The move by social networks to deplatform President Trump last week was the right call. In reality, he left Facebook and Twitter no other choice.
That said, the first week of 2021 is going to be remembered as a watershed moment for the history of free speech and the globally open internet. It has the potential to be a tinderbox that undoes the core of the internet as we know it.
What is at stake goes way beyond social networks and could tip the scales on two of the most fundamental questions of our time: what our rights are regarding digital private speech; and what access we should have to a global internet and information commons.
The questionable decisions by Amazon Web Services and Stripe to cut off services they deemed unsuitable compound the threat to digital speech. Technology companies, and not just social networks, are now in a nearly impossible position. You can make the argument that we are on the brink of the collapse of the global internet.
But I do believe we can look to some lessons from history for navigating this period. In particular, the long-lasting success of the Roman Empire, compared with the disaster wrought by imperialism in the late 19th century, can teach us something about our current moment.
On Privacy: Messaging, Email and the Gmail Problem
The story in the media right now is about how extremist groups are looking for alternative social networks. That endeavor is unlikely to be successful, both because it is harder to build social networks than it might seem, and because internet service platforms like AWS and Stripe are blocking access.
What is likely to work in the short term, however, is email.
Deplatformed people and organizations are very likely going to double down on their mailing lists and concentrate on connecting directly to their constituents. Just as creators worried about feed-ranking problems have moved to email newsletters and platforms where they “own” their audience, so too will the deplatformed set.
In the case of President Trump, he has the benefit of starting with an enormous and engaged mailing list in which he will undoubtedly invest.
In the short term, this is going to create a problem for large tech companies that have overcentralized email.
Despite the fact that email is in theory a distributed protocol, in practice several large companies—such as Google via Gmail—have huge control over which emails get delivered and which are suppressed. This is a huge liability because it means that through internal employee pressure or external political pressure, Google may be forced to step back from the central promise of email, which is that you get the messages you want delivered to you.
If under pressure Google starts breaking the central promise of email, will people move to alternative providers? Maybe.
But the thing to recognize is that the internet is largely governed by a set of norms and implicit agreements about how digital traffic is handled, including the right of people to communicate with each other freely. Once those norms start unraveling, the internet can fall apart very quickly.
Beyond email, the problem is that once a lot of the energy moves off more-public social platforms and toward forms of private communication, serious attempts at regulation and control will follow.
Most people who discuss internet policy like to draw a distinction between what they see as good control and regulation of public spaces compared with the freedoms that should exist in private spaces. But as I have written for many years, this is a false and dangerous distinction.
When the negative energy from public social platforms moves very obviously to encrypted, ephemeral and decentralized places, the calls will clearly come to limit or control access to these technologies, at a time when none of them can truly function without the implicit protection of governments and large organizations.
Is it a good idea to cross this bridge and sacrifice our access to private messaging, starting with email, but over time implicating voice, chat and other services?
I think the answer is decidedly no.
The way we end up with true global dictatorship and authoritarian regimes is by using modern technology to monitor, censor and control private speech at a level that was literally unfathomable until recent technical breakthroughs. We must vehemently reject this power for the sake of the future, despite the continuous pain and suffering that allowing private hate speech will cause.
On the Risk of the Global Internet’s Collapse
Other countries are now going to rightly look at American internet service providers and say, if you were willing to shut off service to Donald Trump, you must also be willing to shut off service to our enemies of the state.
They aren’t wrong.
The problem, of course, is defining who is an enemy of the state and who gets shut off rather than promoted across the nearly 200 countries on Earth. This is a role that no private company can possibly play. Even governments struggle mightily with it.
An expectation of worldwide monitoring would be bad enough just in terms of the challenge it presents to global social networks and speech. What is even worse is that as internet infrastructure providers like AWS and Stripe (whether or not they felt forced to by employee activism or politics) have moved to block Trump, that decision has now implicated the entire internet in this problem.
Many countries are now going to feel fully justified in taking matters into their own hands and saying that they need to put up firewalls, build their own internet infrastructure and take control of who gets to speak inside their borders.
This might sound alarmist, but I think that this rapid unraveling of the internet is possible in today’s environment, to the extent that American internet companies have shown they will take a side in their own domestic affairs.
In this respect, it doesn’t matter if the social networks were justified in their response to Trump, which I believe they very much were. It just comes down to the fact that broad swaths of the internet have finally taken a clearly political step that is impossible to apply consistently or fairly across the globe.
A month ago, any political party would have been reviled for calling to extinguish the voice of a rival on the internet. But in the blink of an eye, exactly that has become a legitimate debate, one that internet companies will lose, no matter what they do.
Until recently, the global internet seemed a given. Today, it seems possible that Trump’s final act as a president will be to set off the dominoes that lead to the end of digital globalism and the erection of closed digital borders, as well as to regionalization and censorship.
Lessons From Historical Global Empires
In the late 19th century, the world went through a terrible imperialist lurch. Interpretations of the period often contend that international companies went on a global expansion spree, and then—when they couldn’t protect their investments abroad without force—they effectively drew European nations into a patchwork of ill-conceived global conquests to shield invested capital.
This historically brief spree of empire building was predominantly organized around force and lacked any real central principle, organization, consistency or law. And, as we all know, it ended with the disastrous violence of the early 20th century.
Contrast this with the more successful and longer-lasting global empires of the Romans or Genghis Khan. Setting aside the complicated history of how those empires were built, they both lasted for so long and were so successful because they were fundamentally grounded in clear principles.
The Romans sought to deploy and maintain consistent and universal laws throughout their empire. The ruling doctrine imposed by Genghis Khan was based on openness and free trade.
The point is that global empires need to be centered around dogmatic and consistently applied rules in order to survive. They cannot sustain themselves out of sheer momentum or force.
I don’t think what we are watching is a repeat of the late 19th century.
Internet companies have gone global, exporting access to information and values that I believe in. But nation-states like the U.S. aren’t going to fight a war to protect the rights of internet companies abroad today. We have neither the will to do this nor the need, since very little of our internet infrastructure is physically located overseas the way 19th-century assets were.
I do think, however, that for the global internet companies to survive this period they need to quickly exit the morass of content moderation and complicated policies and adopt simple laws and policies that they can enforce consistently and universally.
The internet companies need to move away from relying on complicated conditional policies and armies of content moderators that can make bad judgment calls. They also need to move away from giving their employees and other constituents the power to sway their policies and decisions over time.
Two Futures
As a child of the early 1980s, I have had the incredible privilege of growing up alongside the expansion of the digital world and the internet. For me, and for many of my generation, the idea that we were part of an inevitable long-term trend of connecting humanity and helping knowledge and communication flourish felt like a given for a long time.
What is clear today is that this global project is heavily built on norms and trust in individuals and institutions, and it is deeply threatened.
There are two possible futures.
In the first, the internet breaks down in coming years. Service providers aren’t trusted, while regions and communities choose to self-define and build their own infrastructure. In broad swaths of the world, if not everywhere, people don’t trust that they can communicate securely digitally or that the reality they see is indeed reality. Digital borders could become as real as physical ones. In this future, the internet in each country becomes an extension of the country itself, with its own politics, regulations and providers.
In the second, internet companies of all types simplify and dramatically harden their rules, removing subjective human judgment from the equation, and distributed technology gets more advanced, to a point where the internet can really be trusted as a solid global platform. In this future, humanity stays connected and the internet is able to continue existing as a separate global metaverse for everyone.
Each of these scenarios comes with its own challenges, but the future demands a choice. For too long, the debate about trust, impartiality and control has been left ambiguous. The stakes now have become too high for the muddled status quo to survive.