The Master Switch

"In this completely transformed world of the internet, you have so many different subjects. It’s not just law and philosophy and literature, it’s also computers and it’s also very much about business. Tim Wu is an American ‘cyberlawyer’—a new category of human being—and a rather brilliant one. He’s the guy who coined the term ‘net neutrality,’ which we all use now. The focus is on information businesses. He says that these are a new kind of business, he says, and that one thing we simply didn’t know 20 years ago is that the network effects on the internet are so powerful that within a very short period of time we have private superpowers—these absolutely massive information empires which have fantastic concentrations of power. If Facebook were a country, it would be the largest country on Earth, with 1.9 billion going on to 2 billion regular monthly users. “If Facebook were a country, it would be the largest country on Earth” The American constitutional tradition, including the First Amendment, is brilliant at controlling public power. It’s very good at taking on President Donald Trump. It’s amazing how well it’s responded to Trump. But it’s very bad at controlling private power, and the challenge now is as much about private power—Facebook, Google, and Twitter—as it is about public power. I love the way he explores at the intersection of law, politics, engineering and business, how these information empires have developed, and then the question is how should you try to create checks and balances? It’s a very difficult question and there’s no simple answer to it. We’ve now got to the stage where they’re so big and so rich and have such cash powers that when some very clever Brits develop something called DeepMind, so they buy DeepMind. Or someone clever develops something called WhatsApp, so they buy WhatsApp. They can buy up the competition. I think there has to be a series of answers of which part is definitely anti-trust. These are near-monopolies. I know because I spend a lot of time talking to people high up in these companies—because I spend three months a year in Stanford and therefore Silicon Valley —that’s what they’re really frightened of, because of their dominant position, particularly in Europe. But also, if you take Facebook’s news feed, they could swing an election. If they really slanted everything that came across on news feeds to favour the Republicans or the Democrats, they could probably swing that election. So actually you have to think of them, as a kind of media power with some sort of media responsibility. On the other hand, I don’t want to see that being done to Google Search, because Google Search is exactly what it says on the tin, and should be what it says on the tin, a place where I can find everything that’s out there according to some criteria of relevance. Understand that being a news feed, i.e. a news platform, a media platform, is one thing, being a search engine is another. We have to take these things apart, and then say to ourselves, ‘What is it we really want to ask them?’ And be careful what you wish for, because what’s happened with this famous European court ruling on the right to be forgotten is that now, in effect, Google is exercising a kind of arbitrary censorship, taking down hundreds of thousands, even millions, of links in ways which are not transparent, not accountable, not appealable. It’s interesting. This book is from 2010. That was seen as rather an original thing to say then. In 2017, people think, ‘my god, what do you mean, they’re so wonderful?’ The perception has changed, but if you go back to the 1990s, it really was, ‘The internet will set you free.’ It was this cyber-libertarian poppycock that you find with every new technology, including printing. It’s hailed as a thing that will set people free, and, at the same time, you always have the catastrophists who say it’ll be the end of human civilisation as we know it. Of course the truth is that it’s neither heaven nor hell. “I think one of the really important things that we need to do at the moment is to try and get our act together as liberals” But he’s very interesting in his analysis about complex things. There are serious reasons to be worried about some of the stuff they’re doing, but I don’t think the answer to it is to bring in a law against everything, which, particularly in Germany, is what is being proposed at the moment. I spend a lot of time in Germany, and the debate is ‘big, bad American private superpowers’ versus ‘good, virtuous German and European public powers.’ I don’t think that’s the answer actually. We’ll end up over-regulating them and destroying some of the good things that they do. Anti-trust is a really important place for regulation. But with a lot of this stuff—like what do we want them to do on news feeds, or what do we want them to do about hate speech, and so on—you’ll get much farther, in my experience, with a kind of constructive engagement with these companies, because they’re desperately trying to work out what to do. If you look at the world from the Googleplex, or Facebook headquarters, these amazing—I don’t know if you’ve ever been to them, but they make Washington look slightly dowdy—you’re looking round the world and you’re getting competing demands from every side. Everyone is asking something of you, but every demand is different. Even NGOs—free speech NGOs want you to take down less content, women’s rights and minority rights want you to take down more content, so what the hell are you going to do? I think one of the really important things that we need to do at the moment is to try and get our act together as liberals, in the broader sense within civil society, and say what are the four or five most important things we want Facebook to do, or Google to do, or Twitter to do? I don’t think there are enough people, because we now suddenly are in this world where you have giant public superpowers, China, America, Europe, and giant private superpowers, but all these relatively small non-governmental organisations that are slightly fragmented and diverse. That makes for creativity and originality and so on, but it doesn’t make for scale. If you’re trying to get attention from Facebook or Google, or indeed from China or the United States, you need a certain scale. That’s a real problem, actually. Also, I think one has to distinguish between these various platforms. I love Twitter because it’s an explicitly public platform. It is explicitly for public debate. It’s a brilliant way of having public debate. If someone says something really outrageous, stupid, deeply offensive, they get called out on it straight away. I posted some fake news myself. Someone did a montage of two photos from parliament, the House of Commons. One showed a completely empty chamber, when apparently they were debating social care or something terribly important for millions of people. The other showed a packed chamber, when they were allegedly debating MPs’ pay. I tweeted this. Within five minutes, I had three people come back at me back saying this was fake news, and that the picture of the full chamber was actually them debating student fees, not MPs’ pay. That’s a great example of where social media can actually be used to refute fake news. You’ve got it in one. In my book I quote some really good studies which show that there’s much more hate speech on Facebook than on Twitter for that very simple reason, that you’re supposed to be friends. So people don’t call each other out, even if they should. Whereas on Twitter—I think the study was in Kenya, where people were saying really nasty things about other tribes or ethnic groups—they were being called out. So you should go on Twitter. You must be on Twitter? And so am I. @fromTGA . I love it."

"If The Information is a sprawling, sweeping story of how information has changed over time, one thing it doesn’t get into is the commercial nature of information as a good that is bought and sold. That’s the story Tim Wu tells in The Master Switch . His basic argument is that whenever a new communication medium arises, a similar pattern occurs. The technology starts off as a hobbyist’s passion, democratic and open. Then over time, as it becomes more popular, it starts to be dominated by corporate interests and becomes much more formalised, before eventually being displaced by a new technology. You see this with radio, for instance. In the beginning, radio was very much a hobbyist’s technology. When people bought a radio back then it wasn’t just a receiver, it was a transmitter. People would both receive and transmit information through their radio – it was an early version of the blogosphere in some ways. Then dominant radio corporations come in, and suddenly radio isn’t a democratic tool for transmitting and receiving information, it’s purely for receiving. Tim Wu tells a series of stories like this, and television. All of that history is really a backdrop for a discussion of the Internet, which Wu suggests will likely follow the same cycle. So far, I think we’ve seen that. When the World Wide Web appeared 20 years ago, there was all kinds of utopian, democratic rhetoric about how it was breaking the hold of big corporations over media and communications. You saw a huge explosion of personal websites. But over time you saw corporate interests begin to dominate the web – Google, Facebook and so on. If you look at how much time a user devotes to Facebook, it shows a consolidation and centralisation of web activity onto these large corporate sites. Whenever a new technology comes along that changes the way people behave, you always have a utopian belief that it’s going to solve all kinds of problems, create harmony in society, cure wars, hatred and all the bad things. And on the other hand you have fear and alarmism. Some people have accused me of being in that camp – I hope I’m not too far over into it. But you have both reactions, and I think utopianism short-circuits our scepticism and our critical faculties. We don’t think clearly about both the negative and the positive effects. What happens then – and this is also one of Wu’s points – is that we’re so enamoured of technology that we don’t see how it can be controlled or reshaped by governments and corporations, and we don’t try to shape the technology into something that serves our best interests over the long term. Because over the long term other people will shape it according to their own interests of profit maximisation or political ends. If we want the Internet to be best suited for us, then we need to actively resist those interests and get involved at a political level. I certainly think that the technology can be abused, for restricting speech and tracking people. On the dark side of the Internet, it’s an incredibly good technology for totalitarians. But I think Morozov underplays the other side of the equation, which is the ability of the Internet to allow individuals to communicate freely and to organise themselves. Because even though I don’t think uprisings we’ve seen in the Arab world and other places can be explained as purely technological, I do think that technology played an important role in them. So the Internet has revolutionary potential, but there’s always going to be a tension between the way in which it encourages freedom and free speech and the way it can be used to squelch free speech and monitor, control and manipulate people – whether we’re talking about governments or advertisers or Facebook."