There is a useful thought experiment: imagine that every public park, every town hall, every street corner where people gather to argue about politics was owned by a single private company — one that could decide, at its discretion, who speaks, what is said, and who is removed.
This is, with minor adjustments, an accurate description of contemporary digital public life.
The Infrastructure Problem
For most people in most countries, political discourse — the exchange of opinion, the formation of collective will, the practice of citizenship — happens on platforms owned by a handful of corporations. Twitter (now X), Facebook, YouTube, TikTok. These are not utilities in the legal sense. They are private property, governed by terms of service, optimised for engagement metrics, and answerable primarily to shareholders.
This matters because the conditions of speech shape the content of speech. A platform optimised for outrage produces outrage. A platform that rewards virality over accuracy produces misinformation. A platform with algorithmic amplification creates dynamics no speaker would choose if designing a deliberative space from scratch.
What Public Infrastructure Requires
Classical liberal theory holds that the preconditions for healthy democracy include: a free press, universal education, and public spaces for deliberation. The 20th century added broadcast media to this list — and regulated it accordingly. Radio and television licenses came with public interest obligations precisely because the broadcast spectrum was understood as a common resource.
The internet was never subjected to this analysis. It emerged fast, scaled faster, and became politically important before anyone had properly asked: what obligations attach to owning the infrastructure of public discourse?
Three Responses
The Utility Argument. Treat dominant platforms as public utilities, subject to common carrier rules. They must carry all legal speech without discrimination. The analogy: telephone companies cannot refuse calls based on content. The problem: telephone calls are private; social media posts are inherently editorial. The platform is the curation.
The Public Option. Build publicly-funded alternatives — a BBC for social media. Non-commercial, governed by public interest mandates, funded by taxation. This exists in embryonic form in some national contexts but has never achieved scale.
Structural Reform. Break up large platforms, mandate interoperability, require algorithmic transparency. This addresses market concentration without requiring governments to operate media — but faces enormous political and legal resistance.
What Is Actually Happening
Very little, at scale. The EU’s Digital Services Act represents the most serious attempt to impose structural obligations on large platforms. It is significant and imperfect. The US has not achieved comparable legislation. Most of the world has done less.
Meanwhile, the platforms continue to shape the information environment of democratic elections, public health crises, and geopolitical conflicts — without any formal accountability to the publics they affect.
This is not sustainable. But the path to sustainability runs through questions political systems are not yet structured to answer.