But while these bills might help small business owners, app and website developers, it’s not clear how they will help users. Preventing online marketplaces and app stores from disadvantaging hosted vendors may be the one regulation Democrats and Republicans can agree on, but “self-preferencing” is nobody’s number-one beef with Big Tech. Of far greater public concern are free speech, fake news, lobbying, data collection, code theft, collaboration with dictators, social media’s addictive properties and its propensity to target children.
In short, Big Tech firms are more like massive digital landlords than traditional commodity monopolies. Sen. Klobuchar’s “self-preferencing” bill focuses on the limited way in which they act as market competitors in territory they already own. It takes for granted that these few private entities own the ground the market’s built on, and only asks that they compete “fairly” in that market. Under this law, Mr. Potter can still turn Bedford Falls into Pottersville and charge you regular fees to open a hat store there; he can even start his own hat store next to yours and use sweat-shop labor to undercut your prices; he just can’t shove people away from your establishment.
The same thing happened on the old frontier. The great fortunes didn’t go to the most enterprising individuals in the West, but to those who controlled access to it. Early on, that meant the federal government, which in the days before income tax drew much of its revenue from selling land recently opened up (whether via treaty or forcible removal of prior inhabitants) for settlement. After the Civil War, railroad monopolies became the big winners, thanks to massive federal land grants. Railroads could pick winners and losers among farmers and merchants in the West by charging different rates and shutting off market access to some. They sold their extra land at inflated prices to farmers desperate to get close to stations—much of that land ended up in the hands of rich absentee landlords, under whose ownership it was comparatively unproductive. Individual pioneers, though reified in national memory, were perpetually insecure or simply in deep debt. Eventually, the railroad scramble blew a bubble that in 1873 caused America’s biggest financial crisis before the Great Depression.
Private competition, whether of ideas or products, needs public space. But there is no public square, no public marketplace, on today’s internet.
Halfway measures are the worst thing Congress can do to restore public space. Leaving the task to unaccountable regulatory bodies will most likely solidify existing monopolies, and lead to revolving doors and beltway cronyism. That’s the kind of regulation Facebook and the like are hoping for.
Meaningful reform that makes internet platforms responsive to democratic mechanisms and values can follow one of two paths: decentralization or centralization.
The notion of a decentralized internet has prompted utopian longings since the web’s early days. It inspired open-source, nonprofit web conduits like Mozilla/Firefox and, more recently, blockchain technologies that promise a “distributed” internet where anyone can own a piece. Left alone, however, it’s not clear what will prevent this new “internet 3.0” from re-concentrating. Indeed, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies and NFTs are already being concentrated in the hands of a few users, just like Big Tech domains are. But policymakers can try to encourage decentralization while ensuring everyday users have their own carved-out space. A digital homestead act could give Americans the right to their own cyberspace property, meaning data, and require mega-owners like Google to actually pay suppliers (users) for the commodity (data) their business trades in. More difficult is the question of how to prevent the proliferation of content like child sex abuse material in an internet without gatekeepers.
On the other hand, maybe the public sector is the only reliable guarantor of public space. Back when railroad monopolies dominated the West, the pro-farmer Populist Party called to nationalize them, declaring “the time has come when the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads.” The former happened. To avoid a repeat, populists of today should consider public ownership of key components of the nation’s internet infrastructure. National Security Council officials in the Trump administration tried it with 5G, but were shot down by other parts of the administration. Publicly owned web browsers, social media or commercial platforms would in theory be accountable to the First Amendment as well as to laws governing obscenity and abuse material, and wouldn’t be incentivized to become addictive in pursuit of a hidden profit model. They may be prone, as state-run industries often are, to corruption—but any more so than our for-profit, hyper-concentrated internet is now?
There are no perfect proposals, and any route that departs from the status quo would be politically difficult as long as the GOP is tied to Reaganism and prominent Democrats remain close with major tech companies. But the alternative (which we’re already nearing) is a digital gilded age, in which tech oligarchs are free to dictate policy, to control the flow of information and commerce, to put out products that ruin brains. We need to consider these possibilities and decide which we want—or perhaps, which we fear the least—and soon.
Philip Jeffery is deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
