Technology as a Public Good
1. The public good is defined strictly by its non-rivalry and its non-excludability.
1.1 This economic formalization was established by Samuelson.
1.2 Market mechanisms fail to price the public good efficiently.
1.21 This failure occurs because individuals consume the identical quantity of the good, yet their valuation of it diverges.
1.3 Digital capitalism manufactures artificial scarcity for information that is inherently non-rivalrous.
1.31 This enclosure is executed through Digital Rights Management, restrictive terms of service, and intellectual property laws.
2. The privatization of the digital domain structurally mirrors the historical enclosure of the physical commons.
2.1 Aristocratic landowners previously fenced off common grazing lands to transfer them into private property.
2.2 The contemporary public domain is similarly enclosed by expansive intellectual property estates.
2.3 The proliferation of exclusion rights over a single resource generates a tragedy of the anticommons.
2.31 When too many individuals hold rights of exclusion, the resource suffers catastrophic underuse.
3. Communications technology functions as Social Overhead Capital.
3.1 It is an indivisible, foundational infrastructure that lowers production costs for all other economic sectors.
3.2 The state historically recognized this necessity through the nationalization of telegraph networks in 1868 and 1869.
3.3 Contemporary Social Overhead Capital is actively privatized through the enclosure of submarine fiber-optic cables.
3.31 Between 95 and 99 percent of intercontinental internet traffic is routed through this physical medium.
3.32 Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft command between 71 and 75 percent of this total international bandwidth.
4. The technology conglomerate exercises private infrastructural power.
4.1 Internet platforms function as natural monopolies, homologous to historical railroad and electrical utility grids.
4.2 The infrastructural power of these entities manifests in three distinct forms.
4.21 These forms are gatekeeping power to control access, transmission power to preference traffic, and scoring power to rank information.
4.3 Subordinating this concentrated private power requires a modernized public utility framework.
4.31 This framework mandates structural separations, common carriage rules, and state-funded public options.
5. The technological artifact is not a neutral instrument.
5.1 Artifacts are deliberately deployed to achieve specific socio-political ends.
5.2 Highly complex technological systems structurally demand hierarchical and authoritarian social organization.
5.3 Digital algorithms operate as infrastructure that embeds the biases and profit motives of its creators.
5.4 Technological progression must be measured by the expansion of substantive freedoms and capabilities.
5.41 Mere device access is insufficient without the cultivation of digital literacy and informational capabilities.
6. Artificial Intelligence is the apex of digital infrastructure.
6.1 Its development is constrained by massive capital requirements for physical hardware and Graphics Processing Units.
6.2 Sovereign initiatives exist to provision computational power as a public utility to prevent monopolization.
6.21 The United Kingdom achieves this through the £350 million AI Research Resource program and the Isambard-AI supercomputer.
6.3 The logic of open source must be applied to Artificial Intelligence.
6.31 The Open Source AI Definition dictates that developers must provide public access to model weights, inference code, and comprehensive training data information.
7. Cognitive sovereignty is the intellectual prerequisite for democratic autonomy.