Technological progress is on the fast track. In recent years, the technology sector has come to be dominated by a few very large multinational corporations. The scale at which these corporations operate is unprecedented. Today, they collectively provide the great majority of the worldwide digital infrastructure and are all on track to be 1-trillion-dollar-value corporations with Apple Inc. having reached that milestone just recently.1
Not using their software and hardware has become increasingly difficult. Through the use of their platforms, such companies have access to vast quantities of data about usage, personal data of billions of users, and increasingly user-generated data for the training of AI. There is a plethora of ethical issues in the creation and use of technology today, especially in regard to the data generated and to the question of who owns that data. Simultaneously, a new technological trend can be identified of what I will call “decentralized technologies.” Based on a peer-to-peer architecture, these technologies work on a principle in which there is no central instance that houses and manages data — often there is no central entity at all. The key potential of these technologies is to function as a means for the decentralization of digital infrastructure. Most popularly, blockchain technology has come to be the bearer of hopes for people with a wide range of ideological motivations.
I argue that privacy and data ownership are both fundamental rights, and are essential for the individual digital sovereignty. The trust of citizens in both public and private digital infrastructure has eroded. In the following, I propose to regard decentralized technologies as an opportunity and basis for governments to create public platforms that re-establish individual digital sovereignty. I propose to attempt to design and build decentralized public platforms which establish decentralized digital commons.
Consolidated Power
It seems technological progress is only accelerating. The technology
sector is increasingly dominated by fewer and fewer multinational
corporations with tremendous accumulated capital, brainpower, and
infrastructure. The “Big Five” — Alphabet (Google), Apple, Amazon,
Facebook, and Microsoft[2] — used to do seemingly innocuous things just a
few years ago: Providing a search engine, selling colorful computers,
running an online bookshop, or creating a website to talk to friends. At
the present time, all those companies no longer are single product
companies but large multifaceted corporations that are active across a
wide range of sectors and employ. Among cloud hosting providers
Microsoft and Amazon share roughly 70% of the market.[3] Amazon has been
steadily building its own delivery infrastructure up to “last mile”
deliveries, while traditional businesses start to realize their mistake
in viewing Amazon as a pure shopping website.[4],[5],[6] Amazon is now
in a position where more than half of American consumers start their
shopping inquiries on amazon.com and 9 out of 10 consumers will look for
a product on amazon.com even if they found it elsewhere[7], while at
the same time it controls a large part of its own supply chain, as well
as very effective means of media distribution with Amazon Prime already
exceeding 100 million subscribers.[8]
Google finds itself in a similar position. It has the de
facto monopoly on the search engine market, which it capitalizes through
digital advertising—its primary revenue stream.
The company has been the target of criticism and lawsuits,[9]which
allege Google for using their users to perform free labor: Google offers
a service called “reCaptcha” which has found wide adoption.[10]
According to Google “reCAPTCHA uses […] adaptive CAPTCHAs to keep
automated software from engaging in abusive activities on your site. It
does this while letting your valid users pass through with ease.” [11]
However, the same page also states: “Every time our CAPTCHAs are solved,
that human effort helps digitize text, annotate images, and build
machine learning datasets.” Google is using the data it gathers this way
to train its very own machine learning models.
Data has become a resource. It has been likened with oil[12] as it is
a vital resource to big internet companies. Evgeny Morozov uses the
term “data extractivism”[13] to refer to the “logic that drives the
development of this sector […] in a direct parallel to the
natural-resource extractivism that has driven the activities of energy
firms and commodity producers across the globe.” In Morozov’s view the
premise for this kind of extractivism is to view users as “valuable
stocks of data.” The companies in question are in turn dependent on more
and better data to increase their revenue from ad-driven technology or
to train advanced machine learning models.
At the core of this development is an increasing consolidation of
intellectual and financial capital, as well as infrastructure with a few
corporations. Yet, the dominating narrative is that of “neutral”
technology and inherently egalitarian—even democratizing—role as it
enables the poor and oppressed to join the western middle classes and
participate in the new economy. This conceptualization of the “platform
economy” as principally empowering development for the individual falls
short. It is important to regard the role such platforms take and the
very fundamental—yet privately owned—digital structures that they are.
According to Langley and Leyshon (2017), such platforms can be
understood “as a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and
business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of
capitalization.”[14] Furthermore, such platforms “target dominance in
their own niche market” and “seek to extract [monopoly] rents from their
network […]”. Taking Langley and Leyshon’s invocation of platform
capitalism into account, a different picture emerges, where the primary
goal is again that of extraction. In his book “Platform Capitalism”
(2017)[15] Nick Srnicek identifies four tendencies that “emerge from the
competitive dynamics of these large platforms” since “platforms are
grounded upon the extraction of data and the generation of network
effects.” The four tendencies are “expansion of extraction, positioning
as a gatekeeper, convergence of markets, enclosure of ecosystems.”
A fear among experts is a potential growing dependency on technology
providers.[16] It is troublesome to see a push for subsidized,
privatized public transport, as has recently happened with Uber, which
announced its plans to effectively function as public
transportation.[17] Uber already has contracts with multiple cities in
Florida for subsidized transport.[18] The company also has recently
tried to convince New York City to drop regulations for proposed wage
floors for ridesharing companies with a staggering 100 million
dollars.[19]
The state of power that such companies yield and the landscape of
power that it might lead to has been described as “digital
feudalism.”[20],[21] Sterling (2014) illustratively describes the
analogy: “People […] are like the woolly livestock of a feudal demesne,
grazing under the watchful eye of barons in their hilltop Cloud
Castles.”[22] Indeed, multinational corporations in the technology
sector have become increasingly powerful so that their actions often
resemble that of state entity rather than a private business. Amazon has
cities competing over the location of its second headquarters.[23] The
process resembles a business negotiation and cities go at great length
to attract the client offering financial incentives unheard of.[24] The
term “technological sovereignty” has surfaced lately in the discourse
around technology, cities, and public institutions in general.[25],[26]
It is vital to counter the process of consolidating power with a few
large multinational corporations from a market perspective, and even
more importantly from the perspective of governments both on a national
and local level as they struggle for technological sovereignty. The
hegemony of the technological elite and the practices of data
extractivism will prove difficult to break up. Measures such as the
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enacted by the EU in May 2018
are an essential step into the right direction and might serve as a
template for other governments to implement protection of the privacy of
its citizens. Antitrust laws have been taking more aggressive shape
lately[27] but therein lies another question of whether antitrust laws
are equipped to deal with the scale of the companies and the vast
resources—economic and human—that come with them.[28]
On the term of technological sovereignty, I would like to quote the
deputy mayor of Barcelona who describes what values and goals for
technology a democratic city needs to pursue in his view:
“In a democratic city, technology should serve to digitally empower
citizens, to protect their privacy from abuses by the public and private
powers, to fight against corruption and to advance towards a more
equitable and sustainable economy. That has a name: conquering
technological, digital sovereignty, for the common good.”[29]
In the post-Snowden era of state surveillance, the trust of citizens
is eroded in both private and public solutions. Is there a way for
governments to reclaim that trust?
The central ethical issue is that of privacy and data ownership.
Several questions arise in this context: How can governments become
technologically sovereign while protecting citizen rights? Can a model
be devised that protects citizens from abuses of both public and private
powers? Can such a model establish the digital sovereignty of citizens?
The EU’s GDPR among other rights enacted a “Right to be
Forgotten.”[30] These rights are an important precedent in which the EU
recognizes essential rights of individuals and the handling of their
data.
Decentralized Digital Commons
The applications, platforms, and the digital infrastructure in
general that is run by these large corporations are predominantly
constructed in a client-server architecture. Such a system is often
computationally and geographically distributed in its architecture, but
it retains central control of infrastructure, code, and data. In
contrast to these systems, Peer-to-Peer Networks (P2P) have no central
means of control. All nodes are considered equipotent and as such, they
can be considered decentralized systems. Such P2P networks have a
long-standing history in file sharing and allow to freely share digital
media, as they do not offer a central point of control and consequently
can only with difficulty be censored. However, not only individuals and
communities are using P2P technologies, but also corporations use hybrid
forms to offload traffic from their infrastructure to the client. For
instance, the video streaming service Netflix has been causing roughly a
third of the American internet traffic in 2016[31] and as such it is no
wonder that Netflix has been looking to use P2P distribution methods,
so viewers share video data with other viewers directly.[32]
A recently very prominent P2P technology is blockchain technology.
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and the blockchain. [33] Its
anonymous founder(s) used the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto and their
identity has to this day remained a mystery. Since its invention in 2008
and its launch in 2009 Bitcoin has seen continuous and substantial
growth.[34] Today, many alternative cryptocurrencies exist—Bitcoin is
still the largest by mining power and market capitalization—a mostly
unregulated market exists surrounding cryptocurrencies. With the
dramatic price increases over the past years, a large community of
ideologically motivated individuals and groups has formed around this
piece of technology. Nakamoto’s intention with the invention of Bitcoin
was to solve peer-to-peer digital cash payments that work “without a
trusted third party.” Looking at the definition above, the key issue a
blockchain solves seems to be trust. Indeed, with a given
blockchain-based infrastructure there is no need for trust in the
participating parties of the system since the ledger follows a
codified[35] protocol against which every action on the ledger is
verified.
With the introduction of smart contracts through the project
Ethereum, new possibilities emerged: Participants could now create
procedures which are executed on the Ethereum blockchain and which can
be created in such a way, that they, for example, lock up funds until a
specific time has passed, or allow for voting mechanisms to be
implemented on how funds in such a contract are spent.[36] Simon and
Widmer (2018)[37] point out: “[Blockchain technology] emerged as a new
paradigm for organization, coordination, and contractual security for
all kinds of relationships (even for forming opinions and trust). […]
complexity is becoming programmable, at least in the broader sense: […]
When it comes to the regulation of human coexistence, the blockchain
appears to be universally applicable.” However, it is important to
recognize that many drivers and advocates of this technological movement
of “decentralization” are generally opposed to the very concept of
authority. Atzori (2015) describes the motivation of many blockchain
advocates as such:
“This seems to be exactly the ultimate purpose of crypto-anarchists –
as well as an implicit desire of many advocates of decentralization.
[…] for the most fervent blockchain advocates […] it represents the
final victory of free markets and self-interested individuals over
public institutions, in a process of economic liberalization which can
be more properly defined as anarcho-capitalism.”[38]
Blockchain technology attracts all kinds of political ideologies. By
some it is seen as the foundation on which a universal basic income can
be realized, for others, it is an ultimate weapon to dismantle the
state, yet again for others, it is a tool to combat corruption and
transform the state. At the center of the amalgam of ideologies gathered
by blockchain technology lies the idea that encryption can serve as a
political tool. To defend citizens from government overreach, to uphold
citizen rights, to mathematically make corruption impossible, to
disintermediate most everything, to establish digital sovereignty, and
an uncountable number more wishes and goals. With decentralized
technologies a key feature can be identified which is the common
denominator for all the hopes and dreams surrounding this technology:
Decentralized technologies can decentralize digital infrastructure and
services. As such, these technologies are likely the best attempt to
establish a commonly owned, digital infrastructure: digital commons.
Taking into consideration the issues implied in the technological
hegemony of a few large multinational corporations, and weighing the
potential of decentralized technologies, I aim to make a proposal for
inquiry to respond to the previously identified ethical challenges: Can
governments (and citizens alike) create, use, and integrate
decentralized, digital infrastructure and services to adequately respond
to the technological (digital) challenges that they face? Governments
on all levels are confronted with a situation described in this paper:
The lack of trust in both private and public digital infrastructure and
services and a potential dependency on large technological providers.
Srnicek (2017) proposes that governments become proactive:
“Rather than just regulating corporate platforms, efforts could be
made to create public platforms – platforms owned and controlled by the
people. (And, importantly, independent of the surveillance state
apparatus.) This would mean investing the state’s vast resources into
the technology necessary to support these platforms and offering them as
public utilities.”[39]
I propose to take Srnicek’s vision seriously. The technological means
are being developed at this very moment: Decentralized technologies
promise to create and protect privacy and restore the sovereignty of the
individual over their own data (and money). Any democratic government
should be interested to leverage these mechanisms and the ideas found
within those approaches to proactively build public platforms which can
come to be decentralized digital commons.
Conclusion
I have given an overview of the technological hegemony of the Big
Five and their practices of data extractivism. The situation has been
compared to a digital feudalism: The consolidation of power,
infrastructure, as well as economic and intellectual capital puts
today’s technology providers in a position where they resemble feudal
lords much more than private companies. In response to the erosion of
trust in both public and private digital services in relation to
personal data and surveillance, the question has been raised of how
governments may reclaim that trust? The central ethical issue identified
is that of privacy and data ownership, or rather the lack thereof. The
question stands: How can governments become technologically sovereign
while protecting citizen rights?
The possibility of a decentralized digital
infrastructure—decentralized digital commons—has been proposed. This has
been done by pointing out recent technological developments. Among
others blockchain technology. Collectively referred to as “decentralized
technologies”, these technologies follow a different architectural
paradigm, in which there is no central authority, no central entity or
infrastructure.
It is an open and ambitious question I pose here: Can a form of
digital commons, the technological sovereignty of the state, and thereby
the individual digital sovereignty be established, through the use of
decentralized technologies and a decentralized architecture?
I, for one, believe it is not only possible but absolutely vital.