Why we need a public internet and how to get one

And since Musk announced his plans in April, people have debated whether it’s better for online social spaces like Twitter to remain publicly traded companies — where they’re under pressure from shareholders — or be owned by a single wealthy figure like Musk.But Ben Tarnoff, author of the upcoming book Internet for the People, believes there’s a better way. But there is an interesting precedent — from London in the 1980s, where the Labour Party-led local government opened a lot of what we would today think of as makerspaces or hackerspaces and had this aspiration to democratize the design and development of technology.So I think that’s where I place much of my hope: that further horizon of, if you could really stimulate people’s creativity at scale, what new online worlds could we create?It seems like the core issue isn’t necessarily that people can’t develop these things; it’s that they don’t want to spend a bunch of time trying to find new online spaces — like a substitute for a thing that, say, lets them invite people to their birthday party. But it’s not local to the exclusion of the regional or the national — it’s local as a promising site of governance because of the richness of the interpersonal interaction that it promotes.Do you think there are ways to organize small communities that have some level of self-governance that aren’t geographical?Yeah — I think a possible objection would be: isn’t the whole point of the internet and computer networking more broadly the ability to form affiliations that aren’t place-based? It’s very easy to live in an American city, not know your neighbors, not really know anybody in your other community, not really have relationships with your coworkers, but live much of your social life through the internet with people you’ve never met.I wouldn’t moralize and say that’s bad — I think people create arrangements that work for them. But I think there is probably something to be said for creating a more balanced arrangement where in-person, place-based, workplace-based affiliations could be restored.You point to moments in the history of internet privatization where there were intervention points, like proposals for a “public lane in the information superhighway.” How much do you think that any of those paths would have changed the course of the internet if they’d been taken?I’m not sure that they would have prevented the worst abuses of the modern internet, but I think all of them would have changed the future of the internet.Privatization was the plan all along — the federal government did not want to run the internet indefinitely.