and computing is a threat to France's independence." As Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll detail in Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, this system, launched in the 1980s, employed a "hybrid network design, part centralized and closed, part decentralized and open." While the national telephone company controlled the center of the network, the edges—servers hosting private services—were managed by private companies. Its design also included monetization. When users connected to a service (where they could access news, games, sports updates, message boards, etc.), they were charged for each minute of access, creating a revenue stream for service providers and the telephone company, which took a cut. This business model incentivized companies to keep people using their services for as long as possible without resorting to advertising or tracking. In fact, Minitel offered a degree of privacy; when users received their bills, they were not identified by the services they had used.
Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll compare Minitel to Apple's App Store, which is managed by a centralized authority that "platforms" and maintains standards. But unlike Minitel, Minitel's decisions "were subject to due process and could be appealed in a court of law, while Apple exercises absolute control over the communication that takes place on its platform. The public has no interest, no representation, and no recourse to settle disputes." In other words, because Minitel was operated by the national telephone company, there was public accountability through legislation that granted citizens these rights and through a representative democratic system.
These early network projects—particularly the Cybersyn and Minitel projects—were explicit efforts to prevent technological imperialism. In the years that followed, the globalization of the internet hindered the realization of this desire. Most governments could only speculate about different political networks, as the global network their citizens were using seemed beyond the regulatory reach of any country outside the United States.
The most notable exception is China... generous state funding has enabled it to develop a domestic tech industry that rivals that of the United States—something other countries are seeking to emulate.
Researcher Juan Ortiz Freuler argues that if developing countries continue to be exploited by American companies for the value they create, they will be more open to China's model. This has intensified concerns about the internet fracturing along national borders—the so-called "splinternet." But Juan Ortiz Freuler believes that the trend of fragmentation is not only emerging but has already occurred—just along platform lines rather than necessarily national borders. In closed online activities, companies like Google and Facebook restrict the open transmission of data and interoperability of services to consolidate their dominance. The response to the "splinternet" is not to ensure the internet's supremacy but to explore alternatives—and the alternative politics that support those alternatives.
Technologies that serve the public interest are unlikely to emerge from either side of the U.S.-China tech cold war. During the Cold War of the 20th century, 120 countries refused to choose between American capitalism and Soviet communism; Ortiz Freuler calls for a digital non-alignment movement to establish information systems "geared toward solving the big challenges we face as humans on this planet," including the climate crisis and global inequality. He argues that our social, environmental, and technological salvation will not be found in developed countries, whose cultures "are intertwined with the rationality that birthed capitalism itself." However, developing countries have the imagination to create different systems, as they "see their cultures destroyed by colonialism, only to see their fragments recombined into a new narrative that benefits their new rulers." This is not to place the burden of solving the problems caused by developed countries on those they oppress, but they may have a unique approach to ending American technological dominance—and rejecting the alternative of Chinese technology. We can expand Ortiz Freuler's call to include the oppressed people of developed countries—those subjected to surveillance and control by technological systems that continuously expand into more areas of life.
As the example of China shows, allowing alternatives to thrive will likely require the castration of existing platforms, whether by blocking them or by implementing policies to dismantle their "walled gardens." We should also recognize the importance of state control over infrastructure and how that control enables public entities to influence network outcomes. This experimentation can take many forms, but one example can be found in Dan Hind's proposal for a British Digital Cooperative, which includes a communication platform free from advertising pressures, aimed at fostering socially beneficial forms of interaction, and community tech centers that educate locals and develop technologies to meet their needs. But can we also imagine that as Chile embarks on amending its dictatorship-era constitution, it might reignite the anti-imperial technological spirit of "Project Cybersyn"? Or that Cuba could learn from its success in biopharmaceuticals to reimagine how digital networks should serve a socialist society rather than yield to the hegemony of American tech giants? Even Brazil, once again under the leadership of Lula da Silva, could lead a coalition to establish technologies that serve developing countries?
After reflecting on how we idealize early networks, McNeil writes, "When I think I feel nostalgic for the internet before social media consolidation, what I am actually experiencing is a longing for an internet that is better, for internet communities that haven’t come into being yet." Clearly, this is not just a matter of decentralization; it is about thinking through the outcomes we wish to see and building institutions—and the subsequent technologies—to serve those political goals. Rather than hoping a specific network design can be immune to corporate control, we should first establish the necessary political power to make it a reality, thereby building a better internet.
Compiled from: "Reconnected" in Real Life Magazine (2021, Paris Marx)