John Harris, Guardian columnist/The Guardian, UK
A decentralised internet sounds offputtingly complicated. But our lives, online and off, now depend upon it
OOur family got a Google Home Hub for Christmas. As comparative lifestyle Neanderthals, we have so far only used it as a glorified digital picture frame and music player, though this is clearly not what it was built for. Say “Hey, Google”, tell it what you want, and a whole universe of entertainment, advice and help can be supplied – up to and including instant control of internet-connected doorbells, thermostats and more.
Contrary to their branding as “assistants”, the primary purpose of these devices is not to devotedly help the people who use them. At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, once we have paid for the hardware, we get the services they can deliver largely for free, in return for limitless access to the small details of our lives. Big tech is therefore able to carry on making advertising more and more precisely targeted, and vastly increase the mountains of data that power its development of artificial intelligence. Smartphones, tablets and computers have been helpful, but evidently not helpful enough. Build data-gathering machines into the domestic sphere, and you break open whole streams of personal information.
Facebook’s influence is undoubtedly scary, partly because its senior management seems to have no clue about the responsibilities that should come with such power. But Google’s range of activities and penetration of our lives represents something else entirely. Its systems have soaked up and mastered the planet’s topography and most of its languages. In the UK, it has a presence in the NHS. Thanks to the range of offshoots and acquisitions now grouped with Google under the banner of Alphabet Inc, it is centrally involved in biotech, the development of driverless transport – and, through its artificial intelligence subsidiary, DeepMind, the pursuit of even more incredible technologies that will, sooner or later, transform everything from work to education.
Google expertise is also driving the idea of surveillance-heavy “smart cities”, which are beginning to capture the imagination of powerful interests across the world. As all its other activities grind on, it sustains its domination of the most mundane parts of our lives via Gmail, YouTube, the android smartphone system and its monopoly on online search. Its new assistants represent a step into unprecedentedly intimate spaces.
So, to use a very 20th-century phrase, what is to be done? The “techlash” of the last couple of years has left Google remarkably untroubled. But even so, you do not have to look too far for ideas. Perhaps both Alphabet and Google might be broken up, and their advertising operations would become standalone companies, with YouTube and Gmail similarly cut adrift. Maybe Google could be belatedly classified as a utility, and forced to allow open access to both its key algorithms and data sets, just as the US telecoms giant AT&T once gave up a range of its precious patents in return for its monopoly.
All of these things would be worthwhile. But as solutions they fall short in one fundamental sense: they deal with the manifestations of Google’s power rather than the root cause.One glaring truth about the modern internet should be at the core of any meaningful conversation about it. From pluralistic, egalitarian beginnings, it has been transformed into a top-down system dominated by a few big players whose power is based on their control of data, with Google as the king. So perhaps something truly radical is required: a reconceptualisation of what the internet is, and what happens to the data that determines who controls it.
Then there are the possibilities bound up with the blockchain, the system of verification that sits under so-called cryptocurrencies. For instance, the blockchain offers a means of independently verified personal identity, which respects privacy far better than the Google and Facebook accounts do we are now encouraged to use across the internet. Maybe Google’s offer to its users is too simple, and the company’s dimensions now far too big to allow any space for alternatives. Besides, if anyone began to make headway by offering us greater privacy and control, we would hear plenty of protests about how severing the connection between huge data sets and the growth of artificial intelligence would be to hand the dominance of AI to China, where the twin forces of surveillance and innovation are stampeding on. I only know this: that tangled up in all this stuff are elemental questions about how we are going to live. And, even if it can play me my favourite song and tell me who’s at the door, Google does not have the answers.