Nationalise the internet

 
 
POSTED: July 18, 2022
 
 
 
 
 

I read an article in Wired last month that inquired into the problems underlying the internet. In it, Ben Tarnoff, the author of the forthcoming book Internet for the People argues that the internet should be nationalised.

“The internet reformers have some good ideas, but they never quite reach the root of the problem,” he writes. “The root is simple: The internet is broken because the internet is a business.”

Tarnoff sees promise in the successful examples of cooperatively and municipally owned broadband networks throughout rural America. But what would it mean to place the web itself—the websites and apps we use every day—under public ownership? Tarnoff recently spoke to WIRED to lay out his vision for a socialist internet and how to achieve it.