The Luddite

In the last decade, it has become clear to even the least online among us that a few tech companies have far too much power over our society. It is one of the few issues that has received bipartisan interest. Republicans have long complained that Big Tech censors conservative voices. Since nothing Republicans say is ever worth engaging with, we'll leave that there. Democrats, for their part, have increasingly suggested breaking up the monopolies and regulating social media companies as utilities. On its face, this may seem like a good solution, but I hope to argue that even the most progressive of Democrats' plans for breaking up tech monopolies do not go far enough, and the very idea of a web app being a utility is a capitalist perversion of the internet.

First, let us consider the nature of a utility. Utilities exist to maintain infrastructure that has "natural monopoly characteristics." Though capitalists love to talk about the importance of competition in the market¹, even they recognize it would be undesirable and inefficient for electric companies to clog up our physical world with competing power line infrastructure, so they set up public utilities, which usually purport to have some sort of public accountability. This logic is now being extended to the likes of Facebook, and this makes a kind of sense; if everyone uses it, and there is no need for more than one, why not treat it more like a utility?

To explain why this is wrong, we'll start with an excerpt from a writeup from Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential campaign, outlining her plan for breaking up tech companies and designating tech platforms "Platform Utilities."

These platform utilities, in her plan, would become the infrastructure upon which other parties do business. On Amazon marketplace, for example, sellers would ply their wares without fear of competition from Amazon itself.

Consider a shopping mall in the physical world. Stores in malls rent a space from the shopping mall. In exchange, the landlord is responsible for the upkeep of the physical space. My own opinions on landlords aside², in our society, this is generally considered a fair bargain — landlords maintain the building, and in exchange, tenants pay them rent.

Now, consider Amazon marketplace (as opposed to Amazon the seller, which Elizabeth Warren and I agree should be split from the marketplace). Amazon is like the landlord, but unlike the landlord in our shopping mall example, there is no building to maintain. The parallel to our shopping mall is not Amazon, but the internet itself. Amazon does maintain a website, but this is only necessary because Amazon does not allow its sellers to have their own websites.

What's more, were Amazon a landlord of a physical space, we would be scandalized by its terms. They do not charge their tenants a transparent monthly rent. Instead, Amazon sellers select from different plans, paying different amounts per item sold depending on completely arbitrary Amazon rules. An internet search for "how much does it cost to sell things on Amazon" reveals endless results of the self-help clickbait esotericism that makes up most of the internet's flotsam.³

Most readers of this blog probably use a podcast app. Any podcast app allows users to listen to any podcast. Podcasters release their episodes using an RSS feed, which any podcast app can access and download. It's a genuinely wonderful system, and it allows users to choose how and where they want to listen to podcasts. It even allows the most enterprising users to write their own podcast apps. There is nothing stopping us from doing the same with online shopping, and that is the problem with the platform utility framework. There is no natural monopoly. It is quite the opposite. The monopoly is purely artificial, perpetuated by Amazon so it can take a cut of most sales on the internet. We do not need a shopping mall within the shopping mall. Amazon has tricked us into believing that we do, a remarkable feat considering most people interact regularly with the alternative in the form of our podcast app⁴.

If making Amazon into a platform utility creates a pointless middleman, then the idea of Facebook as a utility is an abomination. One could argue, as I purposefully failed to do, that Amazon Marketplace is like a landlord. Amazon is also involved with moving actual physical goods. But what about Facebook? Facebook is a global system of interconnected users that allows them to exchange information, which is precisely what the internet is for. If Amazon Marketplace can be broken apart and turned into an open and decentralized protocol — it can — then this is even more true for Facebook. While Amazon collects rent on the sale of goods on the internet, Facebook monetizes the thing that makes us most human: our desire to form connections with others.

This is true for all social media. Twitter has somehow managed to monetize broadcasting a single 140 character message, something so inconceivably unlike the natural monopoly of laying thousands of miles of electrical cable, and so much more like sending an email, that it exposes the absurdity behind the concept of platform utilities. What's more, Mastadon, a decentralized version of Twitter, already exists. It works just fine, and of course it does, because Twitter is just doing what the internet was literally designed to do.

When lawmakers talk of breaking up Big Tech, let's hold them to it. Don't let them implement half measures that allow platforms to continue to function as utilities. We should not allow tech companies to carve up the internet into little fiefdoms, collecting rent while limiting access by forcing us to use their mobile apps or requiring us to login with our personal details — all so they can sell our information. Platforms need to be dissolved and replaced by decentralized services that speak a common protocol. This is not even a radical solution. It is the way the internet has always worked.