DATA LAB

One key challenge for the internet moving forward is ensuring that the hardware and infrastructures underpinning it are sustainable and can meaningfully contribute to building a more circular and fair economy. The challenges around the internet’s environmental footprint are myriad: from the extraordinary amount of energy used by data centres and emerging technologies like blockchain, to the costly mining processes behind the materials making our tech devices function. Estimates suggest that by 2020 the global number of connected ‘things’ will reach 21 billion– usually hard to recycle and deliberately designed not to have a long lifespan. Can the planet sustain such explosive growth in connectivity?

Our thirst for internet-enabled devices is not just harming the planet, but also supported by exploitative and dangerous production processes across the supply chain, from the mining of resources often reliant on child labour, to dangerous labour practices in the factories actually building our hardware.

One key component of building a more democratic and inclusive Next Generation Internet is ensuring the infrastructures underpinning the internet itself are secure, safe and resilient. We live in a time of growing cyber threats for which we are ill-prepared: from rising cyber crime to ever more sophisticated cyber warfare capabilities, powered by such new technologies as autonomous weapons and quantum computing. Existing weaknesses and flaws in the internet’s physical infrastructure and protocols also require urgent mending. Governments, the private sector and citizens need access to the right tools and information to help them protect themselves against these kinds of threats, and larger systems changes are required to ensure our (critical) infrastructures are resilient in the face of emerging challenges.

One of the biggest scalps of the unbridled growth of the internet is probably the health of our media ecosystems: profits for quality journalism have cratered, and the ad-driven business models supporting information provision online have empowered the sensational over nuance, clicks over truth. The proliferation of “fake news” and the weaponisation of information is a key challenge for the internet today, threatening the very building blocks of our democracies and societies. Ensuring access to trustworthy information, and preventing the deliberate manipulation of information flows without resorting to censorship and hampering of freedom of speech remains an unsolved challenge. We need to not just think more about specific, particularly media-friendly, topics such as fake news, deepfakes, filter bubbles and Twitter bots, but take a wider view in thinking about how we can create healthy (social) media ecosystems and create viable alternative business models for quality news and information sharing.

We are currently seeing a big surge of interest in online identity systems, both driven by private sector and government initiatives. Building a trustworthy and secure system for managing online identities would be incredibly valuable: they might help empower refugees, often left stateless, and ease their access to support systems, they could help make transactions online safer and improve the efficiency of our interactions with government services (see Estonia).

Effective identity management wouldn’t only increase trust on the internet (who am I really talking to? Can I trust the online service?) and so bolster the European digital economy, but would also help us build more personal online relationships. The currently dominant rate-and-review system places a lot of power in the hands of the reviewer (a single low score on ride sharing app can seriously damage a driver’s ability to attract new customers), alternative e-identity and reputation management systems could make these interactions more positive and equal.

Discussions about online identity management systems are only one element in a larger discussion about how we can move to an internet that is build on principles of trust (rather than the “trustlessness” much touted by some in the Blockchain community).

Most of the issues the internet faces today are a direct consequence of the increased monopolisation of power over the internet, and the business models that sustain this dynamic. Even issues that are only seemingly tangentially related to Big Tech’s and certain governments’ disproportionate control become harder to address, because the small number of actors who do have the power to make a change are often unwilling to do so.

We urgently require new business models that can provide an alternative to the reigning surveillance capitalist model, and can sustain a more pluralistic and healthy digital economy. Alternative models, such as platform cooperativism or commons-based approaches can help empower smaller initiatives, help level the playing field and offer better protections to consumers and digital workers. We need to support initiatives and SMEs that operate under these currently still less-sustainable models, through policy (protecting net neutrality, designing next generation competition and antitrust policy), funding, and procurement, as well as promoting adoption among the general public.

With the internet becoming ever more pervasive in our lives and societies, shaping our jobs, our cities, our interactions with the government and so forth, it has become harder and harder for individuals to shape our relationships with, or opt out of, “the internet” altogether.

With the rise of the smart city, and the millions of connected IoT-devices that will underpin it tracking our every move, how do we ensure citizens can meaningfully consent to what happens with the data they generate, and retain their privacy? With everything from our smart vacuums to credit card companies collecting and selling our data to the highest bidder (through very opaque processes), we need new solutions that help citizens give informed consent, as well as the ability to completely opt out of being part of, for example, data sharing systems, while still being able to use key services.

These questions about ownership and consent should not only pertain to our own personal data, but also to, for example, our relationship with our devices and digital ownership rights. The design of newer devices tend to restrict our ability to “tinker” with them (it is a lot harder to build your own smartphone than it used to be to build your own computer), and the growing popularity subscription services like Netflix and Spotify have turned us into content renters rather than owners.

One of the biggest problems the internet faces today, and the main cause of the unequal distribution of power in the digital economy, is the concentration of data in the hands of just a few key players. As the use of data-driven solutions is starting to permeate more and more aspects of our societies, this rat race to get access to our personal data is no longer just a threat to our privacy, but our sovereignty as individuals.

We need to experiment with and build on new models such as personal data stores and data commons models, as well as think about how regulation can be effectively used to help democratise data ownership. Breaking the dominant surveillance capitalist business models will however not be easy, which is why we believe we should be looking at larger systems changes as well- redesigning the internet’s underlying infrastructure to be more decentralised by nature, as well as rethinking the dominant economic frameworks driving the internet today.

Whichever sets of interventions we ultimately go for, re-establishing data sovereignty will also require reclaiming technological sovereignty. Today, too few of the technologies and applications we rely on are designed in Europe. Regulation is ultimately rather reactive- to truly embed European values into the process, we also need to move production of both hardware and software back into Europe.

As discussions about the potential transformative impact of AI and Machine Learning have come to dominate public debate in recent years, so have concerns about the potential negative side-effects of allowing these kinds of technologies to play an ever-larger role in decision-making and the governing of our societies.

We need to embed ethics across the system’s value chain: the development of ethical AI and ML tools should only use responsibly sources and managed data (make sure we have a representative sample, subjects were able to give informed consent, privacy is protected) and algorithms that don’t further existing societal biases (around gender and race, for example) and are accountable. The tools themselves should furthermore only used for purposes we consider ethically just, or at least not malicious. Ensuring we have solutions that are fair and inclusive along the value chain (from the infrastructural level up to the impact of the decisions being made or tasks replaced) is the only way to build truly responsible AI.

The next billion internet users who will move online will look very different from the first billion internet users. Yet, it is still mostly the latter group’s needs who get taken into account in the design of technological solutions and applications. Increasing diversity in who gets to build and use the internet is important if we want to ensure we don’t perpetuate existing inequalities also in the digital economy, but also helps stimulate innovation, as diverse teams tend to be more creative.

Addressing the current lack of diversity in the technology industry will require a combination of ambitious education initiatives helping making training in, for example, computer science more accessible to members of underrepresented groups, but also try to effect culture change within the sector, for example by targeting bias in the hiring process.

Making the internet itself more diverse- whose voices do we allow to get heard and amplified?- not only relies on creating opportunities for those generally marginalised in online discourse, but also making sure the internet provides a space for all. The rise of twitter mobs, doxing campaigns and troll armies has driven many sharing different opinions or from different backgrounds of the internet. To truly foster a diverse internet, we also need to ensure it is safe and free from targeted harassment.

Before we can begin to talk about building a Next Generation Internet, we need to ensure that everyone, in Europe and beyond, can have access to the internet to begin with. This means addressing structural barriers to access, through for example investing in infrastructure and broadband access, and promoting multilinguality and accessibility (many websites are still too hard to use for disabled users) online, but also thinking about the more social barriers that prevent people from moving online. Think here about improving digital skills, as well as ensuring that the internet provides a safe environment for all (particularly as online harassment and hostility disproportionately affect more vulnerable groups).

Access is also only truly access, if new users can actually enter the open internet- think for example of the Facebook-sponsored Free Basics programme, which gives people in developing countries free access to a small set of Facebook-approved websites. Is that truly the internet? We see the emergence of walled gardens and other types of internet fragmentation all over the world- from the curtailing of net neutrality, to censorship, link taxes and ultimately splinternets. It is of fundamental importance we protect and champion the open internet, particularly at a time when it is increasingly under siege.