Over the past month, technology and internet observers have looked on with horror or delight as billionaire Elon Musk has criticized, threatened, and ultimately bid to acquire the social media platform Twitter. For supporters, Time magazine’s 2021 Man of the Year will apply his entrepreneurial innovation to finally unlock the platform’s financial potential for shareholders, in part by evolving it into his vision of a “public town square” free of “censorship” (and maybe reinstating former President Donald Trump’s account in the process). For critics, Musk’s bid ignores and even represents everything that’s gone wrong in digital technology since the early, utopian days of Web 1.0: centralized, monopolistic control; libertarian “tech bro” culture; the spread of networked and politically motivated disinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories; and the resulting dangers to civility and democracy.

In other words, Musk’s bid represents both the opportunities and challenges of our contemporary technology choices.

We have all witnessed the internet’s ability to democratize speech and access to knowledge, give voice to the voiceless, and support community building in shared online spaces. More broadly, we are just beginning to understand the transformational potential of digital technology to “help experienced leaders solve some of the world’s most pressing problems,” as Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative was founded to do. But the promise of these innovations will only be realized if we also acknowledge the challenges that technology brings, forge agreements on values and vision for the technology’s future, and build in mechanisms for accountability when those public interest values clash with those of private industry.

For the last 25 years, civil society has done the hard work of forging these agreements and championing consumer protections like net neutrality and data privacy. Policymakers have often been far behind the rapid advances of technology, and shareholders can rarely overcome the financial incentives that drive their decision-making. But responsibility also extends to those who select technology solutions for their needs, including for driving positive social impact.

The early-era fights about the internet and internet policy were organized around various core public interest values, like free expression, diversity of voices, access to information, and closing digital divides. Now, new issues have risen based on the development of new innovations in digital technology and the challenges that they create:

• Virtual reality spaces, now extending into concepts like the metaverse (in which our digital identities may live in shared, virtual worlds that parallel the real world) can open new opportunities for social support, training and employment, and health care. But will we see the same inequities and societal harms we see on platforms and in real life today (e.g. issues of technology accessibility, scarcity-derived poverty, racial and gender bias or hatred) take root in this new virtual world? And who is responsible for policing those virtual societal harms in the face of the multi-trillion dollar commercial opportunity the metaverse represents for corporations?

• Exciting new advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning may transform the creation and delivery of benefits and services to those that need them most. But how do we manage the economic and social dislocations and threats to human rights that these tools can amplify? And what are the limits of personal privacy in a world where intimate details of health, location, and identity can be tracked in the form of relentless surveillance and data collection, and then used to predict outcomes that may sustain and replicate today’s inequities?

• As engineers and entrepreneurs move to decentralized systems and structures for the internet — the so-called Web 3.0 — how do we ensure this next generation of the internet aligns with the public interest? What guardrails do we need to set up, now, to encourage research and innovation but also mandate responsible development of these technologies? Is centralization a natural evolution of new platforms and services? And how do we avoid the mistake of undervaluing the role of civil society in framing this technological future?

The organization I lead, Public Knowledge, is currently partnering with like-minded organizations like Creative Commons, Internet Archive, and Wikimedia Foundation to grow a movement of academic, civil society, and advocacy groups that hope to articulate a unified public interest vision and affirmative policy agenda for the next generation of the internet. For over a generation we have advanced the vision of a public who understood what it wanted the internet to look like, and then fought for it. Our public interest vision framed policy debates and drove engagement by average tech users. We as a society, not one company or group of companies, built the internet we have today through a mix of design, policy, and marketplace decisions. We as a society also have to be responsible for the messy challenges it can create. The good news is that we can reshape it so that we actually benefit from it — all of us.

To accomplish this, the civil society community must engage with each other and with the public to define the public interest values that frame what a better internet looks like. This will call for civil society groups with missions rooted in parallel values to reconcile and balance their values to work together. The balance between free expression and respectful content moderation must be found. Similarly, data privacy and competition policy can and must be reconciled, and an open internet of links and sharing must address issues of security and disinformation. As we form this vision of a better internet, leaders with the power to make technology choices must do so with these public interest values in mind.

The power of digital technology continues to grow at an extraordinary pace, and its impact on society’s most pressing problems can be transformational. But if we fail to find the balance between the promise of innovation and the accountability for it, we will continue to see digital technology create great harm in our society. We’re committed to articulating a values-based vision for what a better internet looks like, and hope others will do the same to guide their own technology choices for a better digital world for all.

About the Author:

Chris Lewis (Harvard AB ‘01-’02) is President and CEO at Public Knowledge, a public interest digital rights organization that promotes freedom of expression, an open internet, and access to affordable communications tools and creative works. Before joining Public Knowledge, Chris worked at the Federal Communications Commission as Deputy Director of the Office of Legislative Affairs. He is a former U.S. Senate staffer for the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and has over 20 years of political organizing, policy, and advocacy experience.