By Ben Tarnoff
At the bottom of the ocean there is a garden hose stuffed with glass. Life is difficult at this depth. Plants are unknown; oxygen is scarce. There are eels with very large mouths and fish that glow.
Their world may seem strange, but it has a point of contact with our own. That hose filled with glass is ours; we put it there. It is a bundle of optical fibers that carry beams of light. The beams of light are bits of data, encoded as pulses. The bits of data are Facebook friend requests and financial trades, Twitch streams and supply chain analytics. Here, among the eels, lies a major artery of the algorithmic age.
There are many such arteries, but this one is known as MAREA. It is the highest-capacity submarine fiber-optic cable in the Atlantic, running across the ocean from a suburb of Bilbao, Spain, to Virginia Beach. Where it comes ashore, it looks like a snake rising out of the sea.
MAREA is a reminder that the internet has a body. A body of glass, copper, silicon and a thousand other things — things that have to be dug out of the earth and hammered into useful shapes, with significant inputs of labor and energy.
Bodies are material; they are also historical. Submarine cables like MAREA, writes the scholar Nicole Starosielski, frequently follow “the contours of earlier networks.” Installing underwater lines is expensive, and it’s safer to follow the paths of prior telephone and telegraph networks — themselves shaped by even older patterns of empire and capital. Cables typically shadow the sea routes pioneered in previous centuries, routes that circulated cotton, silver, spices, settlers and slaves.
The growth of networks was guided by a desire for power and profit. They were not just conduits for conveying information, but mechanisms for forging relationships of control. While the internet is more sophisticated than its predecessors, it continues this tradition.
As a result, some are saying that the connectivity it enables is not only making the world smaller but making it worse. They worry about fake news, surveillance, the invasion of our privacy, the exploitation of app-based workers, and the proliferation of right-wing propaganda on social media, to name just a few.
Since 2016, a mood of distrust has congealed around the big tech companies that rule the internet, a mood often called the “techlash.” Polling suggests that public opinion has taken a turn: In 2019, only half of Americans said that tech companies had a positive effect, compared with 71 percent in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center. A Gallup poll from 2021 put the number even lower, with only 34 percent of Americans taking a positive view. The belief that the internet is broken has become a new common sense.
But if the internet is broken, how do we fix it?
The answers that predominate among American policymakers tend to circle two main themes — which are, in practice, often joined together. The first involves writing new rules about how companies are allowed to behave, or enforcing existing ones. Examples include the California Consumer Privacy Act, a 2018 law that gives residents certain rights regarding the collection and processing of their personal data.
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The second aims at reducing the market power of the big firms. Last year, President Biden issued an executive order that directs more than a dozen federal agencies to pursue pro-competition initiatives. And this year, two Senate bills seeking to prevent tech companies from using their control of platforms like search engines and app stores to give themselves an unfair advantage over competitors were approved in committee, bringing them closer to a floor vote.
Both strains of internet reform have their merits. The rule-makers are right that tech companies are too lightly regulated. The anti-monopolists are right that rule-making is insufficient without curbing corporate power. Yet neither quite reaches the root of the problem.
The root is simple: The internet is broken because the internet is a business. While the issues are various and complex, they are inextricable from the fact that the internet is owned by private firms and is run for profit. Regulating markets or making them more competitive won’t touch the deeper problem, which is the market itself. MAREA and other cables are, to borrow a metaphor from the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano, like veins in a mine. Through them, wealth is extracted and communities are dominated.
The problems that have provoked the techlash are diverse, but none of them would exist if they didn’t contribute to profits. The profit system produces the dysfunctions and depredations of the modern internet.
Today’s internet reformers would leave this system intact. Yet many of the industry practices with the most destructive effects, such as the obsession with user engagement, were developed by companies when they were comparatively leaner and hungrier and needed to grab market share as quickly as possible. In other words, they came out of competition, which suggests that increasing competition won’t automatically generate better outcomes.
Regulation, too, presents difficulties: Corporations are adept at evading or manipulating rules to preserve their dominant position. Indeed, some big tech firms have even called for more regulation in recent years, provided they get to decide how they’re regulated.
Even with the best regulatory and antimonopoly measures, corporations would still own the internet. Immensely consequential decisions would be left in the hands of executives and investors. Most people would have no say in matters that centrally affect their lives.
- Tarnoff is a writer and co-founder of the magazine Logic and the author of the forthcoming book “Internet for the People,” from which this essay has been adapted.
