In 2020, Edge Cable Holdings, a Facebook subsidiary, was burying a new fiber-optic cable into the seabed near Tierra Del Mar, Oregon. Working beneath a rugged mixture of basalt rock mounds, unconsolidated sands, and sandstone bedrock, the company’s drilling operation went awry. Stalled out, they ditched their metal pipes, drilling fluids, and other construction materials in the ocean: Out of sight, out of mind.

When Oregon’s Department of State Lands learned of the abandonment, they ordered Edge Cable Holdings and Facebook (now Meta) to pay a fine. But the damage was done. Two sinkholes formed along the installation path and most of the materials will remain lodged in the seafloor forever. These items, and thousands of gallons of drilling fluid, pose an ongoing risk to the surrounding seafloor ecosystem. Despite public outrage, the company returned to complete the cable in 2021, with debris from the first attempt still lodged in the seabed.

The cable was not the first to slither into Oregon’s stretch of the Pacific Ocean, and it’s by no means the last. Big technology companies including Amazon, China Mobile, and Google are flocking to Oregon’s coastline to land transpacific fiber-optic cables. Most recently in August 2023, the Department of State Lands approved a 9,500-mile fiber-optic cable connecting Singapore, Guam, and the United States.

What has transformed Oregon into an undersea cable hotspot—and how is the installation process affecting a vibrant ocean ecosystem? The explanation resides in tax breaks, swift permitting processes, cheap energy, vast amounts of open land for data centers, and a historical carelessness for the environment shared by the state and tech companies alike.

Fiber-optic cables transmit data with pulses of light through thin glass fibers. In 2022, they provided over 98 percent of the world’s internet services and international phone calls. There are more than 745,000 miles of submarine fiber-optic cables in operation around the world—that’s enough cable to wrap around the Earth’s equator more than 29 times. It’s the work of cables, not satellites, that connect us on a global scale.

Although undersea cables seem to be torn from the pages of a futuristic science fiction novel, they aren’t a new technology. The first functional telegraph cables crossed the Atlantic seabed in the 1860s.

The Pacific, a wider and deeper ocean basin and therefore more difficult to wire, received its first transoceanic cable in 1902. By the early 1900s, the global seafloor hosted around 200,000 miles of telegraph cables. And by the 1950s, that number reached nearly 500,000 miles of telephone and telegraph cables, with fiber-optic cables first joining the mix in the 1980s.

Back then, many transpacific cables landed in California, Washington, and British Columbia, where they could link up with transportation hubs and industrial centers on land. That began to change in 1991, when Oregon landed its first transpacific fiber-optic cable. Called the North Pacific Cable, the privately owned line connected Oregon to Alaska and Japan. In the three decades since, the state has welcomed a new fiber-optic cable every four or five years, in tandem with new data centers—large, high-security buildings that store rows of servers. These servers host the internet’s millions of websites.

There are significant onshore incentives for cable owners to land their lines in Oregon. Oregon’s “enterprise zones” tax-exemption program allows individual towns to negotiate property tax breaks for big construction projects, thereby saving companies millions of dollars each year. In exchange for the tax breaks, tech companies provide a small influx of jobs and tax revenue to small communities hurting from the decline of the timber industry. In 2015, Oregon lifted its cap on enterprise zones to attract even more data centers, just as more cables arrived along the shoreline.

Consider Meta, which owns a 4.6 million square foot data center complex in rural Prineville, Oregon. Although it’s far from the ocean in a former timber town, this data center connects to a network of underground fiber-optic cables, including the controversial undersea cable installed near Tierra del Mar. In 2015, the Oregonian reported that the data center complex received $30 million in tax breaks that year alone.

For Meta, as well as Amazon, Google, and Apple, Oregon offers a win, win, win.

So who exactly is losing?

The coastal ecosystem. During installation, it’s standard practice to bury cables multiple feet into the seabed to avoid snags by fishing vessels. The most common burial method is plowing, during which a remotely operated vehicle cuts a ditch into the seafloor and inserts the cable into the trough. Another method, jetting, uses high-pressure fluids to liquefy sediments on the seafloor, easily slicing a clean line into the seabed in which the cable can burrow. Companies also use directional drilling to bore diagonally into the seabed from the shore. All of these methods squish or displace any worms, crabs, sea stars, urchins, anemones, corals, or sponges living within the trenching path.

Once installed, submarine cables settle into the seafloor ecosystem. In search of hard substrate to call home, marine life will colonize the cable’s exterior. After a few decades of service, cable owners have historically abandoned their lines in the ocean, a decision that is both cheaper for companies and often results in less disturbance for colonizing species. Inert but not biodegradable, most dead cables will sit in the ocean indefinitely, hidden from the public who is usually none the wiser.

The 2020 Facebook/Edge Cable Holdings abandonment prompted Oregon to pass a 2021 law instituting firmer planning and decommissioning regulations for new undersea cable projects. Still, the increasing scrutiny doesn’t appear to be slowing the big tech companies. As Amazon builds its recently approved line to Guam and Singapore, the tech giant is also building another data center in Umatilla, Oregon, a small town on the Columbia River.

Data centers are no better for terrestrial environments than submarine cables are for marine. The buildings suck significant amounts of power from the grid. Oregon’s renewable energies, like hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River, can’t cover data centers’ growing energy demands, meaning utility providers must tap into fossil fuels and increase their greenhouse gas emissions. Despite Oregon’s efforts to decrease the state’s carbon footprint, some regions are moving backward in the fight against climate change. Big tech companies, and their big buildings, are spurring that reversal.

Across Oregon, communities and ecosystems are confronting the physical impacts of a world that runs on internet—impacts that our regulatory systems have yet to reckon with.

The post Are Meta, Google, and Amazon the Sea Monsters of Oregon’s Coastline? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The question feels less hypothetical after the State of the Union address, when President Biden blasted “Big Tech” and promised new restrictions on the lifeblood of Silicon Valley businesses—their ability to collect and use our data. Republicans in Congress, while rudely heckling the president in other parts of his speech, stood and applauded these threats, which makes it even more likely that Californians soon will be in a conundrum.

Because Silicon Valley is the place that exposes our state’s hypocrisy—California likes to see itself as both a public-spirited, progressive force for the future and a seat of global power and wealth.

For the most part, with the exception of some privacy regulations, California has tolerated Silicon Valley’s ruthless and reckless behavior, because we depend so heavily on it for our wealth.

We Californians will be tempted to sit on both sides of the coming war. Because Silicon Valley divides us against ourselves.

How can we not side with Silicon Valley when the feds come for its firms? The tech business fuels our economy, inspires innovation, and attracts smart people from around the world to come here. It offers compensation and stock options that make workers rich. We wouldn’t be the fourth-largest economy on Earth without it.

But how can we side with Silicon Valley in good conscience? Tech firms proudly disrupt established industries that our communities depend on. They force automation that costs jobs and lay off workers (over 100,000 so far this year) at the first sign of a slowdown. And they suck in billions in capital investment that might be more profitably devoted to public infrastructure or less speculative industries.

Of course, when we lose our jobs or our companies go under, we need support from the government. So how can we not back Silicon Valley, whose wealthy employees and investors pay the big tax bills that support our generous tax credits and programs for the poor? How bad would our schools be without all the money flowing to the state treasury from tech? Big surges in capital gains taxes patch the holes in our broken school funding system. Don’t we need to protect Silicon Valley to protect our children?

I’m sorry, but don’t we need to protect our children from Silicon Valley? Social media companies undermine kids’ mental health. Other tech firms create games and amusements that addict and isolate our children. Why shouldn’t the Biden administration make war on firms that gather up data on our kids and use it to sell them things?

C’mon, protecting children is the job of their parents. And Silicon Valley protects the working families of the Bay Area, a rich place with high wages and generous benefits. Look at the pandemic: When tech firms shut their doors, working families in restaurants and service sectors suffered.

But isn’t that the problem—that California, and the Bay Area, are already too dependent on what trickles down from Silicon Valley—at least, the little bit that trickles down, compared to what the tech lords hoard? One survey found that 10 percent of households in the Bay Area held two-thirds of the investable assets. And in the heart of the valley—Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties—did you know that eight households hold more wealth than the bottom half of households combined?

Inequality is a problem, sure. But don’t we need to fight for Silicon Valley because California is fighting for its democracy? Our tech firms provide the tools and platforms (and the campaign donations) on which our democracy runs, right? Where do we express ourselves freely except on tech platforms?

 But how can you say that when Meta, Twitter, and other tech companies routinely undermine democracy here and around the world? Social media allowed Russia and foreign actors to interfere in our elections. Overseas, tech companies collaborate with tyrannical governments in ways that put democratic advocates and activists at risk. Why should Californians fight for Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and other wealthy handmaidens of authoritarians?

Because we would be fighting for ourselves. California simply can’t allow the federal government to impose laws and regulations on any Californian—even those working in tech. We know that when Washington goes to war on us, our freedom suffers. The federal government has recently sought to strip us of the power to protect ourselves against environmental pollution, climate change, and gun violence. The U.S. Supreme Court eliminated our constitutional reproductive rights. How can we ever trust the feds?

Fair point, but Silicon Valley doesn’t respect our rights either. Tech firms steal our data, and there’s nothing we can do about it. They allow others to use their platforms to spread lies that destroy our lives—and hide behind liability shields. Silicon Valley thinks it can get away with anything because we need it.

How can we be on Silicon Valley’s side?

And how can we not be?

The post Should California Fight for or Against Silicon Valley? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Instead, internet governance is a contest for power between the most powerful tech companies, who put their shareholders first and want the internet to be a free-for-all, and national governments, which prioritize the political interests of their own officials.

In this contest, both sides create the pretense of democracy. Facebook, based in Menlo Park, has created its own “independent oversight” board of global experts, though it’s unelected, and chosen by Facebook. The European Union touts its tougher regulation of privacy and the internet—but those regulators are also unelected, and impose their rules on people far from Europe.

Which is why the internet needs a democratic government that operates beyond the reach of tech companies or national government. Such a system must be both local—to allow people to govern the internet where they live—and transnational, just like the internet itself.

There is as yet no clearly articulated vision of such a government, but there are many constituent pieces that could be mixed together.

A Europe-based network of human rights organizations has developed a Charter of Digital Rights—Article 4, for example: “Every person has the right to freedom of speech and expression in the digital world”—that could be part of the constitution of an internet government. The NetMundial Initiative, developed in recent years with a strong push from the World Economic Forum and a previous Brazilian government, offers ideas for international governance of the internet built around a council that mixes rotating and permanent members.

There are lessons to be learned from ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a somewhat democratic non-profit that, from a Los Angeles base, successfully governed a narrow part of the internet—the domain name system—with participation from more than 110 countries from 1998 to 2016.

An effective internet government must be collective—because the internet’s power, and commercial value, lie not in any individual user or data, but in the aggregation of users and data. In a must-read essay in Noema magazine (which is published by the California-based Berggruen Institute), Matt Prewitt, president of the RadicalxChange Foundation, suggested structuring Internet governance not around individual data rights, but rather around a series of “data coalitions”—online unions that would give communities of users democratic authority.

“Data cannot be owned, but must be governed,” Prewitt wrote. “Data must be the subject of shared democratic decisions rather than individual, unilateral ones. This presents particular challenges for liberal legal orders that have typically centered on individual rights.”

In a similar vein, I’d suggest that the internet’s democratic government combine multiple forms of democratic governance.

The center of such a government should be a citizens’ assembly—a tool used around the world by countries and communities to get democratic verdicts that are independent of elites. This citizens’ assembly would consist of 1,000 people who, together, would be representative by age, gender, and national origin of the global community of internet users. They would not be elected individually, but rather chosen via randomized processes that use sortition (or drawing lots).

The assembly would be supplemented by an online platform that allowed people to report problems, make suggestions, or even petition for proposals that could be voted upon by Internet users everywhere, in a global referendum. The models for such a platform include Rousseau, the controversial online environment through which Italy’s Five Star Movement governed itself for a time, and Decide Madrid, the online participatory framework that has spread from the Spanish capital to more than 100 cities worldwide.

National governments and tech companies would try desperately to influence this government, but they would not be in charge of it. And each citizens’ assembly would dissolve after two or three years—making it harder for the powerful to lobby it.

While the government would live online, it should have a real-world headquarters in the 18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau’s hometown of Geneva.

If such a government endured and succeeded, it could join the ranks of international organizations like the World Health Organization or the International Red Cross. It also could offer a model for international democratic governance to address off-line global problems, from public health to climate change.

The post The Internet Needs Its Own Democratic Government appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These two companies alone suck up an astounding 60 percent of all online advertising in the world (outside China). With Amazon taking another 9 percent, that leaves a mere 30 percent of global digital ad revenue to be split among tens of thousands of media outlets, many of them local publications. With digital online advertising now comprising more than half of all ad spending (and projected to grow further), this domination has greatly contributed to underfunded and failing news industries in country after country.

Australia’s situation is typical. Its Competition and Consumer Commission found that for every hundred Australian dollars spent by online advertisers, $47 goes to Google and $24 to Facebook.

Most Australians who access their news online don’t go to the original news source. Instead, they absorb the gist of the news from Facebook and Google’s headlines and preview blurbs. With fewer people clicking through these links, the digital media platforms effectively have turned thousands of publishers and broadcasters into little more than uncompensated ghostwriters of content.

That’s why Facebook and Google receive the lion’s share of revenue from digital ads, rather than the original news sources. Platforms could tweak their design and algorithms to purposefully drive users to the original news sources’ websites; but they don’t. They prefer to repackage and monetize product from the original producer without paying for it. In other industries, that’s called theft.

Australia decided to fight this thieving duopoly with some rules-setting of its own. A new law approved by the Australian Parliament requires large digital media companies to compensate Australian news outlets fairly for their proprietary content, and to submit to binding arbitration with news publishers if they can’t agree on terms. Media outlets around the world are watching to see how this plays out.

Google initially fought the proposal, but finally negotiated deals with Australian news publishers. But Facebook flexed its muscle by cutting off Australia entirely from its platform for several days. This prevented Aussie news publishers and everyday users—including important government agencies like health, fire and crisis services—from posting, viewing or sharing news content.

The result was jarring, the proverbial “shot heard ’round the world.” Facebook censored Australian users more effectively than the Chinese communist government ever could, prompting charges of “big tech authoritarianism.” Facebook finally relented to Australia’s requirement, in return for some vague and uncertain concessions. But the flexing of raw, naked platform power was unmistakably clear.

Now a similar battle is playing out in the state of Maryland. Over the last 10 years, U.S. newspapers’ advertising revenue decreased by 62 percent, and without that source of funding, newsroom employment dropped by nearly half. That decline coincided with a huge increase in digital media use and, according to Pew Research Center, today more than half of U.S. adults report often receiving their news from social media, search, or podcasts, and only a third from news websites or apps. Those numbers zoom off the charts for young people 29 and under.

Squeezed by these economics, Maryland approved America’s first tax on digital ad revenue earned inside its borders, targeting companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. The measure is projected to generate as much as $250 million annually, dedicated to schools. The tech giants are threatening lawsuits against Maryland, even as Connecticut and Indiana legislators have introduced similar measures.

But the real battle is just beginning. One of the most important, unsettled debates of the Internet Age is whether digital media platforms like Facebook, Google/YouTube, and Twitter are the new “public square,” a kind of global free-speech Agora, or just the latest techno variety of old-fashioned publishers and broadcasters. Or a hybrid of these.

With each crisis revealing the gap between the tech companies’ public-square pretentions and their very real publishing power, the debate has intensified. Following the U.S. Capitol ransacking, Facebook, Google, and Twitter all decided to discontinue “publishing” the president of the United States. Before that—as the platforms tried to contain their toxic pipeline of pandemic and election disinformation and racial tension—they slapped warning labels on posts and removed the content of certain users.

Now, in response to Australia’s law, Facebook pulled the plug on an entire country. That’s something only a giant monopoly publisher can do. In 2014, when Spain enacted legislation requiring Google to pay Spanish news outlets for the article snippets in its search results, Google bullied the government and ultimately closed its new service there.

Even before the past year’s seminal events, Facebook, Google, and Twitter acted as publishers by allowing their “engagement” algorithms to make critical decisions about which content is featured at the top of users’ news feeds, and what is promoted and amplified. Their sophisticated “long tail” publishing machines precisely target niche users, showing different content to different people, including political ads.

These are not passive online chat boards, and the Big Tech platforms are not merely managers of the digital public square. They are “robot publishers,” in which algorithms do the essential duties of an editor. From a liability or accountability standpoint, it should matter little that there is a supercomputer behind the curtain, instead of a human.

So it’s pretty difficult to argue credibly that these platforms are not in some sense publishers, deciding what content and sources should disappear or be amplified. These companies have more in common with the New York Times, CNN, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp than they do with an online Wikiboard or free speech corner in London’s Hyde Park.

Indeed, Facebook’s and Google/YouTube’s algorithmically curated machines, with 2.6 billion and 2 billion users, respectively, are the two largest publishers and broadcasters in human history. Yet existing law does not treat these companies as either, when it comes to being liable or answerable for their mistakes and abuses. The digital media platforms, seeking to avoid accountability and its costs, hide behind the fact they have billions of users generating content. But that should not obscure the centrality of their publisher role.

Critics of the Maryland and Australian approach claim that treating Facebook and Google as publishers threatens the principle of an open internet, which views the internet as an infinite free speech zone for information sharing, consumer choice, and global connection. It’s a beautiful but outdated dream, and it must be balanced by the “copyright principle,” which was established years before the internet was even invented. Copyright law mandates that any person or organization cannot swipe someone else’s content and monetize it without paying for it.

There is something inherently basic and fair about digital media giants paying for the original news content they use to drive traffic to their sites. But the open internet principle essentially demands that traditional news sources bear the financial burden of continuing to produce quality news without fair compensation, much as it demanded that Napster be allowed to distribute copyrighted music for free without compensating musical artists and record companies.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the open internet principle will cannibalize what’s left of the news media. With no credible news sources to steal from, Facebook and Google would be even more overrun by disinformation. They are eating their own seed.

Canada says it will adopt the Australian approach, possibly India, too. And France and Austria have passed similar laws. The U.S. is known for encouraging competition, so you would think regulators would jump into action. Yet the Biden administration has been silent on this subject. Will the United States, a longtime champion of the free press, step up?

The post The Real Battle Between Big Tech and the Free Press Is Just Beginning appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.