Have You Heard of the Open Source Internet? The Antidote to the Capitalist Web Already Exists

In the early days of the Internet, as you know, no one knew if you were a dog. The Internet was a place where you could be anyone.

More importantly, it was also a place where you could find anything: that rare book, the perfect pair of neon pink tights, or a community for people with unusual health conditions. The basic model of the internet was that it was decentralized and everyone had a say—even dogs.

Marketers realized they could use the Internet to make money, but no one had yet figured out how to do it. The original search engine indexed every page on the web: you could literally browse the entire web if you wanted to.

For those of us who were there, it was like the coolest club, except everyone there was a weirdo, a nerd, or some other kind of outcast. But like all the best clubs, the internet didn’t stay exclusive. Marketers figured out a way to use it to sell things (mostly pornography at first), and the internet became a fact of life, not a niche interest.

From consolidation to “enrichment”

At the beginning of the 21st century we witnessed another phenomenon: consolidation.

Facebook, through its links to the college experience in the US, became a place where you could connect with friends. Amazon, through its distribution network, became a place where you could buy… well, anything. Google was this news source and leveraged that position to become the default news source on browsers and mobile phones.

Initially, this consolidation happened because these tools were great for the people who used them. Then, the tools became less great for the end user and instead became great for the people who sold stuff on them (mostly advertisers).

Yet people continued to use these tools because the switching costs were high or there was no viable alternative.

Finally, these products became great for the people who own them, not great for anyone else. The competition was squeezed out, too. The most appropriate term for this process is “enshittification,” coined by author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow. It’s common in digital products as diverse as ridesharing, streaming services, and search engines.

So now, instead of connecting with friends, finding unique products, or having information from all over the world at your fingertips, the internet has become a shopping mall, advertising the same low-quality products everywhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKBQPv4gvXc

Google is currently facing antitrust litigation in the US over its online advertising practices.

An alternative world exists

So what was the alternative? It was there all along. In fact, much of the Internet still runs on it.

This is called the free and open source software movement.

In the early days of technology – in the 1950s and 1960s – most people involved in technology and programming were hobbyists and tinkerers who shared code to help each other build things, grow, and learn.

A social movement emerged around the ethics of software distribution, based on four basic principles:

1. software should be free and can be used for any purpose
2. the software and code it relies on should be available for research and modification
3. you should be free to share software with others,
4. you should feel free to share the software you have modified.

For many people involved in the movement, creating proprietary software or working with companies that did so was unethical: thus, the free software movement was born.

The open-source software movement provides an alternative that is more open to proprietary software, but still relies on the assumption that people should have access to the code.

This approach has a lot in common with the modern “right to repair movement”—a company can sell you a product, but you should be able to take it apart and fix it if it doesn’t work.

Open-source software is built into the internet. More than 95% of the top million web servers—the computers that send web content to your laptop or browser—run Linux, an open-source operating system (instead of Windows or iOS).

Netscape, one of the first web browsers, was released as open source software, and the Firefox browser remains open source to this day.

Tux the penguin is the mascot of Linux, chosen by its creator Linus Torvalds. Anthony Easton/Flickr, CC BY

The right to repair the internet

How different would the Internet look if the open source movement were even more dominant?

It’s instructive to look at what happens when for-profit tech giants share code and documentation, either intentionally (like Twitter) or accidentally (like Google).

In both cases, analysis of the code or documents revealed oddities that benefited the companies or their founders and that company representatives said or implied did not exist.

In these cases, openness meant people could understand what was happening in a way that had not been possible before.

Understanding is one thing. It would be even better if people could use what was spent to get their own data, so the cost of switching to an alternative service – whether a social network, search engine or shopping provider – would be lower.

Imagine being able to write a post and choose which social media platform to post to, or having one app to keep up with all your friends. Open source code and such behavior would be allowed, which would almost certainly mean that this is a reality.

And that reality is still possible. The recent antitrust ruling against Google showed the tech giants that the consolidation required to strengthen the user and vendor experience—and enrich the owners of the tech companies—is on the cards.

Without consolidation, tech companies must compete for users by offering better services, which benefits everyone.

The right-to-repair movement is also gaining momentum. Perhaps one day we will have the right to understand—and repair—the technology we use on the internet. That would be a future worth fighting for.