Review of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff (Verso, 2022)
By Chris Green
July 7, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
During an episode of his program in 2015, the late right wing talk radio demagogue Rush Limbaugh devoted part of a segment to attacking Bill Gates for an interview the latter had recently given to The Atlantic. Limbaugh was particularly upset by Gates’s following statement: “since World War II, US government [funded] R&D has defined the state of the art in almost” every advanced sector of the American economy. For example, Gates noted, it was the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which allocated resources for the R&D which laid the foundation for the modern internet. As for producing economic innovation on its own, Gates said, “the private sector is in general inept.”
Here was Bill Gates, one of the leading economic titans in world history–whose unprecedented wealth is supposedly a testament to the blessings bestowed by hard work and ingenuity operating within a free market economy–saying that the private sector was inept at innovation and needed heavy government funding to help it along. Here was Bill Gates seemingly endorsing the idea that socialistic measures–i.e. government economic planning–had fueled America’s post-World War II economic prosperity. Limbaugh was absolutely aghast. He pronounced Gates’s words as among the” craziest, most nonsensical things” he had ever heard in his life. It was “twilight zone” stuff.
Like a good conservative, Limbaugh held the notion that every major economic advancement on earth has been driven by rugged individualism: hardy entrepreneurs tinkering with inventions in garages or business owners working 24 hours a day to drive innovation, create wealth, jobs and benefits for the human race in general. According to the view of Limbaugh and his ilk, the government’s only proper economic function is to perform certain very limited regulatory and law enforcement functions. Governmental economic intervention beyond that is inevitably going to be a disaster. Socialism doesn’t work! Government economic planning doesn’t work! After all, doesn’t the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrate this?
You can say many harsh things about Bill Gates, but you can’t deny that he has a more realistic view of how the world works than the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Gates’s understanding has also been shared by Noam Chomsky. It has been noted throughout Chomsky’s work that the R&D which has played the leading role in advancing the economic innovations of the post-World War II United States–computers, the internet, transistors, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals–has been funded by US government agencies. After initial development under government aegis, these innovations have, through various mechanisms, ended up under the control of private corporations.
The brilliance of individual scientists receiving government funding–of course–is ultimately responsible for the development of economic innovation in areas like computers and the internet. But government agencies–in the US, Europe, Japan and elsewhere–have had the foresight to plan and direct financial and research resources to these innovations when the private sector saw no short term profit gain in diverting its own R&D resources to them. Historically inadequate R&D funding by the private sector (because of lack of immediate profit gain) is what Gates referred to when he said “the private sector is in general inept.”
Various authors have explored the history in the US and the world’s other most advanced economies of government led economic development facilitating the creation of enormous private sector wealth and substantial economic development. Mariana Mazzucato, the academic economist, is probably the most prominent of current advocates of state-led support of economic innovation. Among other authors, Chomsky has noted how US government military spending during the Cold War supporting research at public universities and government contractors like IBM played key roles in spurring the R&D which developed computers and later the internet.
The military has indeed been a crucible of economic advancement as former Richard Nixon campaign advisor, the late Kevin Phillips, wrote in his 2003 book Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. Phillips’s book was an attempt to show that government led economic development–not classical free markets–has played a major role in creating the unprecedented capitalist wealth developed over the last several hundred years in the US. For example he pointed out that the system of interchangeable parts–which helped power the American industrial revolution–was developed by military contractors at the turn of the 19th century at the US military’s Springfield armory. Phillips noted that during World War I, the US Navy took over all patents of the nascent radio technology to speed up its development. After the war, the navy oversaw the creation of a partnership between General Electric and Westinghouse which launched the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) for the purpose of furthering radio’s development. RCA functioned as a de facto US military corporation with its leading officials and technicians being reserve officers of the army or navy. Phillips noted that the government’s involvement in creating radio generated the possibility that at least a significant part of the radio air waves would be set aside for the public (for use by community groups, educational institutions, unions and the like). However, Congress’s Radio Act of 1927 and Communications Act of 1934 ensured that US radio would be under the nearly complete control of private business ownership.
Internet for the People
The remarks of figures like Gates, Chomsky and Phillips raise important questions. If innovative technologies like the internet and radio were created with such heavy taxpayer expenditure, shouldn’t the public have more control over them? Ben Tarnoff, in his highly intelligent 2022 book Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, produces a reply to this question in the case of the internet, arguing that it should be fully socialized.
Tarnoff, a writer and tech worker, begins his book describing how public money–through the US government agencies DARPA and the National Science Foundation (NSF)–oversaw the internet’s creation in the 1970’s and 80’s. During the 80’s, the NSF oversaw the internet’s establishment as a communications network across disciplines for academic researchers around the country. The NSF created the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications which created Mosaic, the world’s first web site in 1990. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web as a scientist for CERN, the research organization funded by the governments of several dozen nations of what is now called the European Union.
Tarnoff describes how efforts in the early 90’s to privatize the internet–spearheaded by NSF director Stephen Wolff–co-existed alongside efforts to guarantee at least some public control of the internet. While a US Senator in the early 90’s, Al Gore spoke of a public-private partnership controlling the internet. In 1994, Democratic US Senator Daniel Inouye introduced legislation to create a “public lane on the information superhighway.” Gore’s and Inouye’s proposals might have made at least some movement towards establishing equitable internet access for the general American population and greater ability for non-corporate, grassroots individuals and organizations to spread information and points of view not generally favored by corporate media.
However, Inouye’s legislation went nowhere and Gore quickly forgot about facilitating public involvement in the internet’s operation when he joined theClinton White House as vice president. The Clinton administration committed to placing the internet entirely in corporate hands. Tarnoff observes that strategically timed donations to the Democratic National Committee in December 1993 by multiple telecom companies probably played a role in encouraging the administration to make this commitment. The internet’s backbone–the cables and other equipment handling communication between computer networks–was fully divested from by the NSF on April 30, 1995. The internet was fully privatized.
Tarnoff surveys the results of this privatization and it is not pretty. In the US, internet access is essential to basic survival: from communication with loved ones and professional associates to receiving homework assignments as a student, applying for jobs and receiving essential news about the world. Yet Tarnoff notes that internet access is visibly uneven across the United States. In rural and low income areas the service is often, at best, spotty and slow. The US federal government has funneled billions of dollars to private internet service providers (ISPs) to induce them to invest in what are called internet deserts: primarily rural and low income geographic regions where it would normally be unprofitable for ISPs to provide internet service. It appears that in many cases, ISPs have taken the money and failed to deliver the service. Tarnoff writes:
“To cite one example of many, a major ISP called CenturyLink began receiving $505.7 million from the [federal government’s] Universal Service Fund to pay for broadband deployment in underserved areas in 2015. Five years later, the company told the FCC it had only met the mandated milestones in ten states out of thirty-three…During these years, CenturyLink’s CEO was one of the highest paid executives in the industry, earning $35.7 million in 2018.”
Meanwhile the picture of the internet’s actual content is not pretty either. The distribution and amplification of that content is controlled by a relative handful of corporate platforms. Google and Facebook make hundreds of billions of dollars annually because of their dominant position in online advertising (they harvest user data to better target advertisements at their sites’ users). Business forces have exploited the internet to facilitate outsourcing of customer service jobs to low wage third world countries. In the US, rideshare companies like Uber utilize the internet to better surveil and exploit their workers (Tarnoff seems to advocate rideshare coops as a measure to combat this oppression). Right wingers use the great financial resources at their disposal to spread disinformation and racism across the internet.
Possible Solutions
Tarnoff refrains from offering a precise model of how a fully socialized internet would work. He believes such models have to be worked out in practice to see what works in the context of particular needs, experiences and preferences in different communities around the United States.
He does however offer a number of reforms and practices that when taken together can potentially help us build a foundation for fully democratizing the internet and taking the profit motive out of it. For example he advocates municipal broadband, noting that public or coop internet service (the latter being offered in rural North Dakota) has outperformed its private sector competitors in terms of quality and cost. He is an admirer of decentralized social media networks, which allow greater user control over their personal data, the network’s algorithms and other policies in comparison to traditional corporate social media companies like Facebook. One prominent decentralized social media network is the non-profit Mastodon. Tarnoff observes that after it was kicked off major internet platforms for its involvement in the January 6th riots, “the fascist social networking site Gab migrated to Mastodon.” In response, most of the servers representing the independent social network communities comprising Mastodon’s federation blocked Gab from being able to communicate with them. Gab users were able to gather to spew their toxic views among themselves but they were largely quarantined.
Ultimately, Tarnoff wants all aspects of internet service–from the provision of internet access itself to social media networks–to be thoroughly democratically run by the persons who use them. He thoroughly understands that if grassroots movements pursue his ideas–like taxing ISPs to pay for municipal broadband or using similar funding sources to create publicly run social media networks out of local libraries–they will create enormous pushback from the powerful business interests which profit handsomely off a fully privatized internet.
Democrat and Republican politicians are fond of using Big Tech as a political punching bag but, when push comes to shove, more often than not shy away from seriously undermining the power of major internet corporations. It is true that Biden’s Justice Department–in continuation of an action began by Trump’s Justice Department in 2020–has been interminably pursuing antitrust action against Google for its dominance of online search engine traffic and control of online advertising. But, at the end of last month, the American Privacy Rights Act–which might have potentially mildly hindered the ability of Google and similar corporations to harvest data–was scuttled by congressional leaders after it had been introduced on a bipartisan basis. It was apparently the latest example of the utilization of the enormous lobbying power and financial muscle of Big Tech to shape politics in its own interests.
Democratic control of the internet and other information systems is crucial for advancing the power of ordinary people. Social movements must take up the ideas Tarnoff mentions in his book.
During an episode of his program in 2015, the late right wing talk radio demagogue Rush Limbaugh devoted part of a segment to attacking Bill Gates for an interview the latter had recently given to The Atlantic. Limbaugh was particularly upset by Gates’s following statement: “since World War II, US government [funded] R&D has defined the state of the art in almost” every advanced sector of the American economy. For example, Gates noted, it was the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which allocated resources for the R&D which laid the foundation for the modern internet. As for producing economic innovation on its own, Gates said, “the private sector is in general inept.”
Here was Bill Gates, one of the leading economic titans in world history–whose unprecedented wealth is supposedly a testament to the blessings bestowed by hard work and ingenuity operating within a free market economy–saying that the private sector was inept at innovation and needed heavy government funding to help it along. Here was Bill Gates seemingly endorsing the idea that socialistic measures–i.e. government economic planning–had fueled America’s post-World War II economic prosperity. Limbaugh was absolutely aghast. He pronounced Gates’s words as among the” craziest, most nonsensical things” he had ever heard in his life. It was “twilight zone” stuff.
Like a good conservative, Limbaugh held the notion that every major economic advancement on earth has been driven by rugged individualism: hardy entrepreneurs tinkering with inventions in garages or business owners working 24 hours a day to drive innovation, create wealth, jobs and benefits for the human race in general. According to the view of Limbaugh and his ilk, the government’s only proper economic function is to perform certain very limited regulatory and law enforcement functions. Governmental economic intervention beyond that is inevitably going to be a disaster. Socialism doesn’t work! Government economic planning doesn’t work! After all, doesn’t the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrate this?
You can say many harsh things about Bill Gates, but you can’t deny that he has a more realistic view of how the world works than the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Gates’s understanding has also been shared by Noam Chomsky. It has been noted throughout Chomsky’s work that the R&D which has played the leading role in advancing the economic innovations of the post-World War II United States–computers, the internet, transistors, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals–has been funded by US government agencies. After initial development under government aegis, these innovations have, through various mechanisms, ended up under the control of private corporations.
The brilliance of individual scientists receiving government funding–of course–is ultimately responsible for the development of economic innovation in areas like computers and the internet. But government agencies–in the US, Europe, Japan and elsewhere–have had the foresight to plan and direct financial and research resources to these innovations when the private sector saw no short term profit gain in diverting its own R&D resources to them. Historically inadequate R&D funding by the private sector (because of lack of immediate profit gain) is what Gates referred to when he said “the private sector is in general inept.”
Various authors have explored the history in the US and the world’s other most advanced economies of government led economic development facilitating the creation of enormous private sector wealth and substantial economic development. Mariana Mazzucato, the academic economist, is probably the most prominent of current advocates of state-led support of economic innovation. Among other authors, Chomsky has noted how US government military spending during the Cold War supporting research at public universities and government contractors like IBM played key roles in spurring the R&D which developed computers and later the internet.
The military has indeed been a crucible of economic advancement as former Richard Nixon campaign advisor, the late Kevin Phillips, wrote in his 2003 book Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. Phillips’s book was an attempt to show that government led economic development–not classical free markets–has played a major role in creating the unprecedented capitalist wealth developed over the last several hundred years in the US. For example he pointed out that the system of interchangeable parts–which helped power the American industrial revolution–was developed by military contractors at the turn of the 19th century at the US military’s Springfield armory. Phillips noted that during World War I, the US Navy took over all patents of the nascent radio technology to speed up its development. After the war, the navy oversaw the creation of a partnership between General Electric and Westinghouse which launched the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) for the purpose of furthering radio’s development. RCA functioned as a de facto US military corporation with its leading officials and technicians being reserve officers of the army or navy. Phillips noted that the government’s involvement in creating radio generated the possibility that at least a significant part of the radio air waves would be set aside for the public (for use by community groups, educational institutions, unions and the like). However, Congress’s Radio Act of 1927 and Communications Act of 1934 ensured that US radio would be under the nearly complete control of private business ownership.
Internet for the People
The remarks of figures like Gates, Chomsky and Phillips raise important questions. If innovative technologies like the internet and radio were created with such heavy taxpayer expenditure, shouldn’t the public have more control over them? Ben Tarnoff, in his highly intelligent 2022 book Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, produces a reply to this question in the case of the internet, arguing that it should be fully socialized.
Tarnoff, a writer and tech worker, begins his book describing how public money–through the US government agencies DARPA and the National Science Foundation (NSF)–oversaw the internet’s creation in the 1970’s and 80’s. During the 80’s, the NSF oversaw the internet’s establishment as a communications network across disciplines for academic researchers around the country. The NSF created the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications which created Mosaic, the world’s first web site in 1990. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web as a scientist for CERN, the research organization funded by the governments of several dozen nations of what is now called the European Union.
Tarnoff describes how efforts in the early 90’s to privatize the internet–spearheaded by NSF director Stephen Wolff–co-existed alongside efforts to guarantee at least some public control of the internet. While a US Senator in the early 90’s, Al Gore spoke of a public-private partnership controlling the internet. In 1994, Democratic US Senator Daniel Inouye introduced legislation to create a “public lane on the information superhighway.” Gore’s and Inouye’s proposals might have made at least some movement towards establishing equitable internet access for the general American population and greater ability for non-corporate, grassroots individuals and organizations to spread information and points of view not generally favored by corporate media.
However, Inouye’s legislation went nowhere and Gore quickly forgot about facilitating public involvement in the internet’s operation when he joined theClinton White House as vice president. The Clinton administration committed to placing the internet entirely in corporate hands. Tarnoff observes that strategically timed donations to the Democratic National Committee in December 1993 by multiple telecom companies probably played a role in encouraging the administration to make this commitment. The internet’s backbone–the cables and other equipment handling communication between computer networks–was fully divested from by the NSF on April 30, 1995. The internet was fully privatized.
Tarnoff surveys the results of this privatization and it is not pretty. In the US, internet access is essential to basic survival: from communication with loved ones and professional associates to receiving homework assignments as a student, applying for jobs and receiving essential news about the world. Yet Tarnoff notes that internet access is visibly uneven across the United States. In rural and low income areas the service is often, at best, spotty and slow. The US federal government has funneled billions of dollars to private internet service providers (ISPs) to induce them to invest in what are called internet deserts: primarily rural and low income geographic regions where it would normally be unprofitable for ISPs to provide internet service. It appears that in many cases, ISPs have taken the money and failed to deliver the service. Tarnoff writes:
“To cite one example of many, a major ISP called CenturyLink began receiving $505.7 million from the [federal government’s] Universal Service Fund to pay for broadband deployment in underserved areas in 2015. Five years later, the company told the FCC it had only met the mandated milestones in ten states out of thirty-three…During these years, CenturyLink’s CEO was one of the highest paid executives in the industry, earning $35.7 million in 2018.”
Meanwhile the picture of the internet’s actual content is not pretty either. The distribution and amplification of that content is controlled by a relative handful of corporate platforms. Google and Facebook make hundreds of billions of dollars annually because of their dominant position in online advertising (they harvest user data to better target advertisements at their sites’ users). Business forces have exploited the internet to facilitate outsourcing of customer service jobs to low wage third world countries. In the US, rideshare companies like Uber utilize the internet to better surveil and exploit their workers (Tarnoff seems to advocate rideshare coops as a measure to combat this oppression). Right wingers use the great financial resources at their disposal to spread disinformation and racism across the internet.
Possible Solutions
Tarnoff refrains from offering a precise model of how a fully socialized internet would work. He believes such models have to be worked out in practice to see what works in the context of particular needs, experiences and preferences in different communities around the United States.
He does however offer a number of reforms and practices that when taken together can potentially help us build a foundation for fully democratizing the internet and taking the profit motive out of it. For example he advocates municipal broadband, noting that public or coop internet service (the latter being offered in rural North Dakota) has outperformed its private sector competitors in terms of quality and cost. He is an admirer of decentralized social media networks, which allow greater user control over their personal data, the network’s algorithms and other policies in comparison to traditional corporate social media companies like Facebook. One prominent decentralized social media network is the non-profit Mastodon. Tarnoff observes that after it was kicked off major internet platforms for its involvement in the January 6th riots, “the fascist social networking site Gab migrated to Mastodon.” In response, most of the servers representing the independent social network communities comprising Mastodon’s federation blocked Gab from being able to communicate with them. Gab users were able to gather to spew their toxic views among themselves but they were largely quarantined.
Ultimately, Tarnoff wants all aspects of internet service–from the provision of internet access itself to social media networks–to be thoroughly democratically run by the persons who use them. He thoroughly understands that if grassroots movements pursue his ideas–like taxing ISPs to pay for municipal broadband or using similar funding sources to create publicly run social media networks out of local libraries–they will create enormous pushback from the powerful business interests which profit handsomely off a fully privatized internet.
Democrat and Republican politicians are fond of using Big Tech as a political punching bag but, when push comes to shove, more often than not shy away from seriously undermining the power of major internet corporations. It is true that Biden’s Justice Department–in continuation of an action began by Trump’s Justice Department in 2020–has been interminably pursuing antitrust action against Google for its dominance of online search engine traffic and control of online advertising. But, at the end of last month, the American Privacy Rights Act–which might have potentially mildly hindered the ability of Google and similar corporations to harvest data–was scuttled by congressional leaders after it had been introduced on a bipartisan basis. It was apparently the latest example of the utilization of the enormous lobbying power and financial muscle of Big Tech to shape politics in its own interests.
Democratic control of the internet and other information systems is crucial for advancing the power of ordinary people. Social movements must take up the ideas Tarnoff mentions in his book.
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