Ben Tarnoff - Internet for the People

INTERNET FOR THE PEOPLE

INTERNET FOR THE PEOPLE

The Fight for Our Digital Future

Ben Tarnoff

First published by Verso 2022

Ben Tarnoff 2022

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-202-4

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-203-1 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-204-8 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tarnoff, Ben, author.

Title: Internet for the people : the fight for our digital future / Ben Tarnoff.

Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021053057 (print) | LCCN 2021053058 (ebook) | ISBN 9781839762024 (hardback) | ISBN 9781839762048 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Internet industryUnited States. | InternetGovernment policyUnited States. | InternetPolitical aspectsUnited States. | DemocracyUnited States.

Classification: LCC HD9696.8.U62 T37 2022 (print) | LCC HD9696.8.U62 (ebook) | DDC 338.7/61025040973dc23/eng/20220111

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053057

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053058

Typeset in Garamond by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

For Zoe, Josephine, and Moira

Contents

At the bottom of the ocean there is a garden hose stuffed with glass. Life is difficult at this depth. The lack of light means there is no photosynthesis. Plants are unknown; oxygen is scarce. There are fish with very large eyes and fish that glow. There are octopi with no ink and eels with very large mouths. All these creatures have to eat is each other, and the nutrients on the ocean floor. In this inhospitable place, miles undersea, they have found a way to make a world.

Their world may seem strange, but it has a point of contact with our own. That hose filled with glass is ours; we put it there. It is a bundle of optical fibers that carry beams of light. The beams of light are bits of data, encoded as pulses. The bits of data are Facebook friend requests and financial trades, Twitch streams and supply chain analytics. They flow to and from the internet, irrigating the billions of computers that coordinate the global economy and, increasingly, our everyday lives. Here, among the eels, lies a major artery of the algorithmic age.

There are many such arteries, traversing oceans and tracking continental coastlines, but this one is known as MAREA. It is currently the highest-capacity submarine fiber-optic cable in the world. It is co-owned by Microsoft, Facebook, and a subsidiary of the Spanish telecom Telefnica, which has leased a portion of its capacity to Amazon. The cable reaches a depth of more than seventeen thousand feet and spans more than four thousand miles. It crosses the Atlantic, running from a suburb of Bilbao, Spain, to Virginia Beach in the United States. Where it comes ashore, it looks like a snake rising out of the sea.

MAREA is a reminder that the internet has a body. A body of glass, copper, silicon, and a thousand other thingsthings that have to be dug out of the earth and hammered into useful shapes, with significant inputs of labor and energy. Bodies are material; they are also historical. If the internet is not a place of pure spirita civilization of the Mind, as the cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow once called itneither is it a place untouched by the past. It is entangled with history, and often in quite literal ways.

One way is infrastructural. Submarine cables like MAREA, writes the scholar Nicole Starosielski, frequently follow the contours of earlier networks. Installing underwater lines is expensive, and its safer to follow known paths than to pioneer new ones. As a result, the fiber-optic cables that run along the seabed often take the same route as their analog ancestors: the telephone networks of the twentieth century and the telegraph networks of the nineteenth.

These earlier networks were built for particular purposes and used for particular ends. The telegraph networks helped the British supervise and secure their colonial holdings. The telephone networks helped the Americans wage the Cold War, and a hot war in Vietnam. Both networks were essential for capitalist expansion and globalization: they aided in the creation of markets, the extraction of resources, the division and distribution of labor. And, as Starosielski explains, they were themselves shaped by even older patterns of empire and capital. Their cables typically shadowed the sea routes pioneered in previous centuries, routes that sped the circulation of cotton, silver, spices, settlers, and slaves.

Connectivity is never neutral. The growth of networks was guided by a desire for power and profit. They were not just conduits for conveying information, but mechanisms for forging relationships of control. While the internet is more sophisticated than its predecessors, it continues this tradition. The internet is not just material and historical, then; it is also political. The submerged threads of glass that link one land-mass to another are, to borrow a metaphor from Eduardo Galeano, veins. Through them, wealth is extracted and concentrated, communities are dominated and dispossessed.

This is not a recipe for despair. On the contrary: an internet with a body, enmeshed in the past and in politics, is also an internet made by people. It is steeped in the struggles through which humans make their social worlds. Progress or technology or some other inevitable logic of development did not prescribe its present form. Particular choices brought us to this point. We have the ability, collectively, to choose differently.

Market Failure

Up on land, where data rises from the depths to find its destination, people are worried about the internet. They worry about fake news, surveillance, censorship, racism, and several other things. They worry that the connectivity furnished by MAREA and the other glass strands encircling the Earth is not only making the world smaller but making it worse.

Since 2016, a mood of distrust has congealed around the large tech companies that dominate the internet. Often called the techlash, it has become a fixture of US media and politics. The belief that the internet is broken has become a new common sense. The brokenness of the internet is the subject of congressional hearings and New York Times investigations, executive orders and popular documentaries. It is something that, in a fractured partisan landscape, nearly everyone can agree on.

If the internet is broken, how do we fix it? The answers that currently predominate among American policymakers and policy intellectuals tend to circle a couple of main themes. Todays internet reformers talk about monopoly power and the lack of regulation. They argue that tech companies are too large and too little constrained by government. They want to make markets more competitive, firms more regulated.

The internet reformers have some good ideas, but they never quite reach the root of the problem. The root is simple: the internet is broken because the internet is a business. While the issues are various and complex, they are inextricable from the fact that the internet is owned by private firms and is run for profit. An internet owned by smaller, more entrepreneurial, more regulated firms will still be an internet run for profit. And an internet run for profit is one that cant guarantee people the things they need to lead self- determined lives. Its an internet where people cant participate in the decisions that affect them. Its an internet in which the rewards flow to the few and the risks are borne by the many. In other words, its the internet as we know it today.