The public is increasingly aware of how the handful of big companies who monopolise the internet misuse their personal data, leave them vulnerable to algorithmic manipulation, and pose a threat to democracy.
Yet given how far the tentacles of big tech extend into almost every aspect of our lives, weaning ourselves off these platforms can appear daunting.
PublicSpaces is showing how it can be done.
The Dutch coalition of more than 40 public organisations, including libraries, universities and public broadcasters, is helping create an internet based on public values. It was founded in 2018 on the notion that the public and civil society can take back control of the digital world by replacing big tech architecture with something they collectively own and govern.
Pepijn Lemmens, PublicSpaces’ chief community and product owner, has worked in the digital and culture fields for a quarter of a century. He’s recently seen the appetite for an alternative internet grow.
“When I used to do presentations, I spent half my time explaining the problem and the other half explaining the solutions. When I do a presentation now, everybody understands the problem, and I have way more time to talk about the solutions,” he says.
Jantien Borsboom, PublicSpaces’ Director, agrees: “It really shifted over the last three years. There’s now a lot of talk around digital sovereignty, and a lot more willingness among individuals, as well as organisations, companies and governments, to change things.”
Despite big tech’s huge sway over our lives, societal and regulatory oversight remains very limited, she says.
“The development of these digital spaces have been left to the market forces, [with] regulations arriving too little and too late, and the digital space dominated by big tech companies whose business models are based on collecting and monetising data. We’re now in a situation where our democracy is threatened, and where a shared reality is no longer a given, which puts public debate under stress,” she says.
“We work from public values, and see which of those values are specifically important for an organisation. You can’t create a one size fits all advice because organisations are so different.”
Among the tools that Public Spaces has created are PeerTube Spaces, a shared, open-source alternative to YouTube, where institutions share the infrastructure collectively, splitting hosting, governance and costs; and the Digital Powerwash, which can score how the software organisations use matches public values.
Collaboration is key
Switching to less harmful software tools can’t simply happen overnight, and can involve training personnel, and navigating structural issues.
“Sometimes it’s not as easy as just switching, and we encounter structural issues that require a different approach. For example, you can change the social media platform that you use, but that doesn’t mean that your audience will automatically follow. It’s about collaborating and sharing knowledge. We try to connect as many organisations as possible to hopefully create a tipping point together.”
An example of this collaboration is the European Social Stack, a set of common principles agreed by a number of European organisations and companies working on alternative social media platforms, which was launched at PublicSpaces’ conference in Amsterdam at the start of June. “It’s a proposal to join forces to create an ecosystem of European social media, and to work on these structural issues with a broader network,” Borsboom explains.
The critical question is how can we build a European ecosystem of sovereign technology in a democratic way.
Radically different
The European Commission recently adopted a set of measures aimed at boosting the EU’s digital sovereignty.
Borsboom argues that sovereignty alone is not enough: “There’s a lot of talk about digital sovereignty on a European level, but just storing data in Europe or relying on European companies is insufficient for long-term change,” she says. “[Otherwise] we risk creating the same harmful business models and new monopolies. The critical question is how can we build a European ecosystem of sovereign technology in a democratic way.”
This point is echoed by Claudio Cesarano, Civitates’ Senior Programme Manager for Tech and Democracy: “We don’t want to replicate the surveillance and advertising based models of big tech,” he says. Supporting alternatives has been part of Civitates’ strategy since 2024, with PublicSpaces joining as a grantee partner at the end of last year.
Cesarano says that creating better platforms from a technical perspective will not in itself lead people to migrate to them.
“It takes effort and strategy to rebuild communities elsewhere. You don’t just create an alternative and people move there. It needs a culture, a community. We need to think about the incentives for users to move to these other spaces and how we can make them radically different from big tech. These are things that I think philanthropy, as well as the builders of these platforms and civil society, should think about,” he says.
“Big tech wants us to believe that something like Facebook is not replicable,” he adds. “But they get their power from the fact that they were there first, and that they make it as difficult and addictive as possible so you do not leave.”
PublicSpaces and others are showing that there’s another way of doing things, he says.
“Big tech attacks regulations [designed to hold them accountable] because they say that it hampers innovation. But if we look at social media, there hasn’t been a major innovation in years.”
A flourishing alternative ecosystem
The success of a healthier alternative digital ecosystem relies on the right legislation and regulations, maintains Borsboom.
“We’ve seen that it’s very hard for alternatives to develop and enter the market because of big tech companies’ immense market power, meaning they can either push alternatives out of the market, or buy them up. We need clear legislation, which is happening now in Europe with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), to better regulate big tech, but we also need regulations on the use of open source, open standards, interoperability and democratic governance that create a situation where alternatives can grow and can flourish,” she says.
It’s not just new regulations that are needed, but better enforcement of existing ones, adds Lemmens: “The Digital Services Act (DSA) is a good piece of legislation, but in the Netherlands the authority which is meant to enforce it [the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM)] didn’t issue a single warrant last year,” he notes.
Breaking big tech’s stranglehold over our societies remains a huge challenge, but PublicSpaces is showing how it can be done.
