Tech Won't Save Us - Platforms for Public Good w/ Mathew Lawrence & Thomas Hanna

Episode Date: December 30, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Mathew Lawrence and Thomas Hanna to discuss the problems with platforms, why antitrust alone is not enough to fix them, and how we can encourage the creation of democratic platforms that serve the public good.Mathew Lawrence is the founder and director of Common Wealth. He’s also the co-author of “Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown.” Preorder it now from Verso Books and follow him on Twitter as @DantonsHead.Thomas Hanna is the research director at The Next System Project. He’s the author of “Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States.” Follow him on Twitter as @ThomasMHanna.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Mathew and Thomas wrote a new report with Nils Peters called “A Common Platform: Reimagining Data and Platforms.”Eric Levitz wrote about how venture capitalists are like US central planners.Dan Hind wrote a previous report called “The British Digital Cooperative.”Support the show

Antitrust by itself doesn't get to the root of the problem that these giant corporations present. And I think also it doesn't alone point us in the direction of a more equitable, democratic, and sustainable economy. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guests are Matthew Lawrence and Thomas Hanna. Matthew Lawrence is the founder and director of Commonwealth, a UK-based think tank designing models for ownership change. He's also the co-author of Planet on Fire, a manifesto for the age of environmental breakdown, which will be released by Verso in April 2021, and you can find the information on environmental breakdown, which will be released by Verso in

April 2021, and you can find the information on how to pre-order it in the show notes. Thomas Hanna is the research director at the Next System Project, and his work specializes in alternative models of ownership. He's also the author of Our Commonwealth, the Return of Public Ownership in the United States. Together, they are the co-authors with Nils Peters of a new report called A Common Platform, Reimagining Data and Platforms. It not only goes through the existing proposals to transform the platforms that we are so dependent on today to ensure that they better serve the public good, instead of just serving the bottom lines of major corporations and the power of the executives and CEOs of these companies, but also lays out a number of policy

options that could be pursued in order to build a new platform ecosystem for platforms and technologies that are designed first and foremost for the public good instead of having to worry about or consider the incentives of a private corporation. It's a really refreshing report. And in our conversation, we take the debate around platforms and what to do with them beyond antitrust. So we're not just worried about creating more competitive markets for platforms or ensuring that there's more competition, but actually changing the larger incentives that exist around them to ensure that we no longer have platforms that are putting profits first and foremost. So I think you're really going to like this

conversation. But quickly, before we get into it, I also want to give you a quick update on the podcast since this is the last episode of the year. So far, I've released 42 episodes. The podcast has had listeners in 115 countries. Now, most episodes only get listeners in 60 to 70 countries, but I still think that's pretty good and still shows how international the podcast has become. It also has more than 100 five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts in at least 19 countries. And it regularly charts in the Apple Podcasts

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slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy my conversation with Matthew Lawrence and Thomas Hanna. Matthew Lawrence, welcome to tech won't save us. Thanks very much for having me. And Thomas Hanna, welcome to you as well. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to talk to both of you because you have a really interesting new report out called a common platform that kind of digs into the proposals that already exist for changing and kind of reorienting the platforms to make them better serve the public good, but also to imagine a better way to organize the platform economy that would serve the people who we want it to serve instead of serving the bottom lines of massive corporations, right? And so I want to

start by asking, you know, in the past five years, we've obviously seen views about these platforms and the major tech companies significantly shift, right? To the degree that the US government has now sued Facebook and Google for their monopolistic practices, and the EU has levied huge fines against many of these tech companies, right? So before we get to your broader vision, what are the main problems that you see with these platforms and these major tech companies with the way that they are currently composed? Well, I guess first and foremost are the competition issues. And I think these are the ones that are primarily being focused on by the antitrust enforcers and enforcement that you just mentioned. And these include acquiring smaller companies to

prevent competition, stockpiling intellectual property, willfully violating laws and regulations to gain footholds in new markets, squeezing suppliers and contractors, and just generally, I think, using their political influence and power to reduce regulations on themselves and increase barriers for competition for others. But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. For me, one of the biggest problems with the big tech companies and the platform companies is that of surveillance capitalism, which essentially describes, I think, a secretive and non-consensual process of turning all of our life, all of our human life into data that can be bought and sold

and used in various ways. And I think beyond this, surveillance capitalism is increasingly about using that data to modify people's behavior in a way that really boosts the power and the profits of some of these large companies. There's also the issue of precarious work, which means jobs that are poorly paid, you know, lack social benefits and workplace protections, including access to labor unions, and that are just generally unstable or insecure. And these arrangements are really central to the business model of many of these big platform corporations. I mean, think, for instance, Uber and Lyft and what these companies pulled off in California recently. I mean, when you take a step back, it's actually really, really stunning. You know, these companies use their bottomless pits of VC funding to willfully undercut labor and other regulations in California and around the world

to gain a really dominant position in the market. Then when they were faced with a new law that would require them to classify their workers appropriately, that's AB5, they threatened a capital strike, they fought the law in the courts, and then ultimately they spent absolutely massive sums of money on a really deceptive and self-serving ballot referendum that would exempt themselves from the law. And during that referendum, they paid off civil society actors to support them. They pushed pro-22 propaganda through their apps to users, and it really paid off. I mean, the companies won. Their market value soared after the vote, and now they're looking to replicate that trick in states across the US.

I mean, there's a number of other ones, you know, algorithmic bias, financialization, misinformation and manipulation, social control, you know, and so on. Matt, would you like to jump in on any of those other ones or any thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's that line by Lenin about back in whenever he was writing about how in the future, all of society will become a factory. And he's obviously sort of, I imagine, referring to sort of like

Fordism slash communist sort of, you know, industrialization. But in some ways, you know, that has come true in that all of society is increasingly being turned into a digital factory in that our relationships,

our infrastructure, our environments, our attention, our environments, our attention is being increasingly pervasively sort of digitized, enclosed, corralled, and transformed into forms of value. And I think that basic dynamic of expansion and enclosure is what gives the major platforms their sort of vast monopolistic power, which then leads to all the problems that Thomas attests to in terms of inequality, in terms of algorithmic bias, in terms of the scale of concentration of power in society. And so I think a lot of this

stems from that basic point that while they seem shiny new, in many ways, they reflect a sort of very old problem in capitalism a name the concentration of monopoly power rentier activity sort of increasingly dominating the economy and on that sort of point about sort of precarious work i think it's important to in some ways recognize that part of the problems that emerge in the platform are not necessarily sort of links to sort of the technologies as such is that platforms and sort of people like Sanjay and others in the US have made the segment. Platforms are not just sort of digital innovators in terms of the company. They're also as much of innovators in legal and regulatory sort of action and arbitrage.

And so sort of finding the loopholes, working very hard, sort of bust open sort of regulatory sort of gaps, whether that's employment protections labor rights etc etc etc and so i think you know it's it's important to as thomas have mentioned many of these problems are sort of not just sort of side effects of jeff bezos being evil or anything like that it's like linked to the structural dynamic of enclosure expansion sort of you know rontarization that the platform as organized under sort of for-profit, you know, shareholder platform as a model of platform delivery,

it's kind of hardwired, it's baked into the infrastructure of the platform. Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point. And I wanted to ask you specifically, Matt, because in the report, you talked a bit about how these platforms and these tech companies didn't just arise out of nowhere in the UK. And I think this is true of many other countries, right? In the report, you wrote that the UK, along with France, it has the most platforms in Europe, and that the

expansion of VC funding required a particular regulatory environment that was favorable for these companies to flourish. So can you describe a bit what that regulatory environment that was favorable for these companies to flourish. So can you describe a bit what that regulatory environment looks like and what the implications of it are? Absolutely. So there's two things here. The first, which you sort of alluded to, is really important, which is that those sort of platforms and sort of technological development under capitalism sort of like to give off an air of inevitability, like there's only sort of one, you know, one path towards the development of the platform, one path towards technological sort of like to give off an air of inevitability like there's only sort of one you know one path towards the development of the platform one path towards technological sort of you know adaptation

and use of course you know it's deeply fluid it's you know technology is a creel a hybrid they can be sort of reshaped reused you know transformed for social purposes etc etc and so then it goes well okay the second point is all but why is it that we've developed platforms that seem to be squeezing labor which seem to be sort of accelerating inequality rather than distributing voice you know sort of some of those you know utopian sort of imaginaries about sort of what digital connection could have brought us if you look back to the early days of digital technologies i think there it's important as you say you know this is not just like random that it's developed like this and has sort of the power and balances that it generates it reflects political choices you know

social institutions and their design so in the uk you know i think it's important as you mentioned the role of vc venture capital in the rise of platforms because of course you know most platforms are sort of deeply strange of capitalist firms in the sense that most of them don't really make profit most of them you know basically burn through a ton of vc they make profit crash and burn but then one or two burn through enough you know your amazon's your google's etc they burn through a lot at the beginning and they use that to then to get to the scale and the network effects of so many users that enable them to sort of become like real sort-generating machines for their investors.

And so the UK has particularly developed a deep pool of venture capital. And there's a lot of policy questions there around financialization, around treatment of capital markets in the UK relative to Europe. We've also got employment categorization, which is neither employee nor self-employed, and it's in between. And that allows some of this regulatory arbitrage is actually a sort of case at the moment that's been caught involving Uber

and some Uber drivers around the employment status, but sort of the employment relationship has allowed for some of the ways we treat data, and of course, you know, with the UK having left the EU and about to leave the sort of transition period, there's going to be lots of questions around how we sort of regulate and govern collection and use of data so there's a whole set of questions you know tax treatment etc etc etc that have shaped the development of

platforms and shaped why it is that sort of particular platforms thrive and their consequences for you know labor market inequality a whole host of other areas. Thomas, I wanted to ask you as well, one of the aspects of this that I feel allows these platforms to not only grow to such a large degree and to kind of force out traditional competitors in the spaces that they operate, but also to make it difficult to kind of launch some kind of cooperative or more socially oriented alternative is the predatory

pricing, right? The way that all of this VC cash allows them to underprice their product for, like in the case of Uber now, like over a decade, right? So then it becomes really difficult for taxi companies, but also cooperative alternatives to kind of operate when Uber can offer such a lower price because of how they're being subsidized by these venture capitalists, right? So what is the deeper effect of what is going on there? And how is this even able to happen? How is a company able to lose money for a decade and it still continue to operate? It's a really good question. And a lot of the discourse over the past several decades in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere around the world around markets and planning and state intervention has really been

very erroneous. It has really come down on the side of market fundamentalism and has taken this sort of libertarian undertone in many cases. And upon closer scrutiny, when you look at it more in depth, this libertarian undertone of how markets are the drivers of growth and the drivers of innovation really does not hold up to water. We've done a number of other papers in this series where we've looked at different components of the digital economy, things like IP and R&D and so on and so forth. And what you actually see, and Mariana Mazzucato and others have done a lot of work on this, is that you wouldn't have the Silicon Valley. You wouldn't have the VC funding. You wouldn't have this entire big tech system without significant public investment and public support. So even just the basic premises of how these markets work and how funding for big tech should work is based on sort of quicksand. It's based on erroneous principles in general.

But even leaving this aside, even on the merits of VC funding, there's been a lot of criticism and controversy. I mean, as you point out, Uber has not turned a profit in a decade. I mean, in its IPO, they pretty much stated to their investors that they may never, ever turn a profit. And some of the big investment funds, SoftBank's fund, for instance, has taken a huge loss and huge losses recently on a lot of these investments in things like Uber and so on. So that really raises the question as to like, you know, why would VCs want to invest in these platforms? And I think Matt spoke to it quite well in terms of their sort of value and loss proposition. But I think that the bigger point is, is that this type

of funding and this type of game that they're playing, where they invest massive amounts in these loss-making companies, and then maybe one or two will be successful, and then they try and get outsized returns on that success. That's intimately linked to the problems that we see in the platform economy, the monopolization of the platform economy. Because if you have this pressure, if you have all of this pressure to essentially gain a foothold and to dominate a market, if the entire sort of payback for your investors is based on you taking a monopoly position at some point and driving down wages and driving down costs, you know, that is a massive incentive to do that and to monopolize. So these things are very much

intimately connected to each other. And they're not things that can be replicated by alternative models, by cooperatives and so on and so forth. First and foremost, VC funds are not likely to get the same return out of a cooperative as they are from a large giant corporation. And second of all, these are not the types of funds that cooperatives should want to take. Their business model should not be based on surveillance capitalism. I think cooperative alternatives, platform cooperatives and so on, are rightfully wary of this business model of essentially turning all of one's personal data and all of society's interactions into a commodity that can be bought and sold. So I think rightfully so, platform cooperatives shouldn't take VC money and they won't take

VC money. But as a result, there are a significant competitive disadvantage to the loss-making giant corporations that are taking that money and using that money to undercut their competition. Just to follow on that and your question, which I think is a really intriguing question, and it's a lot about the nature of contemporary capitalism, is about how do these loss-making firms survive for so long in its relationship to the financial system and there's an interesting article by eric levitz in the new york magazine the other day on sort of the vc industry the analogy which i think either hit eric drew or certainly others have drawn is

that sort of where we are is almost of the closest approximate it's almost like a brezhnevian sort of moment in sort of anglo-saxon capitalism and that you've got a tight knot of planners, which is what ultimately BC, they're trying to plan the future and break the sort of, they're not working via competition market allocation. They're sort of saying Uber, it doesn't matter what its results are, we're going to pour in money until it gets to X. A tight knot

of very, often very elite, very centralized planners, whether it's BC or other forms of finance, are working out the future through control of investment, and yet you've got sporadic productivity growth. It's not like the platforms are necessarily delivering

surging productivity gains, etc. So I think it does raise really interesting questions around the nature of planning in an economy, how we surface that, politicize it, contest it, and sort of, you know, reshape and democratize planning and planning function, not just in the platform economy, but in the economy as a whole. And I think platforms and their sort of business model actually really sort of surfaces

injustices and sort of inefficiencies of the current model. Yeah. And so, you know, obviously, governments are now starting to pay attention to the issues that these platforms and these tech companies are presenting, right? And so in the US, as I mentioned, you know, the government is suing Facebook and Google. In the UK and other countries, competition authorities are kind of being beefed up in order to look at these companies and to see what new kind of reforms and rules they're going to bring in. And so, you know, say as part of this Facebook lawsuit that has been put out, one of the proposals is that Facebook would have to divest of Instagram and WhatsApp, right? Essentially to break up this company. And that has been one of the major calls by this kind of movement that's concerned about monopolies is to break them up, to create a more competitive marketplace with more tech companies competing against one another. But in your report, you

kind of lay out how, yes, there are positives to this, but simply breaking up monopolies does not go far enough, right? So why is this antitrust approach not enough to rectify the harms that these platforms are creating? I think these actions are definitely welcome and way overdue in many cases. I mean, the monopolization of the platform economy, Facebook called it a land grab when they were acquiring Instagram. It's been increasing for years and has only really been deepened, I think, through the COVID-19 pandemic. And there's been basically no antitrust enforcement in the U.S. against big tech companies in recent years. A Judiciary Committee report that was released at the beginning of October revealed that I think regulators hadn't blocked a single acquisition out of hundreds that have been made by the dominant platforms over the past decade or so. But as you said, for us, antitrust by itself doesn't get to the root of the problem that these giant corporations present.

And I think also it doesn't alone point us in the direction of a more equitable, democratic, and sustainable economy, which is what I and Matt and I think others are ultimately trying to see develop here. I think there are three interconnected reasons why antitrust strategies alone are insufficient to deal with the problems posed by big tech. And the first is the nature of modern antitrust enforcement itself, especially in the United States. And specifically over the past several decades, there's been a pretty fundamental reinterpretation of antitrust law by the courts and a corresponding decline in successful antitrust prosecutions. And the broader concept of antitrust that predominated in the first

half of the 20th century, you know, the trust busters, you know, when people think about antitrust, they think about this broader conception of antitrust from the early days. But that's really given way over the past half century to a much more narrow interpretation of antitrust that really focuses on things like prices, consumer welfare, efficiency, and so on. And so a successful antitrust strategy is likely to be contingent on pretty wholesale revision on the grounds in which a company is deemed to be a monopoly or anti-competitive. It's really an uphill battle, I think, in my opinion. So while we're going to have to see what the outcomes are of these recent antitrust actions that you mentioned against Facebook and Google and the like, I'd be surprised personally

if any of those actually ended up with the companies being physically broken up in any meaningful way or any serious penalties being forced under the current statutes. And already you see a lot of experts in the legal community expressing pretty significant skepticism about the probability of success for these antitrust strategies. Second, I think are the political economic considerations. And without additional changes to the structure of the companies themselves or the markets that they operate in or the legislation governing antitrust enforcement, it seems pretty inevitable to me that these companies will not only be able to use their power to sort of stymie or delay the antitrust strategies, just like

Microsoft did around the turn of the century, but also they're probably just going to reconsolidate relatively quickly in the off chance that they are actually broken up. And there's a lot of evidence of this in the US. I mean, Standard Oil up. And there's a lot of evidence of this in the US. I mean, standard oil, when it was broken up at the turn of the century, it reconsolidated. I mean, Exxon and Mobil is essentially standard oil. All the small standard oils, the regional monopolies gobbled each other up over a period of decades and eventually became Exxon and Mobil. And the same thing happened for AT&T. And with AT&T, they became the Baby Bells, and the Baby Bells started buying each other up and eating each other. And then they sort of

became AT&T again, AT&T and Verizon. But the Standard Oil one took several decades. That is because of the way antitrust was being interpreted in the first half of the century. The AT&T reconsolidation happened almost within two decades, I mean, very, very quickly. And that, I think, really highlights some of the additional challenges related to implementing antitrust strategies in an era where there's very, very strong ideological and political adherence to neoliberalism and market fundamentalism and so on. And that brings, I think, to the third point, which for me is obviously the most important point, and that's the goals and the aims of antitrust. To date, almost all of the mainstream discourse around antitrust and big tech is about increasing competition. So in other words, increasing

the ability of other for-profit companies to compete against some of the big players. And you see this in the Facebook lawsuit, which essentially, as you mentioned, is trying to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp into separate for-profit corporations. And first and foremost, even if this is successful, this is only going to make a small dent in corporate power. Facebook would still be the most dominant social media network, and it's likely that Instagram and WhatsApp would dominate their respective markets, the same as what would happen if Google and YouTube were broken up, for instance. I don't think it's going to markedly change the corporate power in either of those two sectors. Second, I think increasing competition doesn't address the natural monopoly dynamics inherent to the platform economy. So platforms exhibit pretty strong

network effects, which I think Matt mentioned earlier, which network effects essentially just mean that the value of the platform grows the more people that use the platform. And this means that the big incumbent players have a huge advantage that makes it almost impossible for new entrants to effectively compete. It's almost the definition of natural monopoly. And lastly, I think you have to ask the question as to whether or not simply increasing competition amongst large-ish for-profit corporations is going to address any of the major underlying problems and outcomes of the platform economy. And I just don't believe that to be true. In fact, in some instances, things like data collection, surveillance, privacy, you could actually see that increased competition amongst for-profit

corporations with the same surveillance capitalist business model may actually just make things significantly worse. And so none of this is actually to say that antitrust isn't an important tool. It undoubtedly is an important tool. However, it's our contention in this report that antitrust strategies and reforms really have to be connected to more fundamental changes in the ownership and control structure of platforms. And I think there's a great number of antitrust experts, especially on the left, who get this and are starting to put forward some of these innovative proposals about how to make these linkages between antitrust and ownership. I think that's a really good summation of why antitrust, like some of what it would produce

might be necessary, but in the end, we can't rely on that alone to kind of fix what's happening with these platforms, right? Because as you say, as history shows us, they are very likely to merge back up in the future. And simply creating a more competitive market doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to get those, you know, public benefits that we would want to see, right? It doesn't mean that we're going to increase worker power, democratic power over these platforms. And so obviously your report lays out a lot of proposals for how we could approach that and how we could create better platforms that give us more control over them and that produce benefits that actually benefit the public, right? And so that's what I want to dig into. You know, the report lays out five key principles for a democratic approach to platforms, along with a bunch of policy recommendations for how those can be achieved. And so before I get into specific questions about those,

I wanted to give you the opportunity to kind of highlight the aspects of it that you thought were most important. So what do we need to change about platforms? And how do we achieve that? Building on what Thomas said around sort of how antitrust is both a very useful tool but we argue in the paper that we need to go beyond that and indeed some left antitrust figures and movements are already doing that to look at questions of ownership governance and purpose and we sort of set out five principles which we think these are flexible etc but you know we think these principles could i think get to the key thing, which is how can we sort of rescue the democratic and enlivening potential of platforms to connect, to coordinate, to play, to explore? There are obviously huge virtues potentially in the power of the platform.

How can we rescue that from the dynamics and the outcomes that their delivery and control by for-profit, dominant monopoly corporations are generating. So we set out five principles, which I could maybe sketch, and then Thomas can then potentially tee up how these principles could be then institutionalized potentially through intervention. So the first, and this builds off what Thomas said earlier around this now quite well-known phrase around surveillance capitalism. In some ways, it's important to stress, well, I actually don't know where you fall on this, but I sort of fall very much on surveillance capitalism isn't a new break from historic

modes of capitalist development and capitalism, but rather a sort of a heighting up of pre-existing trends to extend social control, to extend capital's ability to sort of corral and oversee labour. But certainly sort of, you know, the first principle is privacy and anti-surveillance. And that means both sort of we should be sceptical of and think through carefully what data is collected in the first place and whether it should be in the first place. And who does it? So I think we should be sceptical both of private platform actors, but also the state, you know, also the state as a sort of problematic actor when it comes to surveillance, control and access to data. So I think we start with the principle of privacy platform economy, which is about expansion and enclosure. And so the totalising attempt to bring the user of the platform into a world into itself. So you shop on Amazon, you get your products from Amazon, you get your TV from Amazon, you basically live within the platform increasingly. And so we argue

that rather than enclosure, we should try and build a digital commons, the democratic governance of the keys of assets, institutions that underpin the platform economy, whether that's data, whether that's IP, whatever that might be. We then suggest, and this is important because we haven't really touched upon it enough, but I think it's important to locate the platforms within a wider geopolitical world systems in some way argument in that it's no surprise that the two twin poles in some ways of the platform economy is a Silicon Valley-centred nexus that links up with, as Thomas mentioned, DARPA, Department of Defence-style funding, the university

networks, and American geopolitical power on a global level. And then, of course, you have got the closed world of chinese platforms i do alibaba etc etc and so it's you know it's bound up in those questions of power so that we think you know we should therefore look towards multi-stakeholder forms of governance which don't just sort of mean you know users of the platform workers on platforms in the uk or the us have democratic voice and sort of a say in how the platform's organised, but try and account through governance for the global nature of use of these platforms, drawing on the work of people like Eleanor Ostrom on commoning.

The fourth is about reducing corporate concentration of power. So this is, you know, this is to some degree where there's quite a lot of alignment with, you know, the Department of Justice, the European Commission, etc, cetera, and where antitrust can play a really useful role. But it's about thinking about how, as Thomas says, there's this drive towards monopoly because of powerful network effects, et cetera, et cetera. So how can we have a much more ambitious attempt to reduce corporate concentration and power?

And the fifth sort of builds up that in some ways, which is that if we do want that alternative, if we do want an alternative in which technologies and platforms are used to amplify human creativity and emancipate all of us and not just concentrate power in the economy, then there will have to be a vital role for public action, whether that's public funding to try and address that funding gap

that at the moment is filled by VC funding, which then generates particular outcomes, as we've discussed, whether it's the expansion of publicly funded R&D that is about public goods rather than sort of investing in R&D to sort of generate outcomes about maximizing trying to challenge a funding ecology, which at the moment, by design, generates particular types of platform to emerge and dominate. So those are sort of some of the five underlying principles that we set out about how we can reimagine the platform economy. But Thomas, perhaps you maybe sketch some of the ideas? Sure. I mean, historically, I think one of the common solutions to the problem of natural monopolies in capitalist countries has been what people call public utility regulation. And public utilities are enterprises or businesses or services that provide a public service and are subject to specific and often relatively strict government regulations. And, you know, traditionally, these things have been electricity, water, communications, you know, so on and so forth. And there's this emerging idea around classifying and regulating platforms and other big data dependent corporations as public utilities. And that's obviously controversial. I think the big tech companies hate it and are totally, totally against that idea. But it is gaining, I think, traction amongst various experts. But, you know, the experience and theory of public utility regulation in the United States, at least, suggests that

this is pretty insufficient to deal with some of the innumerable problems associated with corporate concentration of power. And as I mentioned earlier, it does little in furtherance of redistributing or democratizing wealth or economic control or anything like that. And case in point is obviously the U.S. experience with relatively large investor-owned electric utilities. I mean, you see with PG&E in California and Con Ed and other ones like that. And so that leaves alternative models of ownership for me and for Matt and others as the most viable and radical path forward.

And I think alternative models of ownership are the only options capable of getting to the root of many of the problems that these platform corporations present. So with that sort of framework around it, and along with the five principles that Matt mentioned, first and foremost in the US, I think this has to include considering taking some or all of the large platform corporations into public ownership, either wholly or through a controlling or a majority share-owning position. I think it's different in the UK, and Matt will jump in in a second to talk about public utility regulation framework in the UK.

But in the US, at least, I think a public ownership option is viable. But part of this process really must include embedding democratic principles at various levels. You know, for instance, if you do end up taking ownership stakes in major platform companies, you probably just don't want these things to be held by the Treasury Department or just held in traditional structures. You know, you could put them into an autonomous public trust or some other similar vehicle that's organized, as Matt said, with democratic multi-stakeholder representation for workers, consumers, public officials, the general public, et cetera. Similarly as well, what's in public ownership, the companies

themselves should be restructured to embed democratic management structures and new public interest principles. And particularly concerning for us and for, I think, everyone in this field is ensuring that anti-surveillance and data privacy values are really woven into these new publicly owned platforms if you're going to have publicly owned platforms. And this really can't be an afterthought as it would introduce pretty unacceptable risk that these new public platforms would face incentives and pressure to collect or monetize or misuse data. And this includes sharing it with government agencies that are engaged in surveillance and social control, like ICE, for instance. You don't want the data from a publicly owned platform being given over to ICE or the Department of Defense to be used for xenophobic or racist or imperialistic

processes. Rather, I think anti-surveillance and privacy values should be included in all enabling legislation. Anything that would enable the public to take ownership needs to have these privacy and anti-surveillance frameworks involved. And this can be done in conjunction with or after the enactment of a pretty strict national data privacy framework. And that, I think, would be an important complement to this proposal of public ownership. So I think in addition to the public ownership of the major platform corporations, there are a number of other policy solutions that we laid out in the report that could be deployed to confront the platform monopolies and to chart a course away from surveillance capitalism.

And these policies could be complementary. They could be part of a larger process of public ownership, or maybe a piecemeal approach where certain policies can be taken in certain circumstances. And I'll just run through them very, very quickly, I think, and maybe we can get into some more details later. But one of the proposals is a central bank digital currency and a postal banking system. And this is essentially to try and head off the inevitability that the ascendant fintech industry basically takes control of the currency system itself. And basically we hand over our entire currency system to platform capitalists, which is where we're going. If you look at Libra or what used to be called Libra and is now called Diem, that's where this is going.

And so the alternative would be a central bank digital currency linked to a postal banking system. And if done right, I think this could modernize the payments infrastructure and really head off that corporate control that would lead us in very detrimental directions. The second is a new and enhanced set of rights for workers and unions in the platform economy. And there's nothing innate in the concept of platforms that means work organized through them should be precarious or badly paid or lacking in control. That's just the reality for platform workers based on the own weaknesses of our labor law in both US and the UK. So to address this, we advocate for, you know, establishing a new set of labor rights to be introduced to ensure that work organized through these platforms is secure and decent. And this could be done for publicly owned platforms,

but also could be done even if you don't go the ownership route, you should probably pass some legislation around worker and union rights. The third is a new deliberative and multi-stakeholder body or agency to set and enforce standards around data collection and speech. And this really gets to this question about what types of data should be collected, how is it collected, what purpose data should be used. And as Matt mentioned earlier, this really should not be the prerogative of multinational corporations or really distant state authorities. The same applies to, I think, decisions around what should be considered acceptable speech and content on social media platforms. We've seen recently these corporations, Facebook and Twitter and so on and

so forth, have long said that they were not the right ones to police the internet and to police speech. And as a result, we saw what happened with the sort of proliferation of hate speech and xenophobia and misinformation on the internet. And now they've recently sort of tacked course and are starting to deprioritize certain content, to ban certain people, to flag certain speech. And people can have different interpretations as to, are they doing enough? Are they not doing enough? But the real fundamental question for me and for us, I think, is should corporations be making those decisions in the first place? And if it's not corporations making those decisions, who should be making those decisions? And so we think that a new autonomous and deliberative

multi-stakeholder body or agency should be setting the principles and standards about what data can be collected and determining its use. And the same could also be said for speech as well. And the goal would just be to ensure that all stakeholders, workers, residents, community organizations, businesses, so on, can really collectively shape the rules and regulations around data and speech. And then the fourth is that when data is collected, when you do create it into existence, we believe that it should be held in a new network of public data trusts that really enable residents and communities to access that data and have control over that data so it improves their lives and not so that it's misused for the purposes of control and surveillance capitalism and the like.

The fifth is we propose a series of new public agencies, a public platform accelerator, national labs for community data, and public digital cooperatives based on what you mentioned earlier, Dan Hines' proposal, which we think really will play a role in connecting sort of public support, public investment to the creation of new democratic alternatives. So the creation of platform cooperatives, the creation of nonprofit alternatives to not only the platform corporations that exist, but also the new platforms that will be needed in the future that we perhaps don't even know what they are. Maybe those should be developed in cooperative or nonprofit forms with support from the public. I'll stop there. And I'll maybe let Matt jump in because I've been talking too much.

That's a pretty fair summary. As you can tell, there's quite a lot of things in there. But I think it's partly because it's a sort of multi-headed hydra, so to speak. So if you want to challenge the monopoly power, you can't just say, well, what about how is data sort of surveilled controlled access used you've got to think okay well you're challenging power balances you also then have to sort of provide a basic level of you know labor rights for everyone who enters into sort of work or the labor market you know whether it's work organized through digital platforms or otherwise through to you know addressing that financial ecology that we've discussed around BC and providing an alternative and recognising that left to the market, this will not happen.

So you actually need a much more purposeful, conscious attempt to shape our data worlds, our technical infrastructures, our architectures of digital connection if we are going to build a very different digital world, which I think we can, but I think we won't unless we sort of recognize we need a more systemic set of interventions. You've both given us so much to kind of think about and process. It just shows that there are so many different routes that we can take in order to address some of these issues with the problems, but also think about creating alternatives to

what is there right now. And I think one of the important pieces of the report is that it looks at the US context, but then it also looks at the UK context. And I think in looking at the UK, it also kind of gives us a bit of a broader picture for what a lot of other countries that are not the US can do in responding to these platforms, right? And so that's why I wanted to ask you, Matt, obviously, a lot of this discussion centers, at least the discussion that I think I hear the most centers on what could happen in the US where these companies are centered in the US. But looking from a UK perspective or a non-US perspective, how does that look? How does the power of these companies get reined in when they are not headquartered in your jurisdiction and you can't say,

nationalise them from the UK or something like that? Yeah, I think it's a really important question and challenge. So I think there's three things that I've touched upon. So the first, I mean, I think is, by their nature, this is global in operation, but I think that has provoked and is accelerating a sort of global response. So you may well have seen sort of Make Amazon Pay campaigns, you know, from India to Brazil to US Congress, women, I think, were sort of supporting it through sort of UK legislation, etc, cetera. You know, it was a sort of global coordinated struggle through aggressive international. So I think, you know, there is a sort of mass of organizations, people, movements, trade unions out there that can be cohered around sort of globally contesting the abuses of platforms in sort of particular geographies, while also sort of, you know, pushing for pushing for reform within the US.

So the second, within the UK, and I think the UK is obviously relatively lucky, it is in a slightly different position relative to Africa's capacity to regulate and challenge the power of big tech. But I think also the UK is a particularly interesting one to watch in some ways in that one of the big points of political contestation about the UK's future is whether in leaving the EU, we contestation about the UK's future is whether in leaving the EU, we sort of then sort of drift from the EU's regulatory ambit into basically sort of the gravitational force field of the US, which obviously for the UK

would, you know, broadly be a disaster in terms of, you know, labour market deregulation, standards on food, on finance, etc, etc. And tech is a really interesting case study. Will we sort of continue to align with EU standards on data on finance etc etc and tech is a really interesting case certainly where will we sort of continue to align with eu standards on data etc or you know if there's a uk us trade deal at some point will you know sort of certain sort of digital sort of standards and processes become aligned so it's definitely one to watch where we sort of set out so i guess two differences to what thomas or two additions to what thomas has said where i think it's interesting to know what others can do so the first and this is not just happening in the uk but the first is what Thomas or two additions to what Thomas has said where I think it's interesting to know what

others can do so the first and this is not just happening in the UK but the first is while as you say the UK can't nationalize Facebook etc etc you know I think where it can be clearly shown to be and it might not be the entire so it might not be all of alphabet for example but it might be sort of Google with an alphabet so where particular sort of branches of major platforms are clearly monopolies clearly dominant sustained monopolies you know whether it's google and search whether it's uber and nift sharing etc etc while we can't sort of necessarily nationalize them we should apply a sort of public utility sort of model and essentially these are functions that we all depend upon now and regulate them in terms of you know the required level of private investment the part you know cap their level of profitability you know basically sort of reset you know say right

you're basically utility now these are sort of the social license you need to operate and to have a very sort of stringent ambitious agenda there to go alongside this this wire effort for multi-stakeholders to transition of major platforms in this predominantly u.s-based jurisdiction so i think there's that. And the other thing which I think is quite interesting, and I think whether it's antitrust or whether it's this agenda, and there's obviously lots of complementarities, this is a very significant challenge to some of the most powerful

organisations and people in the world. So it might be that we need to have secondary strategies for advance alongside trying to take advantage of the antitrust hearing in the house etc or this new court case to try and get the maximally ambitious outcome there and there i think towns cities municipalities you know states in america although obviously some states are they've got fairly large countries so particularly sort of cities and towns there's a real chance to develop what we call digital community wealth building. And you can see this already in places like Barcelona and Amsterdam, where some really ambitious municipal socialist mayors have been sort can nonetheless in its cities, for example, require any public contract where they made just a digital platform to require them to comment all the data that they generate through that public contract.

And clearly, if that should be a public contract, not something we outsource, then we think it should be brought in-house and not outsourced. But in the areas where you would engage with the provider, you can have terms around transitioning data. So you could imagine in this digital community wealth building strategy, for example, you're saying, okay, well, condition of license for a Lyft or an Uber is A, national new standards so that you treat all Uber drivers as employees with the rights from day one, collective bargaining on the app etc etc etc but two okay if you if you want to drive in birmingham or

manchester or glasgow or london etc etc etc the data generated does not become siloed and controlled by uber or lyft or whoever it might be it becomes pooled as a sort of shared resource so that information asymmetry that you know works in capital's favor over labor but also works for the company against regulators is rebalanced and then towns and cities can plan more effectively they can say actually hold on there's too many ubers on the road we're going to restrict it or they can say right well there's you know too much emissions coming from these sets of cars or this set of traffic or whatever it might be and so you can have local strategies to reimagine how platforms you know operate within that geographic footprint as a way to rebalance power and to open up the more creative potential platforms. So that's some of

the things that we sort of explore that's slightly different to, but in addition to what has already been explored. When I think about the international approach, a lot of these platforms are headquartered in the US. And one of the things that you discussed, Thomas, was the potential need or, you know, if it's possible to take these platforms into public ownership. But then I'm also thinking that if these platforms are still global in nature, and we are all operating on them, I wonder if people in Canada, in the UK, in India, in parts of Africa, wherever, will really want to be using a platform that is owned and controlled by the United States, right? Knowing how the United States has surveilled people around the world through the NSA and things like that, and for many other reasons. And Matt, I think you touched

on this a little bit, but do you think that in thinking about how these platforms are global in nature, that also forces us in some way to reflect on whether we need new forms of governance that are not limited to national boundaries, but are more international in their scope, and actually give power to the people who use these platforms around the world, instead of, you know, in one or another state? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And Thomas jumping in this moment, by all means, but yeah, absolutely. So what we set out is exactly that. So we set out a multi stakeholder global governance structure, in which, you know, and it might be the subsidiaries operating different countries have like different levels but the overarching architecture should be exactly that governance where users whether in brazil or wherever it

might be have voice access rights you know sort of shape the operation of the platform because as you said these platforms are international they sort of move across all boundaries and yet they sort of obviously clear outposts of american power uh as well so let's say exactly that's we're saying it's not enough just to transition into public ownership it might be sort of u.s public ownership or you could explore you know multinational public ownership measures or sort of the commoning of underlying sort of proper durations of of these large platforms but linked to that absolutely has to be, and the platform should allow for this

because it is a way of coordinating and sort of connecting voice, should allow for multi-stakeholder forms of governance. And, you know, to be clear, we haven't got sort of full worked out, you know, sort of cookbook of the future in this report. But I think, you know, that's part of the excitement and the potential of the platform still

is that it should exactly enable the type of international forms of governance over the architecture of the underlying asset. I think it opens up really exciting democratic and solidaristic potential in it. echo everything that Matt just said and just briefly add that, you know, it's a critical point because, you know, Facebook has more users outside of the United States than inside the United States. You know, Uber operates in, you know, dozens of countries and hundreds and hundreds of cities around the world. These are not solely American companies in that, you know, they really have to take into the dynamics of how they interact with the rest of the world and how people around the rest of the world use these platforms and are abused by

these platforms. And to me, I think the last thing I'd just say on it is that for me in general, one of the big benefits of public ownership is its flexibility in terms of design, in terms of institutional design, unlike private corporations, which are very much constrained by market fundamentalism or market dynamics, profit-making, quarterly returns, so on and so forth. Public ownership is not necessarily constrained by those same dynamics and can really be designed however the people, the owners, want to design it. And I totally understand and accept that, at least traditionally, this has taken the sort of scale or level of the state in many places, the traditional state-owned enterprise organized at sort of a national scale, very sort of top-down,

very managerial, very sort of bureaucratic, kind of arm's length from any sort of democratic accountability or transparency. But that's not the model of public ownership that Matt or I, or I think anyone who's interested in public ownership nowadays from an activist point of view wants to have. You know, we want to design a new type of public ownership that is far more democratic, far more participatory, far more accountable and transparent. And to me, that includes going beyond the nation state level and thinking about international levels of governance and management and ownership. Yeah. And I think another key point there, because, you know, we've talked a lot about taking existing platforms into public ownership and kind of tweaking them that way. But in the

report, you also talking about, you know, creating ways to support the creation of new public platforms that might operate in a completely different way, right? And, you know, you talk about a public platform accelerator and public digital cooperatives. So can you give us some insight into how we would encourage the creation of new platforms and what kind of benefits you would hope that we would see from that? Yeah, I think that it's so we just talked about, you know, the need to go beyond the nation state and potentially to the international level. I think we also need to go beyond the nation state back to sort of the local and the regional level on many of these things.

So it's a twofold process of moving in different directions. And I think I mentioned earlier a couple of the proposals around the public platforms accelerator, around public digital cooperatives, and so on and so forth. Another proposal that we have in the report is around funding. And we mentioned earlier, and we talked earlier about how sort of the logics of monopolization and corporate concentration are in big tech, and platforms are really driven by the type of funding that they receive, this VC funding? How do you incentivize the creation of alternative models of ownership and development that don't rely on that VC funding? And so one of the obvious examples to us is public funding and financing through a national

investment bank and or a series of public banks, basically using the powers of the federal government, the national government, to fund alternatives at the state and the local level. We see this in a lot of different areas. In the United States, we have a quite vibrant public banking movement, especially in California and elsewhere. There's a lot of activist energy around this question of public banking and the opportunities that public banking allows to really seed the various different components of a more democratic political economic system. Everything from sort of social housing to worker cooperatives to tech companies and to platform cooperatives. I think getting control of capital is absolutely critical if we want to ever scale up or develop

any of these alternatives to where they can even rival or or compete against you know the large platform corporations yeah i think that's right the only two things i'd add is one on sort of like what what might it be and i think in some ways we can we can slightly learn from sort of like a replication model so we kind of you know we know that there is and i think it has to be managed properly but uh you know we know there's probably like some social utility for the more smooth connection of users and drivers etc etc in sort of mobility but we also know that you know currently as designed too often that means rising emissions rising traffic in cities and you know people working for less than the living way

you know into often really precarious conditions so So can you sort of like say, well, okay, maybe there is some use in a more sort of smooth sort of mobility process in urban areas, wherever it might be, but actually sort of develop a public platform that sort of does that, but actually make sure that everyone on it has living wage, has, you know, conditions for negotiation through sort of collective bargaining agreements, if you sort of operate on the platform, et cetera. We can replicate, and then I think we can begin to experiment. And I think by investing to create platforms to serve new needs or to meet existing needs

more effectively rather than to maximize profit. And I think there, all of the stress, we don't know what those are. So we'd have to experiment to try and do those. And I think there, I think we should be unafraid, learn from private sector VC. We don't want everything to fail, clearly. But I think one of the things that we'd have to embrace if we want a more entrepreneurial state unafraid, learn from private sector VC. We don't want everything to fail, clearly.

But I think one of the things that we'd have to embrace if we want a more entrepreneurial state in the Mazzucato line, but we do want a more entrepreneurial state, we have to recognise, accept and indeed celebrate, in some ways, ironically, trying to develop new platforms to meet new needs that don't work. And failure isn't necessarily failure as such, as long as it's saying, okay, well, actually, there's no need to develop a public platform

that sort of locates the very best sort of trees in a city. Although that might be quite nice. But like, you know, there is one that says, this metaphor is just terrible. But you know what I mean? Like, there are platforms that you can develop that we don't know. You know, it's the rum something.

There are known, unknown, blah, blah, all that. There are known unknowns. We need to develop those. And but like, we won't always get it right but that's okay and i think you know thriving entrepreneurial public sort of state investments role embraces that sort of you know the fact they won't always get it right but then sometimes they'll they'll sort of create a platform that is democratically governed that serves social needs over sort of profit maximization that makes a real breakthrough in terms of equity and efficiency. And I think generally, just to add,

not only in the case of tech, we must break out of this logic of unimaginativeness when it comes to design of our society and our economies and our systems. I mean, we're trapped in this logic of market fundamentalism. And you see it in the United States now with what's happening in state and local governments with regards to funding and the COVID-19 crisis. And you're basically seeing a wave of what's going to be hardcore austerity coming because state and local governments can't technically spend money like the federal government does. They have to technically balance their budgets. And as such, they're cutting funding for transit systems, they're cutting funding for public services. And it doesn't have to be that way. It's absolutely illogical. The federal government does have sovereign monetary authority. It has the power to solve these problems for state and

localities with the click of the fingers or the click of a keystroke on the computer. It makes no sense that we are cutting all of our public services and our transit in the click of a keystroke on the computer. It makes no sense that we are cutting all of our public services and our transit in the middle of a pandemic and our healthcare systems in the middle of the pandemic. That's a design question. That is a lack of imagination amongst our policymakers, amongst our leaders. When we're talking about big tech as well, if we really wanted to develop alternative models of ownership and an ecosystem of platforms that were not platform corporations, we could do so. We could use the power of the federal government to directly spend money and to create money and run it through public banks or run it through a national

investment bank in however way we want to. We have all the tools. We have all the mechanisms. We just don't use them because we're trapped. We're logically trapped. Yeah, I think that's a fantastic point. And I think the point you make about the imagination We just don't use them because we're trapped. We're logically trapped. shift them into thinking about technology and to give them the permission to pursue these things, like letting libraries think about putting together a different kind of search engine, or seeing what the post office would do if it was allowed to really push forward and reimagine how technology might work in the public interest. And so just to end, I wanted to ask you, you know, you've written this really big report, we've gotten to some aspects of it. But what is the most exciting aspect of the report to you or the future that it lays out? So for me, the most exciting thing isn't necessarily sort of, you know, the policy options

we set out, although we hope that that's obviously, you know, a real contribution to the debate and useful for activists and campaigners and policymakers. I think it's more so this stress on how technology and, you know, technical systems are deeply political, that how they operate and whose interest is not fixed, it's not certain. And that actually the type of institutional reforms, the recommendations we set out are a way to sort of reclaim the platform from the existing logics and actually sort of rescue them and you know so wendy loose of arguing you know abolish silicon valley sort of you know capitalist

development of the platform you know how can we rescue them and the emancipatory potential of digital technologies the emancipatory potential of platforms to connect to communicate really stressing that argument i think is the most exciting thing to say look digital monopolies currently dominate the commanding heights of our economies, but this isn't necessarily inevitable. It reflects political, social, and economic choices we've made. And in that lies the hope, the potential to liberate the platform and to make it a sort of space and a sort of forum for more democratic and social ends, rather than simply sort of the concentration of extraordinary,

sort of in some ways, historically unprecedented levels of wealth and power amongst sort of tiny knot of corporate actors and their major shareholders. Yeah, for me, Matt hit on the critical point for me, and that's this question of the commanding heights of the economy. And people on the left for generations have struggled with this question of how would you potentially move to a more democratic or equitable, sustainable political economic system beyond capitalism if you can't gain control over the commanding heights of the economy, the biggest corporations in the economy.

They just literally have to be confronted and they have to be taken over. And none of these proposals that we've laid out in this report are a silver bullet and they all need further exploration and definition. However, in the 1970s, the British economist and politician Stuart Holland said that taking over the commanding heights of the economy wouldn't by itself fulfill the socialist goal of abolishing private sector capitalism completely. However, it could potentially cause a chain reaction that would radically and permanently tip the balance of economic, political, and social power. And that's really what I want to do and what I'm hoping to do with these proposals and this report.

I completely agree with both of you. Thank you both so much for coming on. And I recommend everyone to go check out the report because it does lay out so many important potential paths to confront these platforms, but also to think bigger about how these platforms could serve the public good and the kind of democratic goals that we want to see. So thank you both for coming on the show. Pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for having me. Matthew Lawrence is the founder and director of Commonwealth and the co-author of Planet on Fire, a manifesto for the age of environmental breakdown. You can pre-order it now at Verso Books and find the links to do that in the show notes. Thomas Hanna is the research director at the Next System Project and the author of Our Commonwealth,

the Return of Public Ownership in the United States. And again, you can find the links for that in the show notes. You can follow Matthew on Twitter at at Danton's Head, and you can follow Thomas at Thomas M. Hanna. You can also follow me at at Paris Marks Head and you can follow Thomas at Thomas M Hanna. You can also follow me at at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network and you can find more information about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. Finally, if you want to support the show, please go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.