(2024-06-17) Berjon The Public Interest Internet

Robin Berjon: The Public Interest Internet. Transnational Digital Public Infrastructure, Tech Governance, and Industrial Policy

Allow me to open with a wildly speculative question: What if the internet were public interest technology?

through and through, warts and all, an internet that works in support of a credible, pragmatic definition of the common good

a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free.

What global digital architecture should we assemble if we take seriously the idea that the internet should be public interest technology?

in order to sketch the shape of this architecture I will look at:
what we should consider to be digital infrastructure and the consequences of its capture;
the problems with our current approach to internet standards;
limits to the main approach to digital regulation that states are deploying;
what problems exist with industrial policy and territorial state investment in the context of a transnational commons;
how to approach the governance of transnational public infrastructure in a manner that is (by necessity) democratic but that limits encroachment on state sovereignty (and in fact improves the situation compared to the big tech status quo);
how to pay for this; and
precedent and proposals showing that this architecture is pragmatic, implementable, and doesn't need to reinvent the wheel.

what I hope to do here is to show how this all fits together as a coherent whole.

Hope in the Dead of Night

What is it that we're fixing and what is the fix?

our troubles start with infrastructure, with who controls it, and with how they use that control to shape what is and isn't possible on the internet