On Converting Tech Companies to Public Utilities
One thing that has NOT emerged from the technological revolution of the past 30 years, is internet infrastructure that is actually made available as a public utility, even though the word “public utility” has been on the lips of the industry on and off going way back. Somehow we just never get around to it. Weird!
This is NOT due to a lack of emergence of technologies that would make great public utilities, or the ability to manage them technically outside of a VC mega-corp like Facebook. Rather, this is due solely to bad management of technological innovation and venture capitalist greed. They are holding us back.
Technology as a whole, and our technology strategy as a country, does not allow for the movement into public utilities, even when it becomes wholly clear that they are needed to support open communication between all peoples, and that venture capitalists and tech companies have proved untrustworthy stewards.
There are some clear, self-evident internet services / “primitives” that have emerged as enduring, distinctly scoped and foundational to our tech-mediated communications. Each of them fits easily into a utility model, and represents technology which we know how to implement and scale — I.e., these are no longer technologically prohibitive, as say, 20 years ago when Facebook started; even if they are hard, these are achievable. The technology and the fundamental interactions are well understood, well studied and well documented.
These are:
- Real time messaging
- Real time microblogging
- Hosted blogging
- Hosted newsletters
- Hosted photo libraries
- Hosted streaming video
An important aspect of a utility is that, it is something identified as something everyone should and needs to have, as a matter of civic participation and as a matter of society. These listed above are undoubtedly basic tools for communication now, the very basic building blocks, which are used across many services and can only be accessed through those providers, and yet do not exist in a simple, accessible way outside of venture capital control. Instead, we must rely on fickle companies with different, changing leaders and different, changing agendas and the agenda of devouring growth and profit above all.
In the case of Twitter and Instagram, the core functionalities, the utility within the platform — real time, peer to peer microblogging and hosted photo library — is buried and warped around entirely separate business drivers and the motives of greedy corporations: advertising and sale of personal data. The utility model allows a de-coupling of the core service from whatever elaborate and interfering mechanisms are implemented by technofascist billionaires.
No one uses Facebook because of the algorithm. The algorithm becomes what users must go through — unnecessary, arbitrary, constantly changing to fuel a profit, manipulative, opaque. No one uses Twitter because its advertising is so great. The advertisement and the algorithms compromise democracy on these platforms. The core service is obscured.
This is a great place for a utility in my mind: when the core functionality can be easily isolated from the larger corporate machine around it, and where it can be demonstrated that the company is actually impeding the utility of these core services, and where it can be demonstrated that these basic building blocks are not at all IP under any reasoned standard. You cannot own the concept of a fucking text box. No one can own the idea of streaming video, and if so, that was literally more than 30 years ago and those first users were porn sites and pedophiles. Netflix cannot possibly lay claim to the basic utility of delivering streaming video in general.
Carrier pigeons were the first peer-to-peer messaging. Postcards was the first microblogging. These are just ways that people want to communicate and naturally communicate, and the design patterns in different ages of humanity stay the same. No company can reasonably stake a claim that they invented these modes of communication, much less to the extent that that gives them perpetual license to a monopoly on it, which is how it is playing out in the field.
I would argue that in the digital world, certain technologies have emerged that the design pattern, is extremely natural and logical and useful on the web and enduring, and that have fueled over the years a large variety of applications and have become ubiquitous. Those design patterns, these absolute tablestakes design patterns, which were NOT invented by any of these companies, are things like… text boxes. Image hosting. This is just hosting of universal internet patterns. It is impossible to own the ideas for these or reasonably say that they were originated in these companies. These are general ideas and patterns to which many, many people have contributed to since, well, the dawn of time. No one can lay claim to the idea of real time communication with other humans; indeed, that is simply the innate way that humans communicate. No one can lay claim to sharing images. There were social networks well before Facebook and Twitter. These concepts are communal property and germane to human communication.
They have been hijacked by a small group of venture capitalists to form data monopolies. The a16z + PayPal Mafia conspiracy now has its hold on both Twitter AND Facebook (and therefore Instagram), plus newsletter service Substack. Content monopolies go way back; Ev Williams first founded Blogger, then started Twitter, and then Medium. So this entire world of communication — real time communication of various kinds, opt-in feeds, chronological microposts, blogging — is encapsulated by this same very small group of people. Transforming these services into public utilities is a great start for resuming actually open communications between citizens of the world.
The business model of these companies is that they CAPTURED a utility and are generating huge profits by taking advantage of the fact that so many people have nowhere to go BUT them. This business model is in fact anti-competitive, because the corporations stewarding these technologies are not actually forced to compete on the value that they add to people’s content, but simply on being the host for it; this data could be hosted by anyone, anywhere; that is not where the business value of Facebook or Netflix resides. Companies like Twitter and Facebook should have to PAY to access the collective data, with revenue going directly to the maintenance of the utility or its users, and be held to the standard of providing an actual value add of significant strength to compel use of them. That is ACTUALLY competitive. In this model, all tech companies become clients of the core public utility. They are forced to create a value-add that people actually WANT to use them as a client for access to communal data.
So there is no virtuous competition happening, which makes these exceptionally appealing and fitting for public utilities as well. These companies form a “natural monopoly,” because the key value (lol!!) they hold is user data and thus, people must use these services to talk to their friends. It is essentially by keeping data and relationships hostage that these companies monetize. The natural monopoly is a great candidate for a public utility.
One of the things a public utility does is relieves the pressure to produce a revenue and profit. It is this pressure to produce a profit that is compromising the core communications values of the sites; for example, Twitter no longer has a real-time feed, even though its greatest utility is as a real-time medium. This puts social movements all over the world in grave danger; real-time microblogging has been used brilliantly in everything from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to the Ferguson resistance. In Instagram’s case, the pressure for revenue has created an incentive to crush particularly young people’s self esteem in order to drive purchasing behavior. In Facebook’s case, they are supposed to be enabling social connection, and yet it is shown time and time again that it is making people miserable, lonely and disordered. We see here an example where something that SHOULD be a public utility, because it offers a tablestakes participation in society, is being warped by goals utterly outside of the well-being of the users. These orthogonal demands threaten open communication.
They have formed the “natural monopoly” that we want to see in something like a utility. If they didn’t want to go in this direction, perhaps they shouldn’t have monopolized it.
The larger issue, of course, is that of data and collective data. We are surveilled within an inch of our lives, and every aspect of the communication disappears into these proprietary data stores. As a global public, we have not been able to benefit from these aggregates almost at all. There is fucktons of aggregate information we can use to have a better society, but Facebook can see wayyyyy more shit than they’ve ever even thought of exposing to us. Only the companies and the advertisers and intelligence communities are reaping these benefits.
There needs to be a decoupling of communal data from these tech giants and specifically, technofascist billionaires, as indeed, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Substack are all funded and led by actual-factual, fascists, and the richest people in the world. Without even getting into the particulars, this should say enough that these basic services, decoupled from their venture capital captors, offer a whole new world of possibility for us that has previously only been restricted to people who absolutely do not have our best interests in mind. Facebook is literally only a client for databases filled with information we put in there!!! There must be a separation of Facebook the apparatus from Facebook the well of data, data which is exclusively generated by us and thus belongs, by all conceivable natural law, to us. And they are in violation.
An obvious question is that of how to fund and operate this. Requiring these corporations to pay for data, and pay US for our data, is a much healthier check/balance than us paying them or their advertisers for access to our own shit. It also gives the new utility formation and the public the ability to have more transparency and more discretion into how data is used. I could even see a model where there are different projects and outside clients and users can decide if they want to add their data to a particular initiative, or there could be broader campaigns for issues like public health.
Algorithms are lenses. We should be able to choose which algorithms we want to apply. This is a place where companies who supposedly have such a strong algorithm game, can actually provide clients of the service, and algorithms as features that can be used or not used. And then we can see if these algorithms are even worth a good goddamn. In this model, tech companies are on the hook to actually provide value besides data hosting, which we can contract on our own and thus, actually own. Algorithms can be focused on what is useful and safe, rather than what is best for advertisers, squeezing a profit, engaging in anti-competitive behaviors, and so on. There is this massive relieving of the infrastructure itself as you take away all of these superfluous goals.
This is a vital point. One of the reasons why Facebook is such a behemoth is because of how much it takes to support a giant advertising apparatus, business development, expansion, acquisitions, etc. Etc. The majority of the work done at Facebook and Twitter, has very little to do with simply providing the core functionalities — hosting and displaying text and images in chronological order. Facebook made 100 billion dollars last year alone on advertising. Without these added complexities, we are faced with a much smaller technical and operational footprint.
They say competition is good for business. Alright, shed the bones and prove that you are adding anything of value here as opposed to layering cash extraction feature after cash extraction feature between two friends! The way these companies are making money is by putting bullshit in between the person and the people being communicated with. The entire monetization strategy is totally orthogonal and unrelated to what the user wants to do. We are left trying to solve for the communication problem that algorithms have created. With AI, even more bullshit will be thrown between us, other citizens, and the goals and aims we have on the platforms. Making it more necessary than ever before to have utilities.
We have reached a point where what Facebook and Twitter the corporation do, is actually just put layers of bullshit on top of the core functionality that is what people are ACTUALLY there for. People are not using Twitter and Facebook because they want to be manipulated by millions of algorithms into buying products. Yet this experience and that demand, is prioritized significantly over something as simple as “let me see the things my friends posted” or “let me connect with my community in real time”. Just because we have not had to contend with the questions of operating these technologies as a public utility, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t going forward.
Public utilities lets us see the actual operating footprint and the actual financial demands of this infrastructure, decoupled from billionaire greed, sadism and manipulation. As far as initial funding, I propose the these giant social media companies turn over at least 100 billion dollars, just one year of their advertising revenue, back to the people. That should get us plenty far! Give ol Zuck a haircut.
As a brief note, please remember that the whole model of startups is that the early team, investors, shareholders, are rewarded for the risk they took financially at onset. We have made so many people billionaires and multi-millionaires for these companies; they sit at the very top of the NASDAQ because of us and continue to generate exorbitant personal wealth. The risks that they have taken have been paid out to them over and over again. We do not owe them any more money. All parties have been made whole beyond reason for any sacrifice of the early days. Which now, are literally 20 years ago. All of these executives have multi-generational wealth from this, and the creation of this internet billionaire class has also fundamentally threatened our free and open access and equal access to life. Enough!!
I’ve written in other places about the amazing benefits of taking technology out of venture capital control. One of the major ones would be stopping the pointless fractioning of video content across so many different services. The shit is now more expensive than cable while Netflix sits on a pile of money. I think that the public deserves free and perpetual access to all content from a streamlined system. If Netflix would like to provide a client to that that people are willing to pay for, excellent! If these folks would like to create their own content to contribute, great!! But they, and the other streaming services, shouldn’t be able to gatekeep this much access to content and the primary access point should be as a public utility, priced as low as possible or preferably, offered for free.
Going the utilities route is the natural and correct social decision to make. Foundationally, it is also the best engineering decision to make. It restores these core mechanisms of internet which venture capitalists have been able to commandeer and hold in perpetual ransom. It is THEIR fault that they haven’t been able to support or responsibly steward them; and it is them who installed themselves as a monopoly, making them a great fit for capture and release as a public utility. Twitter and Facebook and Netflix have not shown themselves worthy custodians of these core functionalities; we can engage even extreme measures without moral quiver.
Fuck these fucking people we need to get our internet back.