Access Rules: Freeing Data from Big Tech for a Better Future

Access Rules

Access Rules

FREEING DATA FROM BIG TECH FOR A BETTER FUTURE

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

and Thomas Ramge

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2022 by Thomas Ramge and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, author. | Ramge, Thomas, 1971- author.

Title: Access rules : freeing data from big tech for a better future / Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021038723 (print) | LCCN 2021038724 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520387737 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520387744 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Big data—Access control—United States. | Big data—Social aspects—United States. | Information technology—Social aspects—United States. | Technological innovations—Social aspects—United States.

Classification: LCC QA76.9.B45 M39 2022 (print) | LCC QA76.9.B45 (ebook) | DDC 005.7—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038723

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038724

Manufactured in the United States of America

31  30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.

Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."

MARIE CURIE

Contents

1. The Power of Information

2. Data Alchemy

3. Schumpeter’s Nightmare

4. Data Capitalism

5. Might and Machines

6. Access Rules

7. Open Data Reloaded

8. The End of Data Colonialism

Acknowledgments

Further Readings and References

Index

1

The Power of Information

In the early 1730s, a young publisher in Philadelphia would hand over two bundles to the city’s postal couriers on a regular basis: a large one of copies of his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, and, covertly, a smaller one of bank notes. The money wasn’t to cover the postage. It was a straightforward bribe. The young printer had no choice in the matter. His name: Benjamin Franklin.

Fifteenth child of a soap and candle maker, he had acquired the Gazette from Samuel Keimer, a flamboyant but heavily indebted publisher who fled his creditors for the Caribbean after a brief sojourn in jail. Ambitious and enterprising, the young Franklin was a brilliant essayist with a keen nose for the stories that caught the interest of a growing class of readers in prerevolutionary America. Under his leadership, his paper soon came to be seen as witty, entertaining, and politically smart while eschewing an overtly rebellious tone against the British colonial authority. But at the same time the paper was imbued with Franklin’s conviction that a free press would pave the way to an American democracy.

The paper’s quality, however, did little to help the talented publisher increase its circulation or influence. Unlike Franklin, no one would mistake the editor of Philadelphia’s largest newspaper, the American Weekly Mercury, for a brilliant essayist. But he did hold down a secondary job working for the British Crown. This was Andrew Bradford, Philadelphia’s postmaster.

At the time, a colonial postmaster could decide at his own discretion which newspapers were sent free of charge through the mail—and which not. In a nutshell: A self-interested supernumerary of the King of England controlled the flow of information and its commercial use. The Mercury was sent by mail, and the Gazette wasn’t. It was that simple. Benjamin Franklin was forced to play along. He managed to keep the Gazette halfway afloat by bribing the postal couriers whenever he could. But, in 1736, the situation changed.

The British colonial postmaster general had become increasingly dissatisfied with Bradford’s services, especially with the meager profits he was generating. Consequently, he appointed Franklin, clearly a far more capable publisher, to be regional postmaster. Franklin immediately put an end to unfair competition in newspaper distribution. All newspapers in colonial Pennsylvania would now be distributed on equal terms. From then on, the Pennsylvania Gazette’s circulation grew. Experiencing how the most important information channel in colonial New England could be abused shaped Franklin’s outlook for the rest of his political life. And the postal system remained an issue dear to him. In 1757, Franklin was appointed co-deputy postmaster of the British Crown for all the American colonies. He was dismissed from this office shortly before the American Revolution for being too close to the rebels. During the Second Continental Congress, Benjamin Franklin advanced the cause of establishing an independent United States Postal Service. In 1775, he was named the first US postmaster general. The Constitution explicitly mentioned an independent postal service and made it a federal agency. The Postal Service Act, too, bore Franklin’s handiwork. It required the postal service to deliver all newspapers—by far the most important source of information for citizens at the time—inexpensively and on equal terms throughout the country. The US Post became an irrevocable element of the founding myth of the United States.

What seems obvious today, after more than two centuries of experience with democracy, was already clear to the Founding Fathers: Access to information is the foundation of democratic decision-making. The principle of a free press means that journalists can report news and offer analysis and commentary and ensure that what they write reaches people.

Fast forward to spring 2020. As the first pandemic lockdowns were lifted, major decisions confronted politicians, society, and individuals: What can we now do again, and where? How can further waves of the pandemic be brought under control more quickly, more effectively, and, above all, in a more targeted way? This required information, and not just about the virus, but also about how it spreads and how people behave. Telecommunications and navigation system providers granted public health authorities access to regional mobility data, but that was neither granular enough nor did it help individuals to know whether and when they had been exposed to the virus.

What was needed was a way to trace individual infections. A number of Asian nations had weathered the first wave well; by manually tracking infections, they were able to quarantine exposed individuals effectively. Governments wanted to build on this experience but use a technological solution—smartphone apps. These apps were primarily designed to inform users when they’d had contact with an infected person. However, a number of countries also wanted tracing apps to provide information in anonymized form about how infections were spreading within a given locality. The hope was that, armed with such information, decision makers might avoid another complete lockdown and instead adopt measures more limited in time and scope.

With this goal in mind, public health authorities negotiated with Google and Apple. These two mega-businesses dominate the smartphone market. Their help and support are vital for tracing apps to work. Otherwise, such apps can’t accurately measure the distance between users and won’t be available for download in the app store. To the surprise of government officials, the Silicon Valley duopoly refused to help. Instead, the pair took on a role usually played by privacy activists—as evangelists of minimal data use. Google and Apple executives pushed for maximum privacy protection and, what’s more, effectively answered a question normally left to democratically elected public officials who (one hopes!) are well-briefed by their scientific advisers: How best can we protect people’s lives in a pandemic with all the possibilities on offer from digital technologies?

In May 2020, it became clear that Google and Apple would not provide authorities with the technical capabilities to get access to the basic public health information they needed to make vital decisions. Dominant digital platforms exercised a de facto veto over the democratic flow of information. Put simply, no longer could Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, or Angela Merkel, or the governments of Japan, Australia, or South Africa, decide what information was available to whom and in what way to combat the pandemic. Instead, the decision was being made by Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai. Their decision crippled tracing apps in Europe, but also in some states in the United States, as well as countries like Singapore and Australia. Apple and Google’s actions may have protected individual privacy but left public health authorities without valuable data on how the virus spreads and where.

This book is about the power of information—and how power may shift as we change the rules on access to information. The frustrations of Benjamin Franklin remind us that unequal distribution of information, control over its flow, and resulting power imbalances are not just a phenomenon of the digital age. But the behavior of Google and Apple over tracing apps graphically illustrates how control over information in a data-driven world is shifting in favor of those who generate, store, and analyze information flows on their digital platforms. Since the days of Benjamin Franklin, information power has been turned upside down. Today, data colonialists in Silicon Valley, and to a lesser extent China, rule much of the world. In fact, these private corporations shape information access just as much within the United States, influencing economic transactions and democratic decision-making.

Machine-readable information, the wealth of data the Internet and smartphones have brought us, the rise of major digital platforms and of the superstar companies that create and control them, the digital collaboration tools we use and the traces of data we leave behind through them—all of these raise an old question in a new way: How do we legitimize—and limit—the power of knowledge?

Spoiler alert. In this book, we’ll offer a clear, concise, and, we hope, compelling answer. We have to prize open access to information if we are to counter power asymmetries and eliminate undue information-based digital domination. We need much more broadly based data access to advance scientific, social, and economic progress in the service of sustainable development. Access rules. Because concentration of information power is good for a few, but bad for innovation, cooperation, and for each and every one of us.

Through our call to broaden access to information, we contribute to discussions about how one can contribute to an equitable digital transformation of our economy and our society. In many public and private debates, the question of informational power is rarely discussed. And when it does come up, the discussion is often one-sided and defensive, as if the answer to informational power is to be found in people’s continued ignorance rather than their empowerment. Most of the time, though, the question of informational power is not even raised. We find this surprising for three reasons: First, it shows a lack of understanding of the nature of power; second, it doesn’t do justice to the role information technologies play; and third, because policy responses to technology-driven imbalances of informational power are rare.

According to Max Weber, power is every [c]hance, within a social relationship, of enforcing one’s own will even against resistance, whatever the basis for this [c]hance might be (formatting omitted). This includes information. The entire theory of innovation since Joseph Schumpeter revolves around the question of how informational advantages and advances in knowledge can be converted into market power. Manuel Castells refers to the postindustrial age as informationalism, because it’s so strongly shaped by the role of information and the power derived from it. In 1999, US economists Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian issued a guide for digital companies in the twenty-first century, explaining how they could use platforms and network effects to seize economic power. The title was not only revelatory for us—it was also inspiring: Information Rules. Superstar companies in Silicon Valley and, increasingly, Asia have followed this guidance—it’s no coincidence that Google hired Hal Varian as chief economist in 2007 and went on to establish information-based dominance. When information rules, we need new rules of access.

Thanks to technology’s influence on the distribution of informational power between organizations and companies, individuals and customers, and societies and states, the digitization and datafication of the world has yielded a series of dialectical developments. Over recent decades, whenever digital innovators have vowed a major technological leap forward, they always equally promised informational empowerment for individuals or small organizations. The personal computer (PC) supposedly democratized computing power, offering electronic data processing to the masses when once it had been reserved for big business and governments. The Internet opened the door to the world’s knowledge for anyone with access to a networked computer. Google’s founding mission was to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. And social media, strongly supported by mobile Internet and smartphones, finally seemed to be taking away the keys from the old gatekeepers of informational power. The Arab Spring looked like an optimistic foreshadowing of how the exchange of information could fuel democratic debate and bring down dictators.

Each of these promises has in some respects been fulfilled. And yet every increase in the flow of information has resulted in a brutal countervailing force. The digital revolution intensified information asymmetries in a way that technological pioneers, from Alan Turing to Vint Cerf to Tim Berners-Lee, with their ambition to improve the world through technology, couldn’t have foreseen—and certainly didn’t intend. Put simply, in each wave of social unrest and political reform since the invention of the PC, information technology has been used to change social and economic structures and expand individual empowerment. But half a century later, these power structures have not only failed to crumble they have solidified in favor of centralization. All that has changed is the names of those in power. It’s no longer oil barons or bankers sitting on top of the economic power pyramid but Tim Cook and Satya Nadella, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and in China Baidu’s Robin Li and Tencent’s Pony Ma.

Their power stems from their ability to collect and analyze digital information, to keep exclusive control over it or dole it out if and when it suits them. To paraphrase Max Weber, they can advance their interests even against the resistance of others thanks to the power of their data. Thinking back to young Benjamin Franklin and his struggle to get his newspaper into circulation against the arbitrary whims of his state-sanctioned competitor, it seems like a bad joke of history that today’s Big Tech is competing against publishers for advertising income while publishing their content and thereby inhibiting profitable quality journalism. It’s not against the law, of course. And yet it undermines the dissemination of and access to information at the heart of technological, economic, and social innovation.

The shift of economic and media power—and political power—in favor of data-rich platforms has been mapped. In the United States, the debate has been advanced by, among others, Shoshana Zuboff with her interpretation of surveillance capitalism (and the unreasonably less popular Julie Cohen’s Between Truth and Power), Tim Wu with his work on net neutrality, Eli Pariser with his formulation of filter bubbles, and Roger McNamee’s settling of accounts with Facebook and the computer industry in general in his book Zucked. Experts, such as the antitrust scholar Lina Khan argued for strong regulatory measures. Adrian Wooldridge, columnist for the Economist, summarized the growing unease with Big Tech’s information dominance by suggesting the term techlash, the angry reaction of consumers and regulators against Big Tech’s power to control people and markets.

By 2021, Big Tech faced antitrust activities by regulators and policy makers across the globe. In the United States, forty-six of the fifty states had sued Facebook, accusing the social media behemoth of anticompetitive conduct. At the same time, Facebook also faced legal action from the Federal Trade Commission. Google, too, was sued by dozens of states for anticompetitive behavior, in at least three different lawsuits. The Trump administration had long and loudly criticized Big Tech for its alleged bias against the president. His successor, President Joe Biden, had not made Big Tech a campaign issue, but in office he swiftly nominated key critics of Big Tech to powerful positions in his administration: Tim Wu became Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy and Lina Khan was appointed Federal Trade Commissioner.

In Europe, the Danish liberal politician Margrethe Vestager had pushed antitrust actions against Big Tech for years as Commissioner for Competition. Under her leadership, the Commission levied fines in excess of $8 billion on Google (although the European Court of Justice reduced many of these fines on appeal). In December 2019, she was rewarded for her active stance by being elevated to the role of Executive Vice President of the Commission, promptly promising more antitrust action to come. Meanwhile in China, in late 2020 the government began its crack down on Big Tech, initially focusing on Alibaba and Jack Ma, Alibaba’s charismatic founder. First, the Chinese authorities prohibited the much-anticipated IPO of Ant Group, which runs China’s dominating digital payment platform Alipay. Then in April 2021, Alibaba was fined $2.8 billion for anticompetitive practices.

These regulatory actions seem impressive and focus on the right issue: rebalancing information power. But we doubt that they will have sufficient impact. Much of the analyses of the current gross imbalances in informational power has led policy makers and regulators to conclusions that are just as one-sided and reactive, as they often have been when critiquing digitization. The responses are still far too defensive in theory, and inefficient in practice. Perhaps the most visible example of such an approach has been Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), intended at least in part to hobble Silicon Valley data giants and give Europe’s citizens sovereignty over their personal information, and lauded by some Big Tech critics in the United States as an encouraging example of how to curb information power.

But despite its noble intentions, GDPR has in fact helped digital superstar companies enlarge