We will likely need more than the restrictions on capital suggested by Zuboff to address the important issues she raises. It's very difficult to imagine in the US context, but we need to reinvent public service media for the digital era. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-surveillance-society-technology.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

This means inventing an alternative economic structure for the information ecosystem that supports democratic deliberation and participation. As she suggests, news and information are different from oil or steel. It is not simply a matter of finding ways to avoid monopoly rents.

It means finding ways to build public interest priorities into information search/curation systems. Restricting access to personal information will not, on its own, achieve this. Limits on data collection and use don't cultivate this positive commitment to democracy.

The libertarian fantasy of the commercial internet as a (potential) site of unfettered free speech makes such suggestions sound unduly interventionist. But this fantasy is just that. Curation -- automated curation -- has become inevitable.

At the moment, this means commercial companies are routinely selecting false and inflammatory information and pumping it into the feeds of those most likely to respond to it on a mass scale. This is the kind of curation that no society can withstand for long.

This is not "free speech" -- this is the deliberate creation of an information environment shaped entirely by commercial imperatives. These imperatives can be shaped negatively through regulation, but they cannot be magically transformed into positive public service commitments.

It takes time and conscious effort to develop the institutions, dispositions, and practices that foster democratic governance -- we cannot count on these emerging as natural consequences of the commercial marketplace (as recent events suggest).

Zuboff accurately frames the magnitude of the problem: this is an epochal shift in the information environment that requires a reinvention of the institutions and practices that shape our information environment. Silicon valley, on its own, is not up to the task.