Public interest values ​​must underpin a better Internet

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By Chris Lewis, January 11, 2022

As Public Knowledge begins its 21st year of promoting the public interest, the work of media technology and politics continues to be filled with exciting innovations and inspiring choices. Technological innovations can be revolutionary and revolutions are disordered. The promise of these innovations can be enormous if our society takes into account the challenges, the mess they bring. The balance between the promise of innovation and responsibility begins with the agreement on values ​​and the vision for the future of technology. Traditionally, the civil society community would have done the hard work of forging these agreements and lining up behind them to shape politics.

In the early days of the internet, civil society groups were focused on realizing its democratizing potential. For the first time ever, we had a wide-ranging tool for many-to-many communications, enabling community building and an explosion in the diversity of voices and stories that could reach audiences. Policy makers have also focused on the exciting potential of the Internet and hesitated to raise the guardrails that could inhibit entrepreneurship. This early age of the internet brought so much innovation, but it also brought us questions that we still struggle with today. For example, how open do we want the architecture of the Internet to be and what does it mean for the rules we impose on profit-oriented companies (broadband providers) that provide this society-changing service? Would network users be able to determine what information they send or receive through it without a gatekeeper? This is the net neutrality debate in a nutshell. Another question we still struggle with is how do we enforce laws that restrict the sharing of information and creative works, such as copyright law, in a medium that was built for the massive sharing and interconnection of digital content? The best known of these fights was the defeat of the disastrous Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

These struggles of the first era of the Internet and Internet politics were organized around various core values ​​of public interest, including: openness, freedom of expression, diversity of voices, access to information, healthy competition and anti-gatekeeperism. These struggles have often put civil society groups in political alliances with emerging technology companies whose services have provided Internet users with spaces to create, share and organize in line with the public interest view of an open web. Social media platforms like Reddit, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have created places for community building and content sharing. Wikimedia has grown as a crowdsourced encyclopedia of the Internet and the Internet Archive as a digital library of the web. The battle over SOPA was a coming out party for the power of Internet users in Washington. The rejection of the bill has shown civil society how powerful the mobilization of the average and individual users of technology, the people, could be.

In the decade following the fight against SOPA, new issues have emerged based on the development of new technological innovations and the challenges they create. As we continue to fight for net neutrality and how to share creative works online, technology has developed new tools for communicating and using the data we were only beginning to understand ten years ago. These challenges are clear, but the public is still struggling to get organized on how to account for the mess they bring to our society.

For instance:

Social media has allowed discrete communities of interest to organize and share their stories, no matter how marginalized that community may be within society. Challenge: What happens when that community’s trust and belonging are manipulated to spread harmful lies, hatred and misinformation? Video sharing apps create spaces where creative people can share content and stories that never would have made network television and make a living doing it. A challenge: who is responsible for the standards of that content, which is often in real time and on an extraordinary scale? Online marketplaces bring products from the smallest city or business to a global marketplace. A challenge: in a world of infinite products but limited space for promotion, what limits should be placed on the market that controls that promotional space … and can it compete within it? Virtual reality spaces and metaverses can innovate and change where and as recreation, occupation, and other realms of daily life take place. A challenge: as a society, will we be happy when the inequities and problems of our society (e.g. technological accessibility, poverty derived from scarcity, racial prejudice or hatred) take root in this new virtual world? Who is responsible for overseeing this virtual harm to society? All of these technologies, many of which are free of monetary costs to users, are driven by data collection to drive both the computing power of the platforms (algorithms) and the model of dominant business (advertising). A challenge: What are the limits of personal privacy in a world where intimate details of health, identity and taste can be tracked, often without that person’s informed consent?

Questions like these (and they may seem endless), posed about innovative online technology, have been interpreted by some as a “technological whip”. But this perspective is tied to a pre-SOPA view of decision making centered on the powerful commercial interests that dominate media and politics. The challenges of the early internet era were not faced by a clash between industry players, but by an audience that understood what they wanted the internet to be and then fought to get it. The role of civil society has been to create a vision rooted in the values ​​of what we want from the Internet. That vision framed policy debates and drove the engagement of average tech users. This can and should be our role again with the current challenges that innovation has created.

This is an important leadership moment for the civil society community. But we won’t realize it if we continue to focus only on what we are against in today’s internet. When we talk about what we imagine instead of what we are against, we can establish a shared image to measure against existing and emerging technology in the future. We as a company, not a company or group of companies, have built the Internet that we have today. We can reshape it so that we actually benefit from it. We also need to be responsible for the messy challenges it can create. To this end, the civil society community must engage with each other and with the public to define the public interest values ​​that frame what a better Internet looks like.

Fortunately, we can identify these values ​​today thanks to the fundamental work of the last two eras of Internet innovation and politics. We certainly must not leave behind the positive vision of the first utopian era in the history of the Internet. But neither should we abandon the public interest values ​​that drive the latest “technological lash” or era of accountability in Internet history. They can and should be balanced with each other for the benefit of the wider society.

People will definitely have their own list of values, but based on the work of Public Knowledge and the civil society allies we often work with, I suggest this starting list:

Openness and access to information Democratic governance and multistakeholders Racial justice and diversity of voices Free expression Healthy competition and consumer choice Content moderation for thriving communities User privacy and control over personal data

This list is not exhaustive and is part of the opportunity facing our civil society community. Technology is being integrated into so many parts of our lives that the list of concerns and challenges created by innovation continues to grow. Civil society groups are growing and multiplying to accompany this growth in innovation, but we must align with our goals, if not always with their tactics, to fully realize the opportunity to build a better Internet.

I recognize that there are pitfalls in using public interest values ​​to guide the development of Internet technology and the policies that shape it. However, the alternative is an Internet based solely on the profit motives of the operators in the sector. This isn’t a satisfying alternative, so let’s work to identify pitfalls before we set foot on it.

One potential trap is the inevitable competition between public interest values. Some members of civil society are bound by their mission to prioritize one public interest value over another. For example, an organization focused on the digital manifestation of a social evil (such as poverty or racial equity) may not prioritize a broader value such as freedom of expression before its core mission. How civil society groups with missions rooted in parallel values ​​reconcile or align their values ​​to work together is essential to building a better internet.

Another potential trap is the impact of industry players when they see value in defining a public interest value. Make no mistake, the industry is profit-driven. Companies strategically co-opt a public interest value to give a persuasive face to their profit-oriented interest. Industry actors also bring skills as innovators and influence into decision making, which can push change in a positive or negative direction. The independence of civil society groups is also essential, despite the political opportunities that will come to work with industry actors as policies shift.

But make no mistake: the power of communication tools continues to grow at an extraordinary rate. If we fail to find the balance between the promise of innovation and responsibility for it, we will continue to see it do great harm in our society. Communication is so powerful.

Public Knowledge’s mission is rooted in some key values ​​and that mission will not change. But as we operate as part of a larger civil society community, we know the importance of defining and sharing a broader set of public interest values ​​that should guide technological innovation and policy development. I invite others to join us in developing that values-based vision for what a better Internet looks like.

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