Should governments run the internet?

Karl D. Stephan

November 19, 2024 6 Reactions

But whether a government-run cyberspace would be public-interested is not clear. Left to themselves, government-run organisations tend to become government-interested rather than public-minded.

One recent example is the way that the US Department of Education did a face-plant with its attempt to follow Congress's instructions to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid website and system. The resulting dumpster-fire disaster had universities all over the country pushing back their application deadlines and losing millions of dollars of student financial aid, a mess which I understand is ongoing to this day.

With the election of Donald Trump, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona is packing his desk and checking his retirement plans. If Cardona's work is an example of how government can operate digital systems in the public interest, good luck with getting it to run politically-oriented social media.

If the Department of Education depended for its operating revenue on having a smoothly working website, with a real downside consequence if it wasn't, either we'd have a smoothly working website or, in a short while, we wouldn't have a Department of Education at all. And the latter outcome would be just fine with certain parties shortly to occupy the executive branch of government.

Ivory tower

Despite all the bots, the Musks running X and Bezoses running Facebook, and every other problem Lepore cites, and despite the fears of armed attacks on polling sites, the election we just experienced last fortnight took place peacefully and issued in an outcome that was not desired by the majority of experts and would-be regulators that Lepore would put in charge of our digital political system. And I'm sure that she would say, "See what happened? Democracy failed! All these young black and Hispanic men are voting against their self-interest because they've been bamboozled by the system."

Now, some people are easily bamboozled, but a principle of democracy that Lepore didn't mention in her article is that if a person meets the minimal legal requirements to vote (age and citizenship, primarily), he or she is free to vote any durn way they please. That principle assigns any responsibility for avoiding bamboozlement to the individual, not to any government agency in charge of preventing voter bamboozling.

I almost hate to say it, but Lepore shows that many people in the higher reaches of academia are more parochial (isolated in a small group of like-minded individuals) than most of the average Joes and Jills they criticise. The problem of regulating political speech was stated well by the Roman poet Juvenal when he asked, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" meaning "Who watches the watchmen?"

Any such regulation inevitably introduces bias, and while there are certain incendiary types of speech that common sense says should be prohibited, the distortions of the present "artificial state," as Lepore puts it, are something that the average voter probably takes into account before voting.

I do agree with Lepore that digital technology has severely altered the way the democratic process works in this country. But I think the answer is not less democracy and more autocratic control, but more democracy in the sense of grassroots movements towards things like local bans on smartphones for people under 16 or so, and some kind of back-to-reality movement whose outlines are not clear at this time. In the meantime, we can rejoice that most of the dire predictions about the recent elections didn't come true. But of course, dire is in the eye of the beholder.

How do you think digital technology has affected democracy? Sound off below.

Karl D. Stephan is a professor of electrical engineering at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. His ebook Ethical and Otherwise: Engineering in the Headlines is available in Kindle format and also in the iTunes store. 

This article has been republished, with permission, from his blog Engineering Ethics.

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