From addictive algorithms to exploitative apps, knowledge mining to misinformation, the web in the present day generally is a hazardous place. Books by three influential figures—the mind behind “internet neutrality,” a former Meta government, and the net’s personal inventor—suggest radical approaches to fixing it. However are these luminaries the correct folks for the job? Although every exhibits conviction, and even typically inventiveness, the options they current reveal blind spots.
Tim Wu
In The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Financial system and Threaten Our Future Prosperity, Tim Wu argues that a couple of platform corporations have an excessive amount of concentrated energy and should be dismantled. Wu, a outstanding Columbia professor who popularized the precept {that a} free web requires all on-line visitors to be handled equally, believes that current authorized mechanisms, particularly anti-monopoly legal guidelines, supply one of the simplest ways to attain this purpose.
Pairing financial idea with current digital historical past, Wu exhibits how platforms have shifted from giving to customers to extracting from them. He argues that our failure to grasp their energy has solely inspired them to develop, displacing rivals alongside the way in which. And he contends that comfort is what platforms most frequently exploit to maintain customers entrapped. “The human need to keep away from pointless ache and inconvenience,” he writes, could also be “the strongest drive on the market.”
He cites Google’s and Apple’s “ecosystems” as examples, exhibiting how customers can develop into depending on such companies because of their all-encompassing seamlessness. To Wu, this isn’t a foul factor in itself. The convenience of utilizing Amazon to stream leisure, make on-line purchases, or assist arrange day-to-day life delivers apparent features. However when powerhouse corporations like Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet win the battle of comfort with so many customers—and by no means let rivals get a foothold—the result’s “trade dominance” that should now be reexamined.
The measures Wu advocates—and that seem essentially the most sensible, as they draw on current authorized frameworks and financial insurance policies—are federal anti-monopoly legal guidelines, utility caps that restrict how a lot corporations can cost customers for service, and “line of enterprise” restrictions that prohibit corporations from working in sure industries.
Columbia College’s Tim Wu exhibits how platforms have shifted from giving to customers to extracting from them. He argues that our failure to grasp their energy has solely inspired them to develop.
Anti-monopoly provisions and antitrust legal guidelines are efficient weapons in our armory, Wu contends, declaring that they’ve been efficiently used in opposition to know-how corporations previously. He cites two well-known circumstances. The primary is the Nineteen Sixties antitrust case introduced by the US authorities in opposition to IBM, which helped create competitors within the pc software program market that enabled corporations like Apple and Microsoft to emerge. The 1982 AT&T case that broke the phone conglomerate up into a number of smaller corporations is one other occasion. In every, the general public benefited from the decoupling of {hardware}, software program, and different companies, resulting in extra competitors and selection in a know-how market.
However will previous efficiency predict future outcomes? It’s not but clear whether or not these legal guidelines might be profitable within the platform age. The 2025 antitrust case in opposition to Google—through which a choose dominated that the corporate didn’t should divest itself of its Chrome browser because the US Justice Division had proposed—reveals the boundaries of pursuing tech breakups by way of the legislation. The 2001 antitrust case introduced in opposition to Microsoft likewise didn’t separate the corporate from its internet browser and largely saved the conglomerate intact. Wu noticeably doesn’t focus on the Microsoft case when arguing for antitrust motion in the present day.
Nick Clegg, till lately Meta’s president of worldwide affairs and a former deputy prime minister of the UK, takes a place very completely different from Wu’s: that attempting to interrupt up the most important tech corporations is misguided and would degrade the expertise of web customers. In How one can Save the Web: The Menace to World Connection within the Age of AI and Political Battle, Clegg acknowledges Large Tech’s monopoly over the net. However he believes punitive authorized measures like antitrust legal guidelines are unproductive and might be averted via regulation, similar to guidelines for what content material social media can and might’t publish. (It’s value noting that Meta is going through its personal antitrust case, involving whether or not it ought to have been allowed to accumulate Instagram and WhatsApp.)
Nick Clegg
Clegg additionally believes Silicon Valley ought to take the initiative to reform itself. He argues that encouraging social media networks to “open up the books” and share their decision-making energy with customers is extra more likely to restore some equilibrium than considering authorized motion as a primary resort.
However some could also be skeptical of a former Meta exec and politician who labored intently with Mark Zuckerberg and nonetheless wasn’t capable of usher in such adjustments to social media websites whereas working for one. What’s going to solely compound this skepticism is the selective historical past present in Clegg’s e book, which briefly acknowledges some scandals (just like the one surrounding Cambridge Analytica’s knowledge harvesting from Fb customers in 2016) however refuses to debate different pertinent ones. For instance, Clegg laments the “fractured” nature of the worldwide web in the present day however fails to acknowledge Fb’s personal function on this splintering.
Breaking apart Large Tech by way of antitrust legal guidelines would hinder innovation, says Clegg, arguing that the thought “fully ignores the advantages customers acquire from giant community results.” Customers persist with these outsize channels as a result of they’ll discover “most of what they’re searching for,” he writes, like pals and content material on social media and low cost client items on Amazon and eBay.
Wu may concede this level, however he would disagree with Clegg’s claims that sustaining the established order is helpful to customers. “The normal logic of antitrust legislation doesn’t work,” Clegg insists. As an alternative, he believes much less sweeping regulation may also help make Large Tech much less harmful whereas guaranteeing a greater consumer expertise.
Clegg has seen either side of the regulatory coin: He labored in David Cameron’s authorities passing nationwide legal guidelines for know-how corporations to comply with after which moved to Meta to assist the corporate navigate these forms of nation-specific obligations. He bemoans the effort and complexity Silicon Valley faces in attempting to adjust to differing guidelines throughout the globe, some set by “American federal businesses” and others by “Indian nationalists.”
However with the sources such corporations command, certainly they’re greater than outfitted to manage? On condition that Meta itself has beforehand meddled in entry to the web (similar to in India, whose telecommunications regulator finally blocked its Free Fundamentals web service for violating internet neutrality guidelines), this grievance appears suspect coming from Clegg. What must be the actual precedence, he argues, isn’t any new nation-specific legal guidelines however a world “treaty that protects the free circulation of information between signatory nations.”
What the previous Meta government Nick Clegg advocates—unsurprisingly—is just not a breakup of Large Tech however a push for it to develop into “radically clear.”
Clegg believes that these nation-specific know-how obligations—a current one is Australia’s ban on social media for folks beneath 16—normally replicate fallacies in regards to the know-how’s human influence, a topic that may be fraught with nervousness. Such legal guidelines have proved ineffective and have a tendency to taint the general public’s understanding of social networks, he says. There may be some reality to his argument right here, however studying a e book through which a former Fb government dismisses techno-determinism—that’s, the argument that know-how makes folks do or suppose sure issues—could also be chilly consolation to those that have seen the hurt know-how can do.
In any case, Clegg’s defensiveness about social networks could not acquire a lot favor from customers themselves. He stresses the necessity for extra private accountability, arguing that Meta doesn’t ever intend for customers to remain on Fb or Instagram endlessly: “How lengthy you spend on the app in a single session is just not practically as vital as getting you to return again over and over.” Social media corporations need to serve you content material that’s “significant to you,” he claims, not “merely to present you a momentary dopamine spike.” All this feels disingenuous at finest.
What Clegg advocates—unsurprisingly—is just not a breakup of Large Tech however a push for it to develop into “radically clear,” whether or not by itself or, if mandatory, with the assistance of federal legislators. He additionally desires platforms to carry customers extra into their governance processes (by utilizing Fb’s mannequin of neighborhood boards to assist enhance their apps and merchandise, for instance). Lastly, Clegg additionally desires Large Tech to present customers extra significant management of their knowledge and the way corporations similar to Meta can use it.
Right here Clegg shares frequent floor with the inventor of the net, Tim Berners-Lee, whose personal proposal for reform advances a technically particular imaginative and prescient for doing simply that. In his memoir/manifesto This Is for Everybody: The Unfinished Story of the World Broad Net, Berners-Lee acknowledges that his preliminary imaginative and prescient—of a know-how he hoped would stay open-source, collaborative, and fully decentralized—is a far cry from the net that we all know in the present day.
Tim Berners-Lee
If there’s any surviving manifestation of his authentic undertaking, he says, it’s Wikipedia, which stays “most likely the most effective single instance of what I wished the net to be.” His finest concept for shifting energy from Silicon Valley platforms into the arms of customers is to present them extra knowledge management. He pushes for a common knowledge “pod” he helped develop, generally known as “Strong” (an abbreviation of “social linked knowledge”).
The system—which was initially developed at MIT—would supply a central website the place folks might handle knowledge starting from bank card data to well being data to social media remark historical past. “Moderately than have all these items siloed off with completely different suppliers throughout the net, you’d be capable to retailer your complete digital data path in a single personal repository,” Berners-Lee writes.
The Strong product could appear to be a type of silver bullet in an age when knowledge harvesting is acquainted and knowledge breaches are rampant. Inserting higher management with customers and enabling them to see “what knowledge [i]s being generated about them” does sound like a tantalizing prospect.
However some folks could have considerations about, for instance, merging their confidential well being data with knowledge from private gadgets (like coronary heart charge information from a sensible watch). Irrespective of how a lot consumer management and decentralization Berners-Lee could promise, current knowledge scandals (similar to circumstances through which period-tracking apps misused shoppers’ knowledge) could also be on folks’s minds.
Berners-Lee believes that centralizing consumer knowledge in a product like Strong might save folks time and enhance every day life on the web. “An alien coming to Earth would suppose it was very unusual that I needed to inform my cellphone the identical issues many times,” he complains in regards to the expertise of utilizing completely different airline apps in the present day.
With Strong, the whole lot from vaccination data to bank card transactions might be saved throughout the digital vault and plugged into completely different apps. Berners-Lee believes that AI might additionally assist folks make extra use of this knowledge—for instance, by linking meal plans to grocery payments. Nonetheless, if he’s optimistic on how AI and Strong might coordinate to enhance customers’ lives, he’s imprecise on the way to ensure that chatbots handle such private knowledge sensitively and safely.
Berners-Lee usually opposes regulation of the net (besides within the case of youngsters and social media algorithms, the place he sees a real want). He believes in web customers’ particular person proper to regulate their very own knowledge; he’s assured {that a} product like Strong might “course-correct” the net from its present “exploitative” and extractive course.
Of the three writers’ approaches to reform, it’s Wu’s that has proven some effectiveness of late. Firms like Google have been compelled to present rivals some benefit by way of knowledge sharing, and so they have now seen limits on how their methods can be utilized in new merchandise and applied sciences. However within the present US political local weather, will antitrust legal guidelines proceed to be enforced in opposition to Large Tech?
Clegg could get his means on one problem: limiting new nation-specific legal guidelines. President Donald Trump has confirmed that he’ll use tariffs to penalize nations that ratify their very own nationwide legal guidelines focusing on US tech corporations. And given the posture of the Trump administration, it doesn’t appear seemingly that Large Tech will see extra regulation within the US. Certainly, social networks have appeared emboldened (Meta, for instance, eliminated fact-checkers and relaxed content material moderation guidelines after Trump’s election win). In any case, the US hasn’t handed a serious piece of federal web laws since 1996.
If utilizing anti-monopoly legal guidelines by way of the courts isn’t potential, Clegg’s push for a US-led omnibus deal—setting consensual guidelines for knowledge and acceptable requirements of human rights—could be the solely technique to make some extra quick enhancements.
In the long run, there’s not more likely to be any single repair for what ails the web in the present day. However the concepts the three writers agree on—higher consumer management, extra knowledge privateness, and elevated accountability from Silicon Valley—are certainly the outcomes we should always all battle for.
Nathan Smith is a author whose work has appeared within the Washington Publish, the Economist, and the Los Angeles Instances.
