Photo by Albert Stoynov on Unsplash 

Accepting the premise that the internet has become an essential planet-wide utility leads to the conclusion that current governance of that utility does not meet the needs of those it serves – corporate monopolies, like the ones that effectively own the internet, seldom meet needs beyond stockholder profitability. That’s why most of the planet finds ways to regulate essential utilities on behalf of the public good. This article is one in a series examining possible internet regulatory strategies. 

In this case, we’re going to consider the example of electric service utilities, and how those utilities evolved from largely unregulated property of inventors and entrepreneurs into their current state. 

Of course, that ‘current state’ varies widely . In Texas, for example, governance has hardly (unsurprisingly) evolved at all. The grotesquely misnamed Electrical Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) routinely places consumers at deadly risk as weather extremes become commonplace – but it also does an exceptional job of ensuring energy company profits (of course it does – Texas, right?)

In contrast to that approach, the largest electrical utility on earth, State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), functions as a state-owned enterprise operating under fairly stringent control. Unlike ERCOT, SGCC does not fuck around. When an SGCC municipal general manager was implicated in a corruption investigation, he wound up doing time – all his time, that is – under a sentence of life imprisonment.

While it is highly satisfying to imagine one of the billionaire tech bros who mismanage the internet spending the remainder of their days in orange pajamas and flip-flops, there are plenty of other regulatory examples between Texas-style laissez faire and the hard-ass management style of China.

The historic transition from entrepreneur-driven, privatized early electric grids to current state produced a wide range of operating models. And while any form of regulation would be preferable to the Internet’s current state, the electrical regulatory model most applicable to this discussion is the modest phenomena of community-owned electrical co-ops.

Utility co-ops first came into widespread U.S. adoption as part of the New Deal. Per the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, such co-ops currently provide service to 56% of the United States geographically, with a user base of around 42 million people. Many of these co-ops are already both serving private data centers as well as providing home internet connectivity to their customers. Similar examples exist in other countries as well (notably the UK and France).

Unlike corporately owned utilities, co-ops pay back dividends to their owners/customers (not private investors) and are incentivized to ensure they meet the needs of the communities they serve. If – as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed – Artificial Intelligence will be a utility, it is entirely too important a utility to be managed solely by the likes of Altman. As Altman and his fellow oligarchs drive the acceptance of AI as the new default interface for the internet, potential service outages become even more dangerous than they already are.

In much the same way the U.S. Federal Government encouraged the development of Depression Era utility co-ops, it is not at all far-fetched to imagine a post-Trump era federal government encouraging those co-ops to become the backbone of a responsive, distributed grid delivering de-shittified internet services and cloud computing as a publicly owned and responsibly regulated network.

There is nothing inherently impossible about this. It requires political will and the willingness to finally stand up to the billionaire class – and take back the online public spaces they’ve privatized for their own enrichment.

It also requires treating the big tech companies like the overblown monopolies they are – and breaking them up. This too, is largely a matter of political will. The biggest tech monopoly of all time, Bell Telephone, was dismantled in a previous era when the U.S. Department of Justice had better things to do than target the perceived enemies of a deranged president. As part of the process, we might also start requiring leeches like Altman, Bezos, et. al. to pay their goddam taxes.

Or maybe we do both, in a classic carrot and stick scenario. Give the tech bro oligarchs a chance to divest – at a modest profit – to regional/local digital services co-ops, or face taxation – at progressively higher rates over time – on the billions they made from services built on what is rightfully a shared community asset.

Again, there is nothing particularly new about any of this. The people who built the original electrical grids made out just fine (except for Tesla, who went quietly nuts and died in poverty). Later generations benefited from their work under the regulatory auspices of governments that actually worked for them.

Regulating the internet’s infrastructure as a public utility, following the model of electrical utilities, works just fine. In some ways, the EU is already working on it. Regulating the internet’s content, however, is another matter… as well as another article (stay tuned).