The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure | Knight First Amendment Institute

"The goal of this essay is not to propose a specific plan to implement public service digital media in the United States or elsewhere but to introduce the question of what we might want such media to do – it’s a possible strategy, not a discussion of the specific tactics needed to achieve it. Our responses to the challenges of the contemporary media ecosystem are marked by failures of imagination. So long as we are wedded to the idea that a few large companies will set the rules for speech and discussion online, we will constrain the solution space of possible interventions. My goal is neither to eliminate the powerful internet platforms nor to cede the future to them – it is to imagine possible futures where surveillant advertising delivered by monopoly providers isn’t the only available option to build a thriving future of democratic communications...."