I was asked about alternatives to dependence on dominant US American for-profit platform companies at an Internet Governance Forum today. Below my response – for those interested in more from me on the topic, I spoke at somewhat greater length about it at the Nordic AI in Media Summit back in April. More broadly, everyone interested in this topic should read the Eurostack pitch paper.
Below my response, video here.
There are plenty of options, but I think the real question is, we need to hold people in positions of power, including public and political power, to account in terms of how they understand the issue and whether they act accordingly.
The question here – when looking at dependence on US-American big commercial platform companies – is which part of that phrase you stress.
If you think the problem is that they’re US-American, then the path you pursue is obvious.
It is that you try to create national, or in the case of Europe, regional champions. And then when they have the right passport, and you are reliant on “grande technologie” rather than big tech, things are fine, right? Because then those companies are beholden to a different set of politicians. And then let’s just hope that whoever is the next inhabitant of the Élysée is not going to abuse that power the way that we see in some other cases. The question then question is whether we as [citizens] can expect very different behavior from large corporations who hold different passports. […]
Then the second way to think about the problem is that they are big.
Now then the alternatives are also, I think, quite clear. You’re thinking about decentralized, federated, open source solutions.
Now I think it needs to be very clear that very few people in positions of power seem to think this is the problem, because if they did, they would pursue those alternatives already, because they exist, like the Fediverse including Mastodon or LibreOffice. There are options in this space and we have now 25 years of revealed preference from people in positions of power. This is not what they want. So those alternatives exist, but they are not being pursued.
Then finally, of course, your analysis might be that the problem [with incumbent dominant platforms] is that they are commercial and that’s where we can turn to the possibility of public service alternatives.
And I think it’s possible to do this. It’s not easy. We need to decide what are they going to do? There are many layers of the stack one could look at. How are they going to be funded? This is not going to be cheap. Who’s going to make the rules and who’s going to enforce them? Like all the controversies we see around content moderation decisions. Imagine those only with the politicians in your country of origin making the decisions rather than Mark Zuckerberg and his Oversight Board.
The question then is a question of priorities, right? In Europe alone, we spend an estimated 40 billion euros a year on public service media. That has been stagnant, in some cases declining in recent years, but we could make investments of a similar size. Europe is a 20 trillion US dollar economy. Public spending in Europe alone is about 10 trillion euros a year. It’s a question of priorities.
And that’s why I think we really need to be clear about.
The full panel is available from the IGF on YouTube and was a great discussion with really interesting participants.
Speakers:
- Kjersti Løken Stavrum, Chairman of the Board, CEO, Schibsted, Tinius
- Anine Kierulf, Associate Professor, UiO and the Norwegian National Human Rights Institute
- Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Professor, Uni. Copenhagen, Reuters Inst. for the Study of Journalism
- Chris Disspain, Former Vice-Chair of the Board of ICANN, Chairman of DNS Capital Ltd, author, lawyer
- Anya Schiffrin, Director, Tech., Media and Comm., Columbia University
- Tawfik Jelassi, Ass. Dir.-General/Deputy Dir.-General, UNESCO
- Pamella Sittoni, Executive editor/Managing Editor, Daily Nation/Nation Media Group (prev)
Moderator:
- Helle Sjøvaag, Prof. & Vice Dean, University of Stavanger
rasmuskleisnielsen.net 