by Dish Staff
In an interview with Rose Dwyer, Astra Taylor explains why she argues for more government regulation of the Internet in her book The People’s Platform:
In the book I challenge the techno-libertarian insistence that the government has no productive role to play and that it needs to keep its hands off the Internet for fear that it will be “broken.” The Internet and personal computing as we know them wouldn’t exist without state investment and innovation, so let’s be real. Related to this, there’s a pervasive and ill-advised faith that technology will promote competition if left to its own devices (“competition is a click away,” tech executives like to say), but that’s not true for a variety of reasons.
The paradox of our current media landscape is this: our devices and consumption patterns are ever more personalized, yet we’re simultaneously connected to this immense, opaque, centralized infrastructure. We’re all dependent on a handful of firms that are effectively monopolies — from Time Warner and Comcast on up to Google and Facebook — and we’re seeing increased vertical integration, with companies acting as both distributors and creators of content. Amazon aspires to be the bookstore, the bookshelf, and the book. Google isn’t just a search engine, a popular browser, and an operating system; it also invests in original content, having opened video-production studios in various cities, and offered fiber-optic broadband in select cities, not to mention all of its other endeavors and acquisitions, including robotics, home appliances, satellites, you name it.
So it’s not that the Internet needs to be regulated but that these big tech corporations need to be subject to governmental oversight. After all, they are reaching farther and farther into our intimate lives. They’re watching us. Someone should be watching them.
The Dish 