Social Platform Ownership & Governance

I was distracted by a sudden recollection of all the instances I had heard the attributes of countries being used to describe the accomplishments of internet companies: the number of users of a streaming service being equated to the populations of sovereign nation-states, a company’s online-advertising revenue to the GDPs of several countries, all ... See more

Fuller blames this thinning on two factors. First, extreme partnership has led to “an intense focus” on specific political outcomes, rather than developing better democratic processes. Second, large private foundations and governments are putting money into their own agendas, rather than tools to empower everyday citizens.

As a simplistic starting point, the model in which public actors fund infrastructure (or the bootstrapping of infrastructure through private-sector coordination and patient capital) and private actors fund innovation in products and services on top of that infrastructure is a good one.

Infrastructure is public in nature even when it isn't publicly owned and operated. However, while public actors have a key role to play, I believe that a successful digital sovereignty strategy will overall end up relying more on private and commons actors. The first role that public actors have here is to disperse power and to help coordinate the ... See more

On top of this, much of the digital regulatory work of the past two decades has used an unhelpful consumer goods framing. Thinking in terms of consumer goods limits the space of interventions: you will mostly consider safety concerns. But regulating structural power needs itself to be much more about creating the kind of structure that supports an ... See more

When you bring together the facts that these companies operate in a largely lawless environment (the supranational environment) that offers no checks and balances, impacting more lives than the largest democracies, and with an explicitly authoritarian mode of governance (which has been the case for years but has become harder to ignore) then you ca... See more

The fact that the digital and the analog are interwoven is not the problem. Not only is it to be expected that all human activities connect to one another, but the mutual encroachment of different governance systems with one another is, under normal circumstances, highly desirable because it makes the resulting system polycentric .9 A polycentric s... See more

Infrastructural goods are strategic because of the manner in which these three properties interact. Without monopolistic tendencies, the market could correct with competition. Without the variety in downstream uses, the power of infrastructure would be narrow (and users in a narrow domain can more easily coordinate countervailing power). And withou... See more

Structural power isn't always a problem, for instance there is no reason to complain that a game designer will pick the rules of their imaginary world, but there is a large set of cases in which this structural power gives corporations " coercive powers like the state but (...) not subject to the kinds of democratic constraints and accountability t... See more