In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Virginia lawyer Samuel Kercheval that included a passage now inscribed on the wall of the Jefferson Memorial, warning eloquently of the dangers of fossilized thinking, invoking a metaphor of a man still wearing the coat that fit when he was a boy.
Tuesday’s post focused on a big problem, how our nation’s laws and policies have not kept pace with technological change, resulting in an internet that is not revolutionizing democracy as once predicted but undermining it instead. Today, let’s talk solutions. First, what won’t work. Then, what might.
The U.S. Department of Justice is actively considering using federal antitrust laws to break up Google after a judge ruled the tech giant illegally monopolized the online search market. Nearly three years ago, the Federal Trade Commission tried what the DOJ is now contemplating, suing Facebook under those same antitrust laws in hopes of breaking up what the FTC alleges is an illegal social networking monopoly after Facebook’s parent company gobbled up Instagram, WhatsApp and other networking platforms.
Talk about laws not keeping up with technology. Our nation’s first antitrust law was established in 1890. There are three core federal antitrust laws still in effect today. The last meaningful changes to any of these three laws were made way back in 1976. The reason for antitrust enforcement is consumer protection, to break up monopolies in order to safeguard against price gouging.
Made sense in 1911 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government in its case against Standard Oil and ordered John D. Rockefeller’s company to be split into 34 companies. Over the next century, most of those 34 companies either merged or were acquired or renamed. Four remain that are selling petroleum products to this day and are descendants of the original Standard Oil in some form or fashion: ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and Marathon.
If laws designed to protect consumers from price gouging are all we have at our disposal to hold today’s internet behemoths accountable, our government has little choice but to awkwardly try to utilize them despite the fact that using Google and Facebook is free. Users are not consumers, they’re the product. Advertisers are sold user data. That’s how these companies make money. Antitrust lawsuits won’t change this dynamic. Splitting the likes of Google and Facebook into dozens of separate companies won’t save us money or give us control over our personal information, it’ll just create a whole bunch more data-mining, privacy-invading online search engines and social networking sites. Will that really make us better off?
Another strategy doomed to fail is browbeating billionaire owners of online platforms to do a better job of policing the content on their sites or creating some kind of commission to do it for them. One option conjures the image of a Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk endlessly trying to whack moles. The other raises the specter of the Ministry of Truth that George Orwell warned us about. The line between “content moderation” and censorship is blurry to say the least. Besides, trying to hold platforms ethically responsible or even legally liable for content posted on their sites by users doesn’t get at the root of the problem with today’s internet any better than enforcement of outdated antitrust laws does.
Finding solutions that could work starts with keeping in mind what platforms like Facebook actually do. They do not create content, they curate it. They decide who gets to see what. So, maybe we should stop fretting about how big they are and obsessing over the nature of the content billions of users worldwide have posted on their sites, and focus instead on their curation. Rather than making them liable for each tiny piece of content, hold them accountable for what they control—how content is prioritized, targeted to certain audiences, and either amplified or throttled—and the impact that sphere of control has on our personal freedoms and our democracy.
At the heart of the curation are algorithms that determine which content is favored and which is discriminated against. Social media sites like Facebook and X currently are free to employ algorithms designed to feed users the content most likely to keep them on the platform the longest, exposing that audience to ever more advertising, producing ever more profit. There is no requirement that the algorithm serve the public interest or reflect democratic values.
Imagine if we rekindled the wisdom of past generations who put up guardrails to make sure the race to harness the power of electricity, the telephone, radio and television ultimately was run for the benefit of the entire citizenry. Imagine explicit public interest obligations for the internet curators. Imagine transparent algorithms and public accountability for the makers of these instruments of curation. Imagine being able to choose from a menu of algorithms so what we see online would not be left to a corporation’s sole discretion but rather would be based on what site visitors—we the people—value most.
This is no pipe dream, it is a future very much under discussion and in early stages of development. One of a thousand possibilities is middleware allowing people to set algorithms themselves so they get the kind of internet experience they want. Middleware is not a futuristic abstraction, it already exists. This computer software serves as a sort of bridge between a computer’s operating system and the applications running on it, providing services like data management and communication to applications that are beyond those available from the operating system itself. It could be put to use in service of democracy on social media and elsewhere on the internet.
There is unquestionably a role for government in this project, but that need not be the lone domain where the work is undertaken. Private and public universities alike can and should help with research and development. Consortiums of computer programmers and cyber pioneers can and should compete in the race to mastermind the most effective design. What we need our government to do is erect the guardrails, spell out the rules, make it clear as was done with electricity, the telephone, radio and television that the internet is a public asset that must be used in the public interest and for the common good.
Whether this work is ever brought to completion is up to us. As to whether we should try and do it, Thomas Jefferson had something to say about that, in the letter he sent to his lawyer friend more than 200 years ago. You have to admit, the coat no longer fits.
Great ideas Mike! We need to take action on making them reality.
Of course they would take it down. They don't want anyone messing with their algorithms. I think you need to propose this idea to Congress.