How to build a new internet (and save the news industry).

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This week Facebook announced that they’ll restore news content to Australian users.

The tech giant has promised to sign payment deals with media providers; in return, the Australian government has backed down on plans to force the platform to pay every time a user links to news content.

It’s an uneasy truce in a dispute that raised deep questions about the future of the internet, and the survival of independent journalism in a connected world.

So this week, reflections on all that. This note orbits around three questions. What happened to the dream of the open web? How do we build a better internet? And what will it take to save the news industry?

What happened to the internet we were promised? Thirty years on, it’s time to accept that the sacred principles of the open web led us to the state we’re in today. We need fresh thinking.

?? Remembering the Dream. Next month it will be 31 years since Tim Berners-Lee sent a memo entitled Information Management: A Proposal to his boss at the physics research laboratory CERN. That document outlined a vision for what Berners-Lee then called the Mesh: an information system that would allow users to identify pages of text with unique URLs, and connect pages using hyperlinks. Berners-Lee imagined a new Republic of Letters, in which academics would be able to exchange ideas as never before. In the hands of a rising generation of Californian technologists, that vision turned into a dream of radical universal empowerment. This was internet of individual creators, blogs, and email: a space outside existing structures of power, in which we would be free to forge new ways of seeing, and new modes of life.

?? Reality Bites. That dream was a vision of the open web. In 2021, we still judge our internet by its standards. But today, the topography of the web is nothing as Berners-Lee imagined. Instead of a boundless array of individual creators, a handful of advertising-funded megaplatforms dominate our experience of the internet. Worldwide, around 90% of internet searches take place on Google properties. Here in the UK, Facebook accounts for around 50% of display ad revenue. We’ve grown used to them, but these are astounding numbers. The megaplatforms don’t prioritise noble ideas about the free exchange of information. Rather, they build walled gardens intended to capture, retain, and monetise as much attention as possible. Cue a host of consequences that Berners-Lee and the original web pioneers never foresaw, including the rise of targeted disinformation (Facebook Groups!), and the destruction of old media business models.

?? Two truths. Facebook and Google have become an advertising duopoly that dominates the internet, and is sucking the life out of traditional news media. The Australian legislation was a first draft attempt at dealing with that problem. A range of observers, including Berners-Lee himself, criticised the legislation because it breaks a traditional principle of the open web: frictionless linking between pages. Facebook’s attack on the new law leaned heavily on that argument. Against that criticism, two truths. First, the open web died years ago. Second, and crucially, this means the principles that defined the open web were self-defeating; they led us to where we are now. In short: those who seek a reformed internet are going to have to tolerate interventions that break traditional open web purity tests established in the mid-90s. There’s a broader lesson here. Freedom is rarely, if ever, a natural state of affairs; it’s something we make. Open societies, open markets, and the open web: despite what some say, they’re only made possible by the invention of the collective.

So where next? We need to rethink the status of news content, and the nature of links. We need to refund the news via proper tax on the big platforms. And, above all, we need a decentralised web.

????? Rethinking Content and Links. What traditional principles of the open web do we need to revise? The Australian solution isn’t ideal, but it does point towards two useful new principles governing content and links. The open web as Berners-Lee imagined it was content agnostic: all information is treated the same. In 2021, we need to treat news as a privileged type of content. Why? Because the health of our democracies depends on a robust news industry in a way that it simply doesn’t depend on, say, the music business. Berners-Lee’s vision of the open web was founded, above all, on hyperlinks; we need new rules to define what constitutes a link, and particularly a link to news. The dispute between newspapers and Facebook is fuelled by the simple fact that a Facebook news ‘link’ often displays much of the story itself, meaning users can consume the content without leaving Facebook. That’s crushing the open web, and we can change it.

?? Refund the News. The reality is that an ad-funded news industry as we know it today may not be able to coexist with the internet in any form. So what to do? The best answer here is probably the simplest: taxation. Facebook and Google are, above all, vast advertising businesses. Here in the UK, Facebook paid ￡28.5 million in corporation tax last year. We need a new global framework that will see Facebook and Google pay more tax, and distribute those payments more fairly across the markets in which they operate. This framework should also force governments to plough some of that new tax revenue into support for the news industry. This isn’t a move to be taken lightly. Public funding for news comes with its own set of problems, because we want our news media to be editorially independent of any government. But we should choose those problems over the those we’ll face if we let the state of news and investigate journalism deteriorate further.

?? Dreaming All Over Again. In the end, attempts to fix the internet via regulation will prove slow, awkward, and at best only partially effective. A lasting solution will only come via a new kind of internet – and there is one in view. The next version of the web, sometimes called Web3, can be built on decentralised networks such as the blockchain, which will allow users to share data and transfer value directly between one another. The recent explosion in digital art associated with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is just one glimpse of the power of decentralisation to rewire the web. In a decentralised web no single party controls data, or limits user’s access to one another. That spells the end of the big platforms as we know them. We’re a long way from Web3 decentralised apps, or Dapps, that replace Google, Facebook, or Uber. But it’s a new dream worth dreaming. And, as it happens, a familiar face is working to make this dream a reality.

despite what some say, they’re only made possible by the invention of the collective.

Get the memo

Thanks for reading this week.

I remember feeling a tectonic shift online when Web 2.0 emerged in the early 2000s. Now, I’m increasingly persuaded that we will see an even more significant change via the technologies of decentralisation. But how soon?

Of course, New World Same Humans is already built on one of the great, decentralised technologies of web 1.0: email!

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I’ll be back on Thursday with news and analysis in New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.