In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this—it had to be remade for the... See more

Decisions were made at the advent of the internet about critical things such as security, privacy, user sovereignty et cetera without any form of democracy. As we now know, many of these choices had profound, often irrevocable, consequences that will reverberate throughout the digital world for decades to come.

At its inception between the 1960s and 1990s, the internet was imagined as a decentralized, horizontal and open space that would foster freedom and equality. Today, it is a collection of walled gardens, a hierarchical ecosystem ruled by a few gatekeepers who leverage access to data, attention and infrastructural capability to enclose users and comp... See more