Why Democracy Needs Bold Non-commercial Spaces on the Web

Revised and republished from #Infogagement with permission from Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement

What Happened to the Internet?

Twenty years ago, the Internet promised to disrupt old top-down power structures and advance democracy and civilization by radically leveling access to information, collapsing geographic communication boundaries, and creating a global bottoms-up marketplace for ideas and industry.

Today we enjoy extraordinary new tools for communication and commerce, but have also learned how the abuse and monopolization of these systems can amplify injustice and be used to undermine civility, community and citizenship.

After 20 years technology has finally become a defining public policy issue. At VolunteerMatch we believe this political discussion is long overdue, but are not expecting decisive legislative action in the current political climate, nor do we believe government should act alone.

Instead VolunteerMatch has been partnering with philanthropy, business and the nonprofit sector to better understand the unintended consequences of commercialization and reclaim the power of technology to bring us together as citizens -- not consumers.

Three Popular but Problematic Assumptions

Five years ago discussions about citizenship on the web were very different because at the time it was still widely assumed that the spread of commercial connectivity through platforms like Facebook was invariably good for individuals, civic engagement and democracy. History, however, has showed us that many of the foundational assumptions — which were central to the growth and development of the commercial web — are flawed and getting in the way of designing and funding systems to more effectively advance the public interest. Here are three of the most problematic assumptions:

1. Anonymity is a Right In the early days of the web, anonymity was precious. It was one of the secrets of the Internet that promised a global infrastructure to speak truth to power without retribution. We all had Internet usernames that protected a right to privacy that verged on being sacred in some circles. As a result, the web we inherit today does not have any universal architecture for identity verification and so no surprise the big platforms have millions of ‘fake’ users. On Twitter for instance, the Pew Research Center estimates that two-thirds of all tweeted links were shared by suspected bots. What seemed like a feature 20 years ago is now the ‘bug’ that allows bots, hackers, trolls, spammers and crooks to hide in the shadows of the web beyond the reach of accountability, civility and the law. Anonymity it turns out is not a solid foundation on which to build democratic dialogue and citizenship.
2. The Web Must Be Free The Internet was born and flourished as a rebellion against the power and control of old institutions. The open-source movement disrupted the economics of technology by creating code that was open and free for all to use. Apache, HTML, SendMail, MySQL, Java were the free open-source technologies that made the web possible and incubated an early ‘nerd’ culture loath to money, paywalls and commercialization. That ethos demanded the liberation of all data and information and lead directly to what many now see as the web’s Original Sin — the decision to make advertising it’s dominant business model — so that all content could be free. The consequences of this decision have been profound. The business imperative to increase user ‘engagement’ is now blamed for amplifying conflict, undermining quality, eviscerating privacy and collapsing control of the web into a handful of companies. In fact, the problem has become so disruptive and threatening that Twitter recently banned political advertising on its platform.
3. What is Good for Big Tech is Good for Democracy  Today it is sometimes hard to remember why it hasn’t always been more obvious that eventually public and private interests would collide online, but hindsight is 20/20. In fact, in 1996 the Telecommunications Act was written explicitly to advance the public interest by privatizing the development of the Internet. As Al Gore explained it, ”The Clinton administration believes…our role is to encourage the building of the national information infrastructure by the private sector as rapidly as possible.” What we didn’t see so clearly in 1996 were the consequences of privatization and where and how the interests of a company like Facebook would ultimately diverge from the public’s interest. But Cambridge Analytica, Russian hackers, hate-bots, clickbait, fake news, social media addiction, privacy mining, trolls and filter bubbles have taught us the hard way that it is no longer reasonable to presume that what is good for big tech is good for all of us.

So Now What?

Today’s digital landscape is a by-product of the explosive commercialization of these flawed assumptions. We’ve created a global information network that has transformed our lives, but it has not turned out to be the democratic Garden of Eden many are still waiting for. It has created extraordinary value, but it has also created vexing new problems. Our democracy has grown dependent on digital infrastructure, but that infrastructure is being abused by anonymous trolls and bots; is governed by a handful of CEO’s; and is dominated by an ecosystem optimized for commerce — not citizenship. For perspective, consider this, 70% of all web traffic now flows through sites and services owned by either Facebook or Google.

This consolidation and control is why many now see technology policy as the defining public policy issue of our generation and one that needs to be shaped by the influence and interests of civil society.

A New Framework for Citizenship on the Web

To visualize the problem and create new possibilities for change think about it this way.

If you imagine the Internet today as a city — it would be a place with all the commercial businesses and buildings we are used to, but because almost all of the land has been privatized by a few companies there is very little public space left. It is a city without the familiar public infrastructure we are used to like parks, schools, libraries, museums, sidewalks, auditoriums, courthouses and sidewalks. It is a place like New York City, but without its significant public institutions like Central Park, City Hall, the Public Library or the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Just like cities need bold public spaces, so too does the web.

The challenge for our generation is to re-imagine the web in a way that sets aside more space for non-commercial use. It is time to level the playing field for the public good. We can make our digital cities work more like our real cities where commercial and non-commercial spaces co-exist.

On a political level this vision will require enforcing policies that encourage greater competition and protect the privacy of citizens in the commercial realm. It will also mean changing the rules so that the limits of free speech online are adjudicated by our court system — not the Business Development team at Facebook.

On a social level this vision will require bold civic and philanthropic leadership to bring the institutions of civil society more firmly into the digital age.

Micah Sifry, co-founder of Civic Hall, put it bluntly, “Public life cannot be built on private servers. It’s that simple.”

It took us 20 years to create these problems and it may take us another 20 to solve them, but the secret sauce of American life is that philanthropy and civil society are free to get started today. We are blessed in this country to have a clear space between the constraints of the market, and of government, to organize and take action to create change. Andrew Carnegie didn’t have to return a profit, or wait for government funding, to create a transformative library system — he just started building them.

Philanthropy today still has that power and it is encouraging to see that it is already beginning to step into this space. Fidelity Charitable Trustee’s Initiative is now focused on a strategy to “strengthen the resilience, sustainability and effectiveness of the social sector’s infrastructure.” Raikes Foundation is building and supporting Giving Compass as a philanthropy knowledge hub to elevate the impact of giving. ProPublica has attracted an influential circle of funders to advance its nonprofit commitment to world-class investigative journalism. And the Gates Foundation recently led a merger of Guidestar and the Foundation Center to create a nonprofit data backbone for philanthropy and social change, Candid. Wikipedia, Kiva, DonorsChoose, Khan Academy and VolunteerMatch also enjoy significant philanthropic support making our work — and our place online serving citizens — possible, but we can and must do more.

The First Step is To Admit We’ve Got a Problem

So how do we create more space on the web to engage people as citizens, not consumers? The first step, as with all change, is to admit we’ve got a problem. The combination of anonymity, Big Tech and advertising is not serving the public good and the answer is not more of the same — or better sensitivity training for tech bros. Our commercial digital infrastructure needs complementary civic infrastructure. Platforms and services designed and built to serve the public interest. Places where our rights, our privacy, and our freedom to participate in civic life isn’t being bought and sold for commercial gain. We won't solve this by trying to make commercial infrastructure less commercial, we will solve it by making non-commercial infrastructure more available. There is a reason we protect and nurture civil society in America. And it is for that reason our generation has a responsibility to ensure that we have the digital real estate and civic infrastructure we need to defend our values, our communities and our democracy in the 21st century.

Greg Baldwin is CEO of VolunteerMatch. His #Infogagement contribution builds off a recent op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy titled “Why Philanthropy Must Fix the Broken Internet.”

This piece is a commentary on the PACE paper: “Infogagement: Citizenship and Democracy in the Age of Connection.” Please see the publication for more commentaries and the original paper — and follow #Infogagement to continue the conversation.

Greg Baldwin is the CEO of the award-winning VolunteerMatch service — the Web’s largest volunteer engagement network. Greg joined the founding team in 1998 as its Chief Imagination Officer to create better ways to bring good people and good causes together. Today Greg oversees the expansion of a not-for-profit platform that is already serving 125,000+ nonprofits, 150+ enterprise clients, and a quarter of a million interested volunteers a week. Since 1998 the VolunteerMatch network has helped the social sector engage more that $14 billion worth of volunteer services. Greg completed his undergraduate studies at Brown University in 1990 with a degree in Public Policy. He is a lifelong volunteer and lives in Berkeley with his wife Kathryn and children Ellie and Matt.