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106 V. MOSCO

What is the right balance between job creation and such a guaranteed
income? How can we facilitate organizing digital workers who tend to be
employed in the “gig” economy of precarious jobs? Are unions at Salon
and Vice, and worker associations at Uber and Lyft, all pioneering
web-based successes, good models for the future?
The digital world is at a critical juncture represented by two clashing
visions. The first imagines a democratic society where information is fully
accessible to all citizens as an essential service. In this view information is
managed through forms of regulation and control that are governed by
representative institutions whose goal is the fullest possible access and
control for the greatest number of citizens. Governance might take mul-
tiple forms, including different combinations of centralized and decen-
tralized approaches at local, regional, national and international levels. The
second envisions a world controlled by global corporations and the
surveillance and intelligence arms of national governments. Under this
model, the market is the leading force shaping decisions about the pro-
duction, distribution and exchange of information and corporations with
market power hold the most influence. In this fundamentally undemocratic
world, digital behemoths share power with governments that make full use
of technology for surveillance, control and coercion.
Fifty years ago, long before the first Internet, the Canadian scholar and
policy analyst Douglas Parkhill chose the democratic vision in his book
about the need to create a global system of computer utilities that would
guarantee public control and universal access. Social movements had
helped to tame private monopoly power over essential resources like water
and electricity by making them public utilities. Parkhill (1966) made the
case that information was no less essential and no less in need of public
control. The Next Internet is an opportunity to build on this vision.
The utility concept received a boost when the US Federal
Communication Commission issued a 2015 ruling affirming the right of
people to fair and equal access to the Internet, what is popularly known as
the net neutrality decision. Although limited, the decision sparked hopes
that we would begin to see the Internet not as the property of commercial
and military interests but as a public commons, controlled by citizens. In its
call for “platform cooperatives” Jeremy Corbyn’s 2016 “Digital
Democracy Manifesto” proposes a rich, contemporary version of the public
utility idea that has received support from progressive Internet and social
movement activists (Scholz and Schneider 2016). The rise of cloud com-
puting, with its extreme centralizing tendencies, has brought about