It’s nearly impossible to imagine any path to a flourishing future for our species that does not run through our cities. And yet we’ve neglected the social systems and institutions necessary for that — public safety, good schools, affordable shelter, public spaces and easy physical proximity to others, government that is free of corruption and responsive to its people. Making today’s cities really work again for the people who live in them will not happen overnight.

But there is a project that cities could embark upon, more or less immediately, to improve their citizens’ collective quality of life. They could turn the land under their jurisdiction into a source and reserve of shared public wealth, rather than a divisive private speculative asset. In doing so, they could overcome the unending conflicts among developers, homeowners and renters that stand in the way of high-road development — development that is beneficial, fair, sustainable and publicly accountable. This could lower costs for ordinary people and small businesses, encourage new arrivals and make cities more equitable.

And cities could start doing this tomorrow, starting with the land that they already own, which can be substantial and is often focused in central or downtown areas. Further, land now in private hands can also gradually be acquired by the public — without turning city government itself into an abusive landlord or a hulking bureaucracy.

We make this argument in four distinct steps. First, we highlight the vastly underestimated land wealth that many American cities already enjoy, which we suggest be used better. Second, we argue that a version of Henry George’s land value tax is a way to unlock this value. Third, relying on more recent work, we suggest a way to improve on George’s thinking by even more clearly limiting speculative gain. Fourth, we suggest applying this idea in urban wealth funds that could be started immediately to potentially great public benefit.

Updating The Public’s Balance Sheet

To motivate this project we should first observe something that’s hidden in plain sight: In the United States, many municipalities own real property whose estimated value exceeds their city’s gross product. But the publics of most cities — and, in some cases, their elected leadership — don’t even know what they own.

A recent McKinsey Global Institute report, looking at the “balance sheet” — all assets minus all liabilities — of 10 of the world’s leading economies, found that global net worth and real assets had more than tripled in the past 20 years to better than $500 trillion, six times the 2020 gross world product (GWP) of just over $80 trillion. Real estate made up better than two thirds of those real assets, or about four times GWP.

We’re used to thinking of these assets as privately owned. But in a separate but convergent 2018 analysis covering 31 countries, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated that the government-owned portion of that real estate — which includes a lot of undeveloped land, as well as physical infrastructure and government and commercial buildings — was worth double the GWP at the time. Some of the most valuable real estate, unsurprisingly, is at the most productive centers of all countries’ economies, in urban areas.

Local governments are an important part of this story; yet many U.S. cities have not fully inventoried their property assets. Even fewer have assigned them a current market value, which is sometimes tens of times higher than the book value in city ledgers.

When they do this exercise, which is not expensive or time-sucking, their balance sheets look radically different. In 2014, Boston’s balance sheet showed liabilities of $4.6 billion outweighing declared assets of $3.8 billion, of which $1.4 billion was real estate, for a negative net worth of $800 million. But examination showed that that the declared $1.4 billion in property holdings was actually worth $55 billion — nearly 40 times the initial estimated value — putting Boston very far into positive net worth territory. A similar story unfolded in Pittsburgh, when it did the analysis (taking only two weeks and $20,000) and found it had undervalued its property holding by nearly 70 times!

Global cities have done far more than American ones to put land in service of the public. Singapore, Copenhagen and Hong Kong all have public “urban wealth funds” managing real estate on behalf of the public. They are savvy and have information advantages over private speculators regarding the complexities of city government. Married to public purpose, that’s often a powerful motor for constructive change. It’s especially useful for capitalizing on the positive externalities of mindful development, which are often lost in private speculation. In Hong Kong, for example, a public-owned developer has focused on building apartments near transit stops. This causes transit investments to benefit the public twice: first through better transit and second by increasing the value of the public’s real estate portfolio.

Dag Detter, a former Swedish government economic development official now in private consulting who often works with the IMF, has argued for better public-serving management of this “hidden goldmine” for years — either for national or “sovereign” wealth funds, of the sort he helped design and run in Sweden, or for these city-centric wealth funds. He recommends that they should operate within strict guidelines but focus on maximizing returns to the fund for the owning public. For Detter, they should be largely insulated from political pressure, though it’s fine with him if some portion of their return is turned over to public authorities.

Given the divisiveness of our urban politics, the limited bandwidth of city finance managers and the deep power and predatory behavior of our private financial sector, doing what Detter suggests would require extra caution and preparation. But it’s still worth exploring. That exploration may get a boost if many cities create new financial entities to better manage the current influx of federal monies. One way or another, we expect the demand for better strategic management of municipal assets will only grow. But first, cities need to account for that wealth and update their own balance sheets, which only a few have done.

And that first step should prompt city residents and their leaders to ask themselves where their land wealth really comes from in the first place.  

Recognizing The Ultimate Source Of Urban Wealth

Why does a half-acre of unbuilt land in the center of a large city cost so much more than in an unpopulated greenfield site? It’s not that the land itself is different — it’s because it has a bunch of people around it and public infrastructure for their commingling. People — their interactions and their ideas — are the real source of land value. Cities are simply a way of getting more of them in one place. The land beneath or near them rises in value merely by their proximity.

But as land values increase, owners find they can charge non-owners ever more in rent for the privilege of living and working near one another. Owners are thus enriched merely for owning the land — independent of anything they do to make the activity on or near it more productive of value. Henry George pointed out the injustice and economic irrationality of this way back in 1879, in the wildly popular “Progress and Poverty,” which helped inspire the Progressive movement of the early 20th century.

To address it, George prescribed a simple remedy: land value taxes. Unimproved land doesn’t magically shrink when taxes are put on it — in economist-speak, it’s quintessentially “inelastic.” That means taxes put on land are among the most efficient, and they can go as high as that unimproved land’s value. Unlike other kinds of tax, the cost cannot be passed on to renters without consequence. It is instead “fully capitalized,” or built into the price of the land, decreasing that price and lowering the hurdle to anyone who’d like to purchase land as a location for some profitable enterprise. The decreased land price lowers the rents owners can feasibly charge. Land value taxes are therefore good for those who want to unlock land for valuable uses — building shelter or new commercial projects — and bad for those who primarily want to hold it and watch its price climb over the years.

Many countries and cities around the world have versions of land value taxes — with predicted effects on land prices and tenancy costs. Land value taxes were successfully implemented in early 20th-century German cities such as Berlin, Cologne and Frankfurt, after proving their ability to tamp down harmful speculation in the leased territory of Kiautschou Bay. These successful policies were altered and lost in financial upheaval of the first World War. Land value taxes also worked well in numerous Pennsylvanian cities and lasted for the better part of the 20th century. Indeed, as a recent overview of theoretical literature on and reports of practical experience with land value taxes show, there is overwhelming substantiation of the concept. George believed, not completely unreasonably, that land value taxes could eventually replace all other taxes; he called it the “single tax.” There’d be enough money to fund any number of worthy social investments for the public good — and even, depending on our druthers, universal or targeted subsidies to those in need.

Land value taxes are today more prevalent elsewhere — in places like Estonia and Taiwan — than in the U.S., where the idea originated. There are many reasons for this, but one can hardly fail to see that there are a lot of rich and politically powerful people in the United States who prize the ability to speculate on land prices and pocket unearned rents. Especially after the federally subsidized explosion in home ownership after WWII, they’ve found political allies, tragicomically, in the many non-rich homeowners whose share in the real estate game is their best bet for economic security.

But this lamentable entanglement of upper-middle-class interests with regressive land politics is less acute in our urban centers. There, dwelling renters are far more common. There, too, live many from younger generations who may have not yet developed emotional commitments to traditional real estate ownership — a potential base of political support for new ways of thinking about land value.

Splitting The Property Atom

We can still improve upon land value taxes, devising new methods of administration that accurate reveal land values, insulate assessments from political pressure, and truly place markets in the service of the public.

Work since George suggests a promising avenue toward the ideal of efficient abundance. Sun Yat-Sen, inspired by the Georgist land administration in Kiautschou Bay, proposed a method for land assessment in the early 1900s: owners assessed the value of their own land, and the state could then purchase the land at that value. More recently, economists E. Glen Weyl and Anthony Lee Zhang have sketched an elegant update of this idea, which could form the basis of a kind of land use license.

Without using the eminent domain power, and even without raising existing property taxes, cities could thus gradually shift property markets away from the buying and selling of permanent property rights, and toward the buying and selling of a special sort of land-use license. This could change the way we think about and share the value of our urban spaces.

Here’s how the licenses work: They resemble conventional time-based leases, except that they are a form of equity for their holders. At the time of their expiry after, say, six or 12 months, they go on a public auction block. But the amount of the winning bid is paid to the former license-holder, rather than to the public. Importantly, their holders periodically pay a license fee to the public, which generates revenue in proportion to license’s price, like a tax. The rate at which this fee is set is a matter of government judgment — higher or lower depending on government’s interest in encouraging long-term investment. But the fact that its rate is known at purchase, and its absolute amount determined freely by the bidding parties, makes it a self-enforcing source of public revenue, while allowing market actors to determine the real value of the property-cum-license.

Among the communities of scholars and practitioners developing this system, it’s known alternately as plural property, partial common ownership, and self-assessed licenses sold at auction (SALSA). It’s possible to imagine SALSA replacing the role of common municipal property tax regimes. Instead of relying on a city assessment of, respectively, property value or unimproved land value and then paying whatever tax on that, the licensor pays the license fee rate the city has set, applied to the most recent price of their license.

The on-ramp to this promising system of land management is to apply it to property owned by an urban wealth fund, thus not unduly stirring the hornets’ nest of vested land interests, while creating a meaningful vehicle for the public to “buy back” the land in cities. The Government Finance Officers Association is exploring urban wealth funds; its innovative programs are an excellent place to begin this work.

This would truly split the property atom, unleashing tremendous democratic and economic energy. It would separate land values from productive use, ensuring the public a fair share of the former, as Georgists have long advocated, and as traditional land ownership has always failed to do. And there would be no financial losers in the establishing urban wealth funds to pursue this agenda: incumbent homeowners’ interests would be unaffected but for a likely rise in valuation due to the presence of a powerful new buyer in the city.

At the same time, the urban wealth fund would give all city-dwellers a stake in the rising real values of land that they are helping create. And it would do all this without overburdening city administrators with mastering the arcana of real estate development or land management. If the urban wealth fund grows as we think it could, it’s possible to imagine a future city in which little land is privately owned in the conventional sense, yet all is efficiently allocated through markets, and affordability and livability is available to all comers.

Powerful tools are at hand to efficiently transform real estate markets and eliminate speculative rents. It’s time to use them. Cities must recognize the sources of their general wealth (commingling people), the hidden public wealth they already have (still barely charted) and manage that wealth in ways that give all city residents a material stake in urban development. This would help restore the social fabric and democratic life of cities, which is currently being strangled by land politics. 

How It Would Work

To establish a SALSA urban wealth fund, a city would first map its public-owned real assets (office buildings, outskirts land, any infrastructure whose administration does not necessarily need to be centralized), assigning market value where possible. Parks and any other land already being used in the public interest should be excluded.

The city would then identify its urban core real estate not being used by public actors, along with underused outskirts land, and transfer all the titles to the city’s wealth fund. That fund would be managed consistently with its public purpose, as stated in its charter.

To minimize any suspicion of government waste, we’d recommend limiting the urban wealth fund’s charter (respecting existing law) to administering SALSA licenses — that is, collecting fees and using them for some combination of (a) purchasing and developing new land in the city, (b) democratically-decided public goods investments and/or (c) cash dividends distributed to city residents on an equal per capita basis. The revenues should not be used as another general revenue source, but rather maintained as an apolitical people’s fund.

If it is as beneficial and popular with the public as we suspect, such an urban wealth fund might grow to acquire much private real estate. Paying out a dividend to citizens, even a small one, would affirm current residents’ contribution to the wealth of the city — and induce new ones to come. It would partially offsetting renters’ costs. It would make productive business owners happy. Last but not least, its purchasing activities would make real estate prices increase, pleasing incumbent homeowners. All this together would happily start to dissolve the dysfunctional caste system that now divides urban renters, developers and homeowners, impeding the high-road livable densification we urgently need.

As this urban wealth fund’s portfolio of properties grows, it would be able to have a bigger and bigger impact. If the fund came to own all of the land in the city, its popular dividend might cover most of a typical resident’s monthly housing costs. This would be an unprecedented experiment in alternatives to traditional property interests, and it would make smart development something everyone could root for. That’s the kind of thing that makes cities happier.

The post How To Harness Cities’ Hidden Public Wealth appeared first on NOEMA.

Spend time with people interested in data policy, and you will hear wild, florid language. Terms like “self-sovereignty,” “data colonialism” and “surveillance capitalism” share sentences with comparisons of data transactions to organ sales. These colorful metaphors beg for your attention, contrasting startlingly with the insipid transmissions of ones and zeroes to which they refer. Much of this talk is confused and misled, but it is not overheated. Language is simply sputtering before the vastness of the issue.

This happens to technical people regularly. In the 1990s, those who really understood the internet could not voice their predictions without eliciting eye rolls. During much of the last decade, blockchain enthusiasts sounded ridiculous to everyone except one another.

Today, it is policy thinkers who are dumbstruck regarding the question of data regulation. Because while not everyone quite sees it yet, the policy decisions now facing us will shape society and democracy for decades.

In this essay, addressed to the reader from 2022, I will depict and defend an attractive, feasible vision for the future of the data economy. But make no mistake: We’re going to have to fight for it.

A View From 2022

Following a nonpartisan groundswell, 2021 marked the beginning of a historic realignment of our governments and economies. Viewed from a distance, it looked like merely the latest policy skirmish around data, artificial intelligence and Big Tech. But more than met the eye was at stake when legislatures signed the “data coalition era” into law.

The law established a new class of organizations called data coalitions to redress the outsize power of technology companies. It ensconced data coalitions in the economy by requiring large companies to negotiate with them in order to obtain the rights to use data concerning anyone who had joined the coalition’s membership. In other words, it set up coalitions as unavoidable intermediaries in the data economy.

The coalitions themselves are legally independent, specially regulated entities with strong fiduciary duties to their members — a bit like credit unions or old-fashioned mutual insurance companies. By representing many members, they act as collective bargaining agents on behalf of members’ interests.

Coalitions have sprung up to represent many different types of data and philosophies of data use. Some people have opted into coalitions focused on privacy, while others have joined ones interested in research and progress. Many have joined coalitions focused on ensuring that social media platforms do not use information in ways that harm democracy. Still others have joined coalitions that aimed to earn revenue for members.

Data coalitions have rapidly replaced the foundations of the digital economy. They have inhibited Silicon Valley’s most harmful and unethical data uses — and not coincidentally, have also reduced the market capitalization of many large technology companies. But at the same time, they are accelerating technology’s overall development and spawning a dynamic new entrepreneurial ecosystem, giving an advantage to businesses trying to access and use data in ways the public genuinely supports.

Most fundamentally, data coalitions are restoring to ordinary citizens the power over our lives, our communities and our world that we had ceded to Big Tech. Coalitions have become the main forums through which we express our views on the most important public question of modern times: How do we make technology work for us?

What Does The Data Coalition Era Look Like?

Selecting a coalition requires a fair bit of engagement, like voting. We all must weigh difficult questions of value: whether we want our medical, browsing, geolocation, or other data to be held close to the vest, used for the public good or used to make money.

All options, however, are better than the status quo ante. The law requires data coalitions to be fully member-controlled. Thus, they make decisions democratically through direct or delegated votes. Members can also make their voices heard by exiting: If we disagree with the direction of our data coalition, we can leave it for another one. As in any democratic organization, we sometimes choose to go along with our coalitions when they don’t make the decision we hoped for. But the fact that data coalitions are bargaining for us on a vastly collective basis — some quickly gained many millions of members — means that they have already secured enormously better privacy policies and terms of service than we could have hoped for before 2022.

Choosing one coalition over another sometimes means that we gain or lose access to particular digital services. For example, if your designated coalition fails to negotiate terms with Slack, then you can’t use Slack. A lot of people fretted about this at first. But it has become clear that the threat of coalition “strikes” forces technology companies to serve our true interests and opens up more room for plucky competitors. This new diversity of services, for example, pushes companies to focus on interoperability instead of trying to lock users into their ecosystems.

Protecting A New Category Of Information: Everything

Today, data coalitions represent our interests in a dizzying array of information. Before 2021, we had cognizable interests in, roughly speaking, just two “bundles” of information. The first, personal information, included things like our social security numbers and medical histories. The second, intellectual property, included copyrights to our expressive work and any patents or trademarks we might own.

But there was always a third, under-governed category: the data that we generate semi-spontaneously as we move through the world, interacting with services and sensors that capture all sorts of information about our location, interests, habits and behavior. This category of data, sometimes referred to as “data exhaust,” was previously collected by companies in an almost completely unrestricted manner and then used to predict our behavior, influence our decisions and train algorithms that could emulate our intellectual work.

Data coalitions now represent our interests concerning all of this information — including “exhaust” information that we previously (and mistakenly) considered non-sensitive. Suppose you walk past a CVS on a Saturday afternoon, and CVS’s foot-traffic monitors record that an unidentified person walked past the store at that time. Your coalition, alongside others, now negotiates the terms on which CVS can use even that simple datum.

This seems radical to those of us who remember the 20th century, but it is searingly necessary. Data coalitions do much more than protect our economic and privacy interests. In 2021, we realized that if we cannot make nimble democratic decisions about the uses of all types of information, we will never steer a middle path between tyranny and chaos.

Rhymes With Gutenberg

The adage that “knowledge is power” contains a complete blueprint of the data economy. Whoever controls information we rely on controls us and can therefore profit off us. Another adage (apocryphally credited to Mark Twain) says that history doesn’t repeat itself — it rhymes. We have always been slow to recognize when information becomes our master instead of our servant.

Consider the history of the printing press. We know that the technology of the printing press empowered capitalist press owners to challenge the state. A neglected side of the story is how it also empowered them to exploit writers.

Gutenberg’s invention changed writers’ lives in two important ways. First, it increased their potential distribution, and second, it decreased their control. Presses could produce thousands of copies of a text far more easily than manual copyists. But writers generally didn’t benefit, because they didn’t own these expensive new printing machines. To be sure, on a shoestring budget, they might rent a press and print a handful of copies of something they wrote. But if readers responded positively, larger publishers would react, rapidly saturating the market and excluding the writer from both profit and moral credit. Thus, power shifted away from creators toward the owners of the fastest information-processing machines.

I don’t mean to suggest that the printing press was harmful or even a double-edged sword. The point is that 15th-century technology’s facilitation of information distribution inexorably concentrated power among the owners of capital. It challenged the state but also made publishers into moguls and writers into their pawns.

Two hundred years later, after several religious wars driven by heretical pamphlets — the fake news of its day — countries began to respond. Following the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, sovereigns set up harsh press censorship regimes. Shortly thereafter, they also moved to strengthen writers’ hands. In 1710, the British Parliament passed the first copyright act, giving authors legal tools to protect themselves from easy exploitation by press owners.

Centralized state censorship is not fondly remembered: The more progressive regimes (such as Sweden and the United States) rolled it back in the 18th century. Copyright, on the other hand, didn’t work out too badly. To be sure, it has never been perfect. And today, copyright law has a deservedly terrible reputation because global media companies have bent it to suit their interests. (For example, texts were originally protected for a reasonable term of 21 years from their writing. Now, thanks to Disney’s lobbying, most copyrights last well over a century, generating absurd rents on old work.) But overall, the 300-year project of arming authors against exploitation has been one of modern law’s signal successes.

The historical lesson here is that when radical new information-processing technologies emerge, the balance of power between content producers, owners of the information processing devices and the state changes. It necessitates new legal infrastructure to restabilize these relationships in a way that permits the potential unlocked by technology to flourish, while protecting the weak from exploitation and preventing wealthy owners of technology from acting against public interests.

Shared Governance, Not Individual Property

Data coalitions do something very different from intellectual property. Still, it is useful to see that they address the same problem: helping the creators of valuable information protect themselves from the well-capitalized parties positioned to appropriate it.

Where intellectual property law gives individuals unilateral property rights, data coalitions instead give communities democratic authority. Printing presses enabled capital owners to appropriate certain texts assembled (in theory) by solitary writers. But big data and artificial intelligence enabled capital owners to appropriate all the information that everyone assembled collectively. This is why we need data coalitions instead of new individual rights.

Twenty-first-century data cannot be understood in the individualistic terms of the 18th century. Followers of John Locke and Immanuel Kant unsurprisingly restricted their protection of information to the artisanal-scale works of the “geniuses and great men” who they parochially saw as the drivers of history. But the vast data that drives history today is not like that. Instead, it always both pertains to and originates from indefinite numbers of people, and it gains its value through aggregation. “My” data is valuable not because it is some masterpiece of self-expression, but because it contains deep, predictive insights about people I associate with. Thus, whenever one person discloses or withholds it, countless others are affected in ways we cannot simply ignore.

That is why data cannot be owned, but must be governed. Data must be the subject of shared democratic decisions rather than individual, unilateral ones. This presents particular challenges for liberal legal orders that have typically centered on individual rights.

Immediately prior to the data coalition era, some of the most earnest advocates for a better data economy remained stuck in a defunct, 18th-century proprietarian mindset, hoping to grant us “sovereignty” over our individual information. But in the context of 21^st-century data, this made no sense. It was like imagining thousands of people owning different threads in the same blanket.

Similarly, many well-intentioned advocates of open data failed to see how free information has always concentrated power in the owners of the fastest information-processing machines. Like the publishers of centuries past, the richest technology companies will always lead in extracting value from open data, giving them unearned leverage over the rest of society. So putting data into the public domain actually does precisely the opposite of leveling the playing field.

If individual data ownership is Scylla, the mythical sea monster who devoured unwary sailors, then open data is Charybdis, the whirlpool near Scylla’s cave. Finding the narrow path between the two means treating data like a police force or a water system — that is, as the subject of widely shared yet deeply responsible governance.

Individual Responsibilities, Democratic Rights

It is important to emphasize that “your data” and “my data” do not exist as distinct things. My address is my father’s son’s address, and my genes are the genes of my cousins. My deepest desires are also the desires of my friends, not just because we have common backgrounds, but because we communicate and form our desires together.

For some, this is a destabilizing insight that threatens to submerge the individual into a collective. It might seem to neutralize the emancipatory dimensions of Enlightenment thinking. After all, modern democracies have done much good by making distinct human subjects the wielders of legal rights. If data does not pertain to individuals, how are we going to preserve this tradition in this crucial new context?

Data coalitions address this concern in a powerful but unexpected way. In fact, they keep individuals at the center of the picture. But instead of centering individual rights, they center individual responsibilities.

Although we cannot all have absolute individual rights to an inseparable corpus of shared information, we can and do have palpable individual responsibilities regarding how we make use of whatever information is at our disposal. After all, when we disclose information unilaterally, we compromise (or advance) others’ interests. The same is true when we withhold information, like when we refuse to participate in contact-tracing that could halt the spread of a contagious virus. Thus, our decisions about “our” information should look more like decisions at the ballot box (exercises of responsibility) than like decisions about the money in our wallets (exercises of power).

Before the data coalition era, we had no hope of meaningfully exercising these responsibilities. Races to the bottom ruled the day. Some new data-grabbing productivity app would frequently tempt some people to use it, giving early adopters a social or professional advantage, thus pressuring others to follow suit and ultimately revealing information about many third parties who — once they realized they had few privacy interests left to defend — adopted it themselves. For example, it was not worth trying to keep your information away from Gmail when most of the people you corresponded with were using it.

This kind of thing happens much less now. Today, coalition-wide votes indicate whether overall membership — thousands or millions of people — believes it would be served or disserved by the proliferation of particular services. The power of these shared decisions forces even the biggest developers to appeal to a deeper notion of the public interest in designing their services. Thus, by participating in these shared decisions, we both advance our interests and fulfill our responsibilities in ways that were impossible before 2021.

How Did It Happen?

The data coalition era could not have started without support from lawmakers. It would never have emerged solely through grassroots organization or new technological developments. There are three reasons why.

1. Data coalitions needed to be made into necessary counterparties for businesses looking to use data. Otherwise, Big Tech would have done everything possible to circumvent coalitions and go on assembling data from the individuals willing to part with it most cheaply. 

2. Data coalitions needed to be subjected to special regulations. These regulations ensured that they remained wholly independent of conventional data-exploiting businesses and that they really served their members’ interests. They also set forth necessary guidelines streamlining the complex disputes that arise between different coalitions representing partly overlapping data.

3. The individual rights to data created by legacy laws like the GDPR (in Europe) and CCPA (in California) needed to be made temporarily delegable to coalitions. If that didn’t happen, then coalitions could not have fulfilled their central purpose: facilitating shared decisions by their members about data use. Making individual data rights strictly non-delegable to coalitions would have neutered them in exactly the same way that “right to work” laws neuter labor unions.

Paradise Found?

Data coalitions have cut through the network monopolies of the internet giants like a Gordian knot. Those companies have not been pleased.

But data coalitions have neither diminished the quality of digital services, nor slowed technological progress. On the contrary, competition has increased and the technology sector as a whole is prospering. Today, any entrepreneur with a good idea has the same shot at getting access to large datasets as Amazon and Google. Consumers are happier, and the public discourse is healthier. Data coalitions have helped society make precisely the sort of intelligent judgments about technology and the public interest that were disastrously neglected for the previous two decades.

The data coalition era is neither a techno-utopia nor a Luddite fever-dream. It is simply a new political-economic settlement with a more reasonable synthesis of competing interests, better incentives and a less alarming concentration of power in Silicon Valley.

I wonder where’d we be heading without it?

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