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Beyond Big Tech: A manifesto for a new digital economy

70+ orgs back bold vision for a better, fairer digital world and call on states to invest for the public good

Graphic of tree resembling a connected, tech ecosystem, with branches, roots and people icons

We, people and organizations from across the globe, are fighting for a future where the digital infrastructure underpinning our world works for people, workers, and the planet. And where creativity and innovation can flourish free from centralized control. 

We believe in a world where power over data and technology is decentralized, redistributed and democratized, instead of being held by harmful tech monopolies. Where people can choose between a wide variety of digital tools to explore and connect, without giving up their privacy and other rights. Where we really get to control and trust what we see on our social media feeds, instead of algorithms designed to surveil, exploit, enrage, and addict.

It’s a world we know is possible, necessary and urgent. But it won’t come about by chance. Creating the digital future we all deserve will take a determined ‘whole of government’ effort from states – to break up the powerful tech monopolies, steer the digital economy in a direction that promotes innovation, fair competition, and democratic values, and offer people genuine freedom and choice in goods and services that are designed to serve them, rather than use and abuse them. 

Big Tech corporations have locked us into a narrow and warped version of the digital world that chips away at our democracies and concentrates wealth, while deepening global inequalities. We must break down Big Tech’s walled gardens, which protect their profit margins, not the public interest. Doing so will unleash progress, fair competition and innovation in a new digital economy – one built to serve the billions of lives the Internet is weaved from, not the tiny group that currently holds the strings. Doing so will require states to:

1) Break Open Big Tech to level the playing field

To create the conditions for a new digital economy, regulators must target the structural power of the tech giants and level the playing field so alternatives can emerge and scale. This includes:

  1. Break up dominant tech firms through stronger enforcement of competition and antitrust law and regulation to enforce structural separations, and prevent further consolidation by blocking more mergers and acquisitions. 
  2. Require dominant tech firms to be more interoperable to enable users to freely choose and move between different platforms and services, open up new entrants to the market, and make platform recommendation systems customizable for users.
  3. Tax dominant tech firms to redistribute the enormous profits they currently extract as rents, including through digital services taxes. 

2) Stimulate a new and fair digital economy 

States’ industrial policies and strategies must proactively foster a more open and diverse ecosystem of digital services that serves public goals and not just private profit. This includes:

  1. Commit significant investment towards public digital infrastructure based on free and open source software and the digital commons. 
  2. Use public procurement as a market lever to encourage the adoption and scaling of open and interoperable alternatives to the Big Tech incumbents.  
  3. Put in place and enforce strong human rights safeguards and accountable governance frameworks, including over public digital infrastructure. 

The digital world is our world; its tools are the infrastructure of human connection. It is too vast and important to leave in the hands of a tiny, self-interested few. By using these levers, states can move beyond efforts to simply mitigate the symptoms of Big Tech’s concentrated power and harmful business models and allow a better and fairer digital economy to emerge. We urge them to begin now.

Read the white paper:
"Beyond Big Tech: A framework for building a new and fair digital economy"


Signed, 

Robin Berjon, Governance & Standards Technologist

Dr. Ian Brown, Centre for Technology and Society at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV)

Dr. Christina J. Colclough, The Why Not Lab

Dr. Maria Farrell, Writer

Michelle Meagher, Competition lawyer and author

Accountable Tech 

African Internet Rights Alliance

AfroLeadership

AI Forensics

Alternatif Bilisim (AiA-Alternative Informatics Association)

Alliance4Europe

ARTICLE 19

Associação Alternativa Terrazul 

Association for Progressive Communications

Balanced Economy Project

Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communications 

Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP)

Center for the Study of Organized Hate

Centre for Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Governance in Africa (CAIEGA)

Centre for Internet and Society, India

Check My Ads Institute

Coding Rights

Commons Network

Consortium of Ethiopian Human Rights Organizations

Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO)

Council for Responsible Social Media  

CyberLove

Data & Society 

Defend Democracy

Digital Action

digiQ

Digitalcourage

Ekō

European Digital Rights (EDRi)

Fair Vote UK

Federación de Consumidores y Usuarios CECU

Forum on Information and Democracy

Foxglove

German NGO Forum on Environment & Development

GRESEA

Hindus for Human Rights

Homo Digitalis 

Human Rights Journalists Network Nigeria 

HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement

IT 4 CHange

Lie Detectors

LobbyControl e.V.

LODelle

Nexus Research Cooperative

Open Future

Open MIC

Open Markets Institute

Open Rights Group 

Panoptykon Foundation

People Vs Big Tech

PLZ Cooperative

Public Citizen

Rebalance Now

SHARE Foundation

SocialTIC

SOMO

Superbloom Design 

TEDIC

Tehila 

The Citizens

The London Story

Transnational Institute

UBUNTEAM

Universität zu Köln

Uplift

Waag Futurelab

WACC

Wikimedia Germany

T20 Working Group on Information Integrity, Interoperability & Media Diversity (i3M)

VoxPublic

World Economy, Ecology & Development - WEED

Xnet, Institute for Democratic Digitalisation