The Internet is not theirs: towards a public network service

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A judge from the National Court, Santiago Pedraz, has seen these days how frustrating it can be to fight against a digital platform.

On Friday, it provisionally suspended the activity of Telegram, an alternative messaging application to WhatsApp, following a complaint from Mediaset, Atresmedia and Movistar Plus, three television production companies that accuse the social network of using content protected by copyright. .

This Monday he had to put the car in reverse.

Both specialized lawyers and technology analysts had spent the weekend pointing out that blocking Telegram was a disproportionate measure — it would harm eight of the millions of users in Spain who have nothing to do with this illegal content — and sterile, since it did not There is a reasonable way to carry it out without creating a mess.

Also these days, there has been concern about the legislation approved by the lower house of the US Congress that threatens to ban TikTok, another social network, if it does not break its ties with ByteDance, its Chinese parent company.

President Joe Biden will sign the law if it passes the Senate.

The arguments in this case do not come from the communication companies, but from the environment of the trade war with China that Donald Trump unleashed and that Biden has done nothing to reverse.

The massive use of TikTok by American citizens puts a lot of data in the hands of Beijing and its business environment.

Also in this case, the possible closure of TikTok in the United States has sparked criticism from users, the vast majority of whom have nothing to do with industrial espionage or the trade war.

Like Telegram, TikTok has some advantages over other platforms that no one would want to lose.

These days the expression “putting doors on the countryside” has often been heard again, which is uttered every time the issue of internet regulation arises.

It is true that the field has always had some doors, like the ones that prevent the brave bulls from escaping from the pasture and goring the children from the school next door, but it is also true that those doors made of fine wire and rancid wood break. with astonishing ease.

Artificial intelligence, which is the focus of the current regulatory debate on both sides of the Atlantic, only confirms the enormous task that regulators have in front of them, and which may never be completed.

But there is an alternative idea that does not consist of blocking or prohibiting networks - a vain purpose in all probability - but of creating them.

In creating platforms, applications and social networks that function as a public service, as a resource for citizens, instead of as a business for the largest companies in the world.

To use a pre-technological metaphor, the existence of a Citizen Kane should not deprive us of the BBC.

Information, education and knowledge should not depend, or not exclusively, on the arbitrary decisions of a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires.

It will have to be us, the citizens and our political representatives, who found and finance another style of network, an Internet that functions as a public service.

This is how its creators conceived it, who were scientists who put their enormous talent at the service of society.

Forty years later, it is time to develop that initial project.

Video games have been very good at paying for the development of the necessary technologies, but now we have to land on the hard, dark and unfair ground that lies beneath the screen.

Scientist and media expert Helen Jay picks up some interesting initiatives in

Scientific American

.

Read them and, above all, think of others for yourself.

The world waits for your ideas.

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