- Our nationality has long been one of the principle ways we identify ourselves.

Today's guests, those surveys the rise of net states, big-tech companies take you to the roles previously reserved for the nation state.

She's Alexis Wichowski, this week on the Story in the Public Square.

(upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to the Story in the Public Square where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes, the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

Joining me as he does every week in the co-host chair is my great friend and colleague G. Wayne Miller of the Providence Journal.

Each week we talk about big issues with great guests, storytellers, scholars, novelists, and more to make sense of the big stories shaping public life in the United States today.

This week we're joined by a remarkable scholar, public servant, and author of a book called The Information Trade.

She's Alexis Wichowski.

Alexis Wichowski, thank you so much for being with us.

- [Alexis] Glad to be here thanks so much.

- So there's a lot in your body of work that we wanna talk about, but let's start with The Information Trade, give our audience an overview of the book.

- So I think the best way to talk about the book is to talk about how I came to write the book, which is that, it starting in around 2015.

I noticed that the Big Tech companies were doing something a little bit different than when we had seen in the past.

They weren't just focusing on their digital products and services, they were getting involved in areas like defense and diplomacy and citizen services and even public infrastructure.

So I started to map out their activities in this space and came up with this notion of them, not as just companies but it is something similar to Nation-States.

And we called them net states.

So I proposed this idea back in 2017 and was able to track a few instances where we saw companies like Google and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon really moving into areas that used to be the sole domain of governments.

So that's what the book is about really, is it tracking the movements of net-states as they move into these areas that used to be the domain of governments.

- Can you give us a couple of specific examples of those instances where those companies are beginning to behave more like nations-states?

- Absolutely.

So one of the things we saw with Hurricane Maria a few years ago when it hit Texas, and when it started, when it hit Puerto Rico, is that despite the fact that the United States is responsible for emergency management in Puerto Rico, they sent something like 50 people to help out.

It was weeks before they send any really significant aid.

The people that responded most quickly to the complete blackout of the Island when Hurricane Maria hit were companies like Google.

They sent in, they have a project called Project Loon, which brings in internet and telecommunications services.

And they brought that in within 24 hours of the hurricane.

And Tesla, which is known for making cars also has a solar energy and battery storage company called Powerpack.

They stepped in to help rebuild the grid and were able to get the children's hospital back online again within just 24 or 48 hours after the storm.

So what we saw was not the United States taking care of its citizens in emergency response, but these net-States stepping in to take care of emergency response.

- Can I just follow up on that real quickly?

So when we think about the functions of government, though, we think about, in the ideal world anyways, particularly in a democratic republic such as ours, the government serving the Commonwealth, the common good, why are these companies taking on these roles?

- That's an excellent question.

I mean, some people could cynically say it's just a PR move, which it's certainly good PR to step in emergency situations.

But I think it's more of telling that they're taking these actions because government is not leading in the way that it needs to be leading, especially in the last four years.

So when the pandemic hit in March, in the United States, the first entities to step in and say they were going to send their workers home, make sure that hourly workers were still going to get their wages, even if they couldn't come into the warehouses.

We're not states, it was the net-states.

It was companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon.

And I think this is because there has been an absence of national leadership.

So there's been this whole vacuum to fill.

So that's one reason why.

And the second reason is that simply these net-states are expanding their markets beyond just their original products and services.

So think about Microsoft, for instance, they make Microsoft Office and Outlook and all of the web products, I mean computer products that we use for work.

But they're also now engaging in diplomacy.

They've opened up an office to the UN and they've opened up an office to the EU.

So they're trying to move forward on digital rights for people who use Microsoft products almost as if everyone that uses the Microsoft product is a citizen of Microsoft.

Now, the reason for this is that if they can expand the rights that are available to citizens in some countries to all of their user base, then this is really good for brand and trust, continuing to invest in their trust of their brand with their users.

- So these are capitalists companies, obviously.

And so, what is the overarching motivation?

Is it profit?

It's there a degree of, for lack of a better word megalomania on the part of the people that are running these companies?

What is really sort of the bedrock motivation to make these changes and these expansions into becoming net-states?

- I really think that it has to do with just basic empire building.

These companies have been extremely successful in moving from the original products and services into other sectors.

And I think that the more sectors they move into, the more sectors they realize they can move into.

So Amazon just announced they were gonna be fulfilling medical prescriptions.

They've moving heavily into the health sector.

Now, what can they do with all of this new information is data that they can then mine and harvest and sell.

So they're learning not just about our preferences for routine products, such as books or other things we might buy on the Amazon's marketplace, but now they're going to have our health history and health information as well.

So I think this is about expanding their empires into so many sectors that they're essentially becoming regulation-proofed.

For instance, the antitrust case that's been brought up against Google, it's just about Google search.

But Google search is just one piece of the Google empire at this point.

So I think that bumpy trust is actually not going to be as effective as regulators are hoping.

- Do you think the general population has an understanding of what is happening here?

Obviously, if they read your book and we highly recommend they would, but for people who may not have read the book or people who are not necessarily tech-savvy, people like myself who buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, tell me what your sense is of citizens, people.

- Yeah, I think that people are becoming more aware of the incredible power of these tech firms, but I don't think they understand quite the extent of their reach.

So for instance, if you look at just the big, the major tech firms, such as Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, et cetera, they're not just companies, they're parent companies that own upwards...

When I wrote the book, there was about 673 other companies that they owned.

So people, for instance, might not realize that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, or that Instagram is owned by Facebook.

In fact, when Cambridge Analytica hit in 2016, a lot of people left Facebook and went over to Instagram because they're angry Facebook.

Not realizing that Facebook owns Instagram and also WhatsApp.

So I think that citizens need to really work hard to educate themselves about the tremendous reach of these tech firms and what they own and what they're involved with.

- Well, you talk in the book, not just about net-states, but also about user's citizens.

So let's explore that a little bit.

What is a user for the citizens?

How's that different from the concept of citizenship that we associate with our US citizenship, for example?

- So the idea of the citizen user is that in addition to whatever citizenship we have by virtue of the country, in which we physically reside, we are also citizen users of the net-states.

So for instance, Microsoft decided, when EU implemented the GDPR, which is this pact of regulations to provide digital rights protections to users, Microsoft and all the other big tech firms had to comply for their EU users.

But Microsoft took it one step further, and they said, we will allow any of our users of our products to have access to this level of digital rights that are afforded to EU citizens.

So they're deciding that regardless of country and regardless of their regulation requirements in specific countries, they want everyone who uses their products and services to have the same standard of protection.

Now, this is very different than someone like Facebook, who when they were hit with the GDPR regulations, right before that they moved 2 billion of their users out of EU data centers.

So they wouldn't have to comply with EU rights and regulations protections.

So I think this notion of citizen users is the idea that we are in addition to citizen users of the net-states and our rights and our responsibilities vary, depending on which one they are, they're not monoliths.

- Does this pose a threat?

I can remember being in graduate school forever ago, and there was, I think that it was a book called In Athena's Camp.

I don't know, familiar with it.

It raised this prospect of people's loyalty to corporate brands being more relevant, even then our identity as us citizens or Russian citizens or subjects of the British Monarch.

Is what you're talking about a threat to the sense of national identity that we have been accustomed to since the Peace of Westphalia.

That's like a comprehensive exam question I realize.

- But I've been answering them too, right?

It's no problem.

Maybe I think that what it is is that citizenship, the notion of citizenship is becoming more layered and complex.

We will still have physical places in which we reside.

We still have to abide by the laws and regulations of wherever country we're in.

But in addition to that, we do have, I think faith in net states in a way that we don't necessarily always have faith in our own nation states.

So think about this, if we wanted to, for instance, well, actually a good example is when the city of Atlanta and Georgia was subject to a ransomware attack a few years ago, the entire government system of Atlanta was totally frozen.

So people couldn't log on, government officials couldn't log on, people couldn't go to court, everything was frozen.

What happened was the city of Atlanta called Microsoft.

They called Google.

It also called the FBI, but it's, I think no mistake that when they knew that they had a really serious problem with their technology, they didn't just turn to the US government.

They turned to the net states for help.

And I think that when we think about competence and the ability to get things done, the congressional gridlock that has dominated our country for years, and the political polarization has really eroded our sense of faith, that this country is still a country that can get things done quickly.

If you asked, I think the average citizen who could solve a major problem in our country today, Congress or Google, I just wonder if the answer would really be Congress.

- So Congress has called the leaders of many of these companies to testify before them with the goal apparently of some sort of federal regulation.

And that can be defined in many different ways.

But let me ask you, is there a role for regulation of these companies and what should that role be?

And a third question, how could that be achieved particularly given that we have a polarized government now?

- Yeah, absolutely, there's a role for regulation.

And I think that this is something that we've been really behind on.

I think the time for regulation was 10 years ago before these companies really expanded outside of their original sectors into all these other areas like defense diplomacy, citizen services, and public infrastructure.

Right now in 2020, I think the most regular thing is going to be to hem in a little bit of what net states are doing in certain areas, but it is not going to stop them from empire building.

And it's not going to stop them from expanding into new markets.

I think that what we can expect to see, unfortunately, because there is going to be this partisan divide in Congress is very timid or tentative steps towards regulating the net states.

I don't think we're gonna see an overhaul of 230 and I don't really think we're going to see any substantive, real changes occurring in the near future.

- So, the genie is essentially out of the bottle.

And I guess that brings it back to an individual's response to this, what the individual wants or needs to do in terms of this new development.

Is that a fair statement?

- Absolutely.

And it's one of the ideas that I come to in the book is that we are not powerless in this situation.

If we all had some sort of organized outrage that we've seen so effective in protest movements, it would be very effective in getting that state to change their behaviors.

For instance, if we all stopped using Facebook, Facebook would be a ghost town.

It would have no data.

It would have nothing to advertise, no people to advertise to.

It would essentially deflate like an empty balloon.

So we have a lot of power that we don't actually take advantage of because we're not organized around any sort of movement there's annoyance with tech companies.

But I think that that tech lash movement is not yet powerful enough to orchestrate the kind of public pushback that we would need to see in order to make real change happen.

But I think the step one is just becoming educated about what net States are, what they're doing and how big they really are.

- Alexis, how do you respond to people there are some voices in Congress who think that the big tech needs to be broken up.

Is that a non-starter?

Where do you come down on that?

- I personally don't think that they tech needs to be broken up because I don't think that that's the answer to the lack of privacy rights that we have for instance.

I would much rather see there'd be some sort of regulations that protected similar to GDPR regulations, where we protected user data or where users were allowed to request that their information be pulled off of search engines, for instance, the right to be forgotten, where there were regulations in place that ensured that these companies had to make clear what they were doing with data if they were going to sell it or share it with third parties, I think that would be much more effective for the American people and for citizens around the world.

Then seeing these companies chopped up into pieces.

- Let's get back to Facebook for a moment.

I think what you're talking about in terms of a revolt, for lack of a better word, would be effective, but is that realistic to expect?

And particularly now during the pandemic, when so many people are staying connected to people, other people, friends that might've seen in person might've had visiting coming over Thanksgiving or whatever, it's entirely by Facebook and in similar platforms.

So talk about the, the realistic possibility of that now.

And then when we come out of the pandemic, when the vaccine has come online and a year from now, hopefully knock on wood, wouldn't knocking her word.

Things are better, but things look better with Pfizer and Madrona.

But anyway just talk about the realistic possibility of people dropping off Facebook on maths.

- I don't think it's realistic.

I think it's a really good point.

And I think one of the reasons that it's not realistic is that to organize a sort of effective digital revolt, you would have to use Facebook to do it really hard to achieve that without these kinds of tools.

But one of the things that I think we should think about is there's a fellow named Ethan Zuckerman who used to run the MIT media lab, who's proposed this idea of a digital public infrastructure, sort of like a PBS for the internet, where there would be a network that would protect privacy and would still provide a national sort of platform.

But that would be subsidized by the federal government in order for people to have connectivity experiences and organizing experiences that weren't ad driven.

So I don't think we're going to see the business models of these major corporations change, but I do think we might see alternative platforms arise, but I think that they would have to be somehow in the public in the public square, as it were so that we would have an option to make that choice, you know, and in the same way that we do with, for instance, when we watch television with sometimes or listen to the radio, we sometimes go towards the cable networks.

And sometimes we go to PBS because we know we're going to get different kinds of quality in the programming that we see there.

And when we saw PBS emerge and the corporation for public broadcasting emerge, we also saw that it influenced the networks in terms of the quality of their programming that also increased historically.

So I think that a digital public infrastructure is something that would be really worth exploring.

- Alexis you wrote a recent article for public books titled Let's Polarize Together in which you argue that there is a way to break through the hyper-partisan thought bubbles that are created by our dependence on social media and big tech.

Can you tell us what it is?

- Yes, so that article was really designed to get people thinking creatively about the fact that we are just, if we can choose to be in information filters in bubbles, we can choose not to be as well.

So it requires conscious effort though.

It means reaching out to people who we wouldn't agree with on certain issues and trying to connect with them, and it could start with our own family members.

So I think that's the most realistic way this would happen is with families and neighbors in our communities.

So for instance, I'm sure we all have a cousin or an uncle or a relative, somewhere out there who is politically on the other side of the fence than we are.

And maybe we see their posts and ignore them or say, "Oh gosh, there's that crazy cousin "against posting whatever."

But I think that if we actually took the time to engage with them and try to understand where they're coming from, we might be in a different place as a country.

So I think it starts somewhere just starting with our own families, being more conscious about it.

- I think that's great advice and not just for this issue, but for many issues.

So we're taping this now two weeks after the presidential election.

So we're in a transition period and in January president elect Biden becomes the president regarding these matters and the issues raised in your book.

What advice would you have for the Biden team?

- So one of the first things I would suggest for the Biden team is to appoint a tech ambassador.

This is not something that America has right now.

We have one tool in our toolbox with the tech companies and that's regulation.

Well two, there's also fines.

But I think that engaging with tech companies on a diplomatic level would allow us to negotiate for better terms and conditions than we currently have in existence.

There are other countries with tech ambassadors.

Denmark was the first country to launch its tech ambassador ship back in 2017.

There's Australia, France, and Estonia, and Canada has a consul general for Silicon Valley.

So not quite an ambassador, but it diplomatic level appointment.

So I honestly think that we need to think about ways to engage with the tech sector, not in an adversarial only capacity, but in a way that we can actually have true dialogues with them.

- What does a tech ambassador do it's a term I'm just really hearing for the first time from you and from your book?

What is the role, the function and so forth?

- Well, in the same way that the U.S has an ambassador towards for special issues or the U.S has an ambassador to the United nations.

This would be an ambassador to Silicon Valley and ambassador to the tech sector whose job it would be to engage with them on matters that represent American interests, such as respecting privacy and making sure that users are informed about their rights and to do so in such a way that diplomats engage on all kinds of issues with all kinds of countries.

So the diplomats toolkits are really about talks.

You start with, you go into negotiations, maybe you develop some treaties together.

We've seen this actually happen already, kind of organically in 2016, Brad Smith, who's the president of Microsoft gave a talk called the digital that we need a digital Geneva convention.

And what he was describing was a pact among tech companies, where they would all join forces to say, we will not use our tools and platforms for warfare.

So that evolved into the Paris call for trust insecurity and cyberspace.

So France then took on this diplomatic treaty, essentially that Microsoft proposed and turned it into a call that was open to countries and tech companies alike.

And it's the only treaty of its kind in the world today, where there are tech companies and countries as coast signatories to a treaty as equals it would be more of those kinds of actions.

I think that we could be able to achieve if we had tech ambassador.. - Yeah.

Alexis, one of the questions we've got a couple of minutes left here, but one of the questions, and I don't know if it's overstatement to say it's a concern is we think about government today as having at least in the United States is having a system of checks and balances where you can hold individuals to account.

You write pretty persuasively about the scale, the size of these corporate entities, the amount of money that they have, which often is greater than any number of countries in the world, their economic power, their ownership of the physical infrastructure of the internet.

I was shocked to read in your recent Washington post Op-Ed, that Google now owns 8.5% of the undersea cables that make up the global internet.

Do we risk something by treating them as nation States?

Or is that horse out of the barn and we need to adapt to that reality?

- Too long out of the barn.

And that's the reality that we're in because it's not just Google, that owns part of the internet infrastructure it's Facebook, it's Microsoft, it's Amazon, they're all buying up pieces of the backbone of the internet itself.

So I think that we are just behind times on realizing the extent to which net States truly control, not just commerce, but that the tools and services that we use to conduct work and life, none of us would be having this conversation right now, if it weren't for these net states they've made it possible for us to continue working through this pandemic.

And I don't see that going away anytime soon.

- Well, Alexis, this is a profoundly important book.

Again, it is the information trade.

Alexis Wichowski thank you so much for being with us.

- [Alexis] Thanks for having me.

That is that's all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about Story in the Public Square, you can visit at pellcenter.org or find us on Facebook and Twitter.

For G Wayne Miller I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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