How to Fix the Internet? Deprivatize It and Make It a Co-Op

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KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Author Ben Tarnoff thinks the internet is broken:It is rife with misinformation and vitriolic hate speech. It potentially invades privacy rights. In the United States, it costs way too much to access compared with prices in other countries. And, it’s no surprise that it doesn’t work for consumers, Tarnoff says, because the internet was built by companies focused on power and profit. In his new book, “Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future,” Tarnoff offers a vision for a better internet that centers on public ownership of internet service providers and companies. We’ll talk to Tarnoff about his hopes for a more utopian internet. Guests: Ben Tarnoff, author, "Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future"; founding editor, Logic magazine Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Landmark College, commemorating 40 years of educating people who learn differently, with programs on campus and online for both students and professionals.
0:12.0	Learn more at landmark.edu.
0:14.8	Greetings boomtown.
0:16.2	The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming.
0:18.5	Xfinity combines the power of Internet and mobile.
0:21.7	So we've all got lightning fast speeds at home and on the go!
0:25.2	Learn more at Xfinity.com.
0:27.1	Restrictions apply.
0:27.8	Exfinity, Internet required.
0:28.9	Actual speeds vary.
0:31.1	From KQED.
0:32.1	Thank you. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:47.0	It kind of doesn't matter what kind of person you are, Luddite or early adopter, leftist
0:51.6	or arch-conservative, Zoomer or Boomer, most people agree that something
0:55.5	has gone wrong with the internet. In a new book, tech worker and author Ben Tarnoff argues that
1:00.4	underneath all these different complaints about tech and cable companies, there's one underlying
1:05.4	problem. The internet, born in public hands, and initially tuned for public use, became privatized
1:10.8	through the 1990s.
1:12.5	Tarnoff argues that the problem is governing our networks for profit.
1:16.3	But if turning the internet over to Comcast and Google happened quickly and without much opposition,
1:20.9	deprivatizing it and creating new public alternatives is a whole other kind of task.
1:25.8	We'll talk with them coming up next after this news.
	...

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