How to defund Big Tech and empower communities

There is much to celebrate about Toronto City Council’s recent move to ensure affordable, high-speed internet connectivity for all Torontonians. The city’s ConnectTO program is timely in recognizing that reliable internet access has become an essential service for every household.

ConnectTO rightly puts those first who have been underserved for decades by Canada’s major telecom companies and who are now especially vulnerable during the pandemic. The city deserves praise for the invitation for cooperative or non-profit broadband models. It is a welcome response to the effective civic resistance to Google Sidewalk Labs’ techno-centric smart city vision.

But the city needs to do much more than improve connectivity to achieve an alternative, community-centred vision. Connectivity is essential, but it is not an end in itself. It is a means for us to participate in many facets of society.

Today five giant, monopolistic companies — Google/Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft — largely control how we do that. Big Tech companies surreptitiously capture and monetize personal information, crush potential competitors, avoid paying the taxes public services rely on and evade democratic accountability.

Overall they provide a poor return to the public on the long-term, high-risk, government funded technology R&D crucial to their rise to dominance in the first place. In short, Big Tech exerts outsized influence over our daily lives, our economy and our democracy.

National governments are finally challenging Big Tech’s overreach more boldly. The U.S. has launched multiple antitrust investigations into Big Tech and the EU has slapped them with billions in fines for nonpayment of taxes.

But we need to go much further. It’s time to defund Big Tech and refund community. Above all, this means to redirect Big Tech’s excessive revenue flows: for example, to tax those revenues at source, to cancel government contracts with illegally operating surveillance companies, and to make Google and Facebook pay for the news content they harvest from media sites. Ultimately, it means to abolish the conditions that lead to Big Tech harms while redirecting technology development toward a sustainable, just future.

Defunding Big Tech frees up resources to support a wide range of socially beneficial ends. A high priority for support are community-based and communityoriented initiatives to develop digital infrastructures and services that better serve the public interest, such as ConnectTO. This is a daunting societal challenge.

Federal and provincial governments are best positioned to tax and regulate Big Tech, but a lot can be done at a local level. Municipal governments working with their communities can accomplish much to develop services and infrastructures that avoid Big Tech’s surveillance-based offerings. Barcelona, Milan, Helsinki and Mexico City are exemplary in adopting the participatory governance platform DECIDIM to support democratic engagement by residents.

ConnectTO too can provide community-centred innovation, but only if it goes beyond delivering Torontonians into Big Tech’s fangs and instead empowers them to choose their own path.

Toronto is especially well positioned to accomplish this ambition and resist the pitfalls. Firstly, Toronto is an early member of the growing worldwide Cities Coalition for Digital Rights.

The Coalition’s declaration, based on international human rights law, incorporates such core principles as universal access, privacy protection, and participatory democracy. This provides an important moral foundation for Toronto’s initiatives and stands in sharp contrast to Big Tech’s primary drive for profit and personal gain. Left unchecked, that drive erodes human rights and threatens the public interest.

Toronto’s second major asset in developing innovative services for, by and with its residents is its civic tech scene, already thriving in tandem with Canada’s growing academic and corporate tech powerhouse. One promising area of current civic tech activity is developing mobility tech that facilitates people in travelling around the city without having their movements surveilled and monetized. Toronto never really needed Sidewalk Labs.

Will the city successfully complement the ConnectTO connectivity initiative with wider civic based community tech efforts that provide alternatives to Big Tech’s services and resist its overreach? If so, Toronto would go far in establishing itself as a world leading city that serves its residents needs while advancing their human rights.