From addictive algorithms to exploitative apps, data mining to misinformation, the web today could be a hazardous place. Books by three influential figures—the intellect behind “net neutrality,” a former Meta executive, and the net’s own inventor—propose radical approaches to fixing it. But are these luminaries the precise people for the job? Though each shows conviction, and even sometimes inventiveness, the solutions they present reveal blind spots.
Tim Wu
In Tim Wu argues that just a few platform corporations have an excessive amount of concentrated power and have to be dismantled. Wu, a outstanding Columbia professor who popularized the principle that a free web requires all online traffic to be treated equally, believes that existing legal mechanisms, especially anti-monopoly laws, offer one of the best solution to achieve this goal.
Pairing economic theory with recent digital history, Wu shows how platforms have shifted from giving users to extracting them. He argues that our failure to grasp their power has only encouraged them to grow, displacing competitors along the best way. And he contends that convenience is what platforms most frequently exploit to maintain users entrapped. “The human desire to avoid unnecessary pain and inconvenience,” he writes, could also be “the strongest force on the market.”
He cites Google’s and Apple’s “ecosystems” as examples, showing how users can change into depending on such services because of this of their all-encompassing seamlessness. To Wu, this isn’t a nasty thing in itself. The convenience of using Amazon to stream entertainment, make online purchases, or help organize day-to-day life delivers obvious gains. But when powerhouse corporations like Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet win the battle of convenience with so many users—and never let competitors get a foothold—the result’s “industry dominance” that must now be reexamined.
The measures Wu advocates—and that appear essentially the most practical, as they draw on existing legal frameworks and economic policies—are federal anti-monopoly laws, utility caps that limit how much corporations can charge consumers for service, and “line of business” restrictions that prohibit corporations from operating in certain industries.
Columbia University’s Tim Wu shows how platforms have shifted from giving users to extracting them. He argues that our failure to grasp their power has only encouraged them to grow.
Anti-monopoly provisions and antitrust laws are effective weapons in our armory, Wu contends, mentioning that they’ve been successfully used against technology corporations up to now. He cites two well-known cases. The primary is the Nineteen Sixties antitrust case brought by the US government against IBM, which helped create competition in the pc software market that enabled corporations like Apple and Microsoft to emerge. The 1982 AT&T case that broke the phone conglomerate up into several smaller corporations is one other instance. In each, the general public benefited from the decoupling of hardware, software, and other services, resulting in more competition and alternative in a technology market.
But will past performance predict future results? It’s not yet clear whether these laws may be successful within the platform age. The 2025 antitrust case against Google—by which a judge ruled that the corporate didn’t need to divest itself of its Chrome browser because the US Justice Department had proposed—reveals the bounds of pursuing tech breakups through the law. The 2001 antitrust case brought against Microsoft likewise did not separate the corporate from its web browser and mostly kept the conglomerate intact. Wu noticeably doesn’t discuss the Microsoft case when arguing for antitrust motion today.
Nick Clegg, until recently Meta’s president of world affairs and a former deputy prime minister of the UK, takes a position very different from Wu’s: that attempting to break up the largest tech corporations is misguided and would degrade the experience of web users. In Clegg acknowledges Big Tech’s monopoly over the net. But he believes punitive legal measures like antitrust laws are unproductive and may be avoided via regulation, akin to rules for what content social media can and may’t publish. (It’s price noting that Meta is facing its own antitrust case, involving whether it must have been allowed to amass Instagram and WhatsApp.)
Nick Clegg
Clegg also believes Silicon Valley should take the initiative to reform itself. He argues that encouraging social media networks to “open up the books” and share their decision-making power with users is more prone to restore some equilibrium than contemplating legal motion as a primary resort.
But some could also be skeptical of a former Meta exec and politician who worked closely with Mark Zuckerberg and still wasn’t in a position to usher in such changes to social media sites while working for one. What is going to only compound this skepticism is the selective history present in Clegg’s book, which briefly acknowledges some scandals (just like the one surrounding Cambridge Analytica’s data harvesting from Facebook users in 2016) but refuses to debate other pertinent ones. For instance, Clegg laments the “fractured” nature of the worldwide web today but fails to acknowledge Facebook’s own role on this splintering.
Breaking up Big Tech through antitrust laws would hinder innovation, says Clegg, arguing that the concept “completely ignores the advantages users gain from large network effects.” Users keep on with these outsize channels because they will find “most of what they’re searching for,” he writes, like friends and content on social media and low-cost consumer goods on Amazon and eBay.
Wu might concede this point, but he would disagree with Clegg’s claims that maintaining the establishment is helpful to users. “The standard logic of antitrust law doesn’t work,” Clegg insists. As an alternative, he believes less sweeping regulation might help make Big Tech less dangerous while ensuring a greater user experience.
Clegg has seen either side of the regulatory coin: He worked in David Cameron’s government passing national laws for technology corporations to follow after which moved to Meta to assist the corporate navigate those sorts of nation-specific obligations. He bemoans the trouble and complexity Silicon Valley faces in attempting to comply with differing rules across the globe, some set by “American federal agencies” and others by “Indian nationalists.”
But with the resources such corporations command, surely they’re greater than equipped to manage? Provided that Meta itself has previously meddled in access to the web (akin to in India, whose telecommunications regulator ultimately blocked its Free Basics web service for violating net neutrality rules), this criticism seems suspect coming from Clegg. What must be the true priority, he argues, just isn’t any latest nation-specific laws but a world “treaty that protects the free flow of knowledge between signatory countries.”
What the previous Meta executive Nick Clegg advocates—unsurprisingly—just isn’t a breakup of Big Tech but a push for it to change into “radically transparent.”
Clegg believes that these nation-specific technology obligations—a recent one is Australia’s ban on social media for people under 16—normally reflect fallacies in regards to the technology’s human impact, a subject that may be fraught with anxiety. Such laws have proved ineffective and are inclined to taint the general public’s understanding of social networks, he says. There’s some truth to his argument here, but reading a book by which a former Facebook executive dismisses techno-determinism—that’s, the argument that technology makes people do or think certain things—could also be cold comfort to those that have seen the harm technology can do.
In any case, Clegg’s defensiveness about social networks may not gain much favor from users themselves. He stresses the necessity for more personal responsibility, arguing that Meta doesn’t ever intend for users to remain on Facebook or Instagram endlessly: “How long you spend on the app in a single session just isn’t nearly as essential as getting you to return back over and once more.” Social media corporations need to serve you content that’s “meaningful to you,” he claims, not “simply to present you a momentary dopamine spike.” All this feels disingenuous at best.
What Clegg advocates—unsurprisingly—just isn’t a breakup of Big Tech but a push for it to change into “radically transparent,” whether by itself or, if obligatory, with the assistance of federal legislators. He also wants platforms to bring users more into their governance processes (by utilizing Facebook’s model of community forums to assist improve their apps and products, for instance). Finally, Clegg also wants Big Tech to present users more meaningful control of their data and the way corporations akin to Meta can use it.
Here Clegg shares common ground with the inventor of the net, Tim Berners-Lee, whose own proposal for reform advances a technically specific vision for doing just that. In his memoir/manifesto Berners-Lee acknowledges that his initial vision—of a technology he hoped would remain open-source, collaborative, and completely decentralized—is a far cry from the net that we all know today.
Tim Berners-Lee
If there’s any surviving manifestation of his original project, he says, it’s Wikipedia, which stays “probably one of the best single example of what I wanted the net to be.” His best idea for moving power from Silicon Valley platforms into the hands of users is to present them more data control. He pushes for a universal data “pod” he helped develop, often known as “Solid” (an abbreviation of “social linked data”).
The system—which was originally developed at MIT—would offer a central site where people could manage data starting from bank card information to health records to social media comment history. “Slightly than have all these items siloed off with different providers across the net, you’d have the ability to store your entire digital information trail in a single private repository,” Berners-Lee writes.
The Solid product may seem like a form of silver bullet in an age when data harvesting is familiar and data breaches are rampant. Placing greater control with users and enabling them to see “what data [i]s being generated about them” does sound like a tantalizing prospect.
But some people can have concerns about, for instance, merging their confidential health records with data from personal devices (like heart rate info from a wise watch). Irrespective of how much user control and decentralization Berners-Lee may promise, recent data scandals (akin to cases by which period-tracking apps misused clients’ data) could also be on people’s minds.
Berners-Lee believes that centralizing user data in a product like Solid could save people time and improve every day life on the web. “An alien coming to Earth would think it was very strange that I had to inform my phone the identical things time and again,” he complains in regards to the experience of using different airline apps today.
With Solid, all the pieces from vaccination records to bank card transactions may very well be kept throughout the digital vault and plugged into different apps. Berners-Lee believes that AI could also help people make more use of this data—for instance, by linking meal plans to grocery bills. Still, if he’s optimistic on how AI and Solid could coordinate to enhance users’ lives, he’s vague on methods to be certain that that chatbots manage such personal data sensitively and safely.
Berners-Lee generally opposes regulation of the net (except within the case of teenagers and social media algorithms, where he sees a real need). He believes in web users’ individual right to manage their very own data; he’s confident that a product like Solid could “course-correct” the net from its current “exploitative” and extractive direction.
Of the three writers’ approaches to reform, it’s Wu’s that has shown effectiveness of late. Corporations like Google have been forced to present competitors some advantage through data sharing, and so they have now seen limits on how their systems may be utilized in latest products and technologies. But in the present US political climate, will antitrust laws proceed to be enforced against Big Tech?
Clegg may get his way on one issue: limiting latest nation-specific laws. President Donald Trump has confirmed that he’ll use tariffs to penalize countries that ratify their very own national laws targeting US tech corporations. And given the posture of the Trump administration, it doesn’t seem likely that Big Tech will see more regulation within the US. Indeed, social networks have seemed emboldened (Meta, for instance, removed fact-checkers and relaxed content moderation rules after Trump’s election win). In any case, the US hasn’t passed a significant piece of federal web laws since 1996.
If using anti-monopoly laws through the courts isn’t possible, Clegg’s push for a US-led omnibus deal—setting consensual rules for data and acceptable standards of human rights—could be the only solution to make some more immediate improvements.
Ultimately, there just isn’t prone to be any single fix for what ails the web today. However the ideas the three writers agree on—greater user control, more data privacy, and increased accountability from Silicon Valley—are surely the outcomes we should always all fight for.
Washington Post,Economist,Los Angeles Times.
