How to Save the Internet
Also by Nick
Clegg
Politics
How to Stop Brexit
Nick Clegg
How to Save the Internet
The Threat to Global Connection in the Age of AI and Political Conflict
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To Miriam, Antonio, Alberto and Miguel – the best fellow travellers anyone could wish for
You are living through one of the most rapid periods of technological change in centuries. It is barely three decades since the pinging and popping of dial-up modems brought the internet into our homes via bulky desktop computers; now it is embedded in every aspect of our lives. The iPhone wasn’t released until 2007; now many of us struggle to imagine getting by without a smartphone. Facebook launched in 2004; now more than twice as many people use it as drive cars. Somewhere along the line, Google became a verb. A hundred million people were using ChatGPT within two months of its launch. More than a hundred billion messages are sent every day on WhatsApp alone. Even the most technologically inept baby boomer has more information, more choice, more people – and more power – at their fingertips than their grandparents could have dreamed of. The open, borderless and largely free internet has become an integral part not only of our daily lives but also of how our societies function. Processing data at scale has revolutionised the way businesses operate and public services are delivered. People generating and sharing content at previously unheard-of scale and speed has transformed the public sphere. From the Arab Spring to Donald Trump’s breakthrough election in 2016, social media has been seen as a driving force behind some of
the big political upheavals of recent times. At the same time, the ability to connect with each other online kept the wheels of society turning during the Covid-19 pandemic in a way that would have been unthinkable just a few years before. To quote an internet meme of Will Ferrell in Anchorman : ‘That escalated quickly.’
For as long as there has been digital technology, there have been people who have cautioned us against it, but in recent years many societies – especially in the West – have become increasingly anxious about the size and power of tech companies, how our data is held, used and monetised, and the impact internet technologies have on everything from our privacy and mental health to the exercising of free speech and the functioning of democracy. In many quarters it has become something like accepted wisdom that Big Tech is exacerbating or even at the root of many of society’s ills.
This backlash, or ‘techlash’, raises difficult questions. Would we choose to turn off certain technologies if we could? Would we deny ourselves the next innovation? Would we be better off without the freedoms of the open internet? Some would say yes. Most of us, I suspect, experience a dilemma: fundamentally we recognise and welcome the benefits that technology brings, but we baulk at the fact that they put power in the hands of people and entities we don’t trust and don’t feel are accountable to us. As I hope to show in this book, how we attempt to resolve this dilemma is a question of immense importance that will reshape our relationship with the internet.
As I also hope to show, it is no coincidence that this techlash has come to a head during a period when the international order is pulling apart. Since the 2008 financial crash, the politics of economic nationalism and geopolitical rivalry have been turbocharged. Trump’s ‘America First’ reliance on tariffs and trade wars has up-ended the global economic order and antagonised allies and adversaries alike. Both democracies and autocracies have become increasingly insular, seeking to exercise greater sovereignty over their economies, their borders and
the technologies used by their citizens. The result is a new wave of laws and regulations as nation states seek to reassert control over the internet.
Donald Trump’s return as President of the United States promises to accelerate this trend. A significant difference from his first term is that, this time around, Silicon Valley tech leaders have sought to align themselves with Trump and his forceful America First philosophy. This is at least in part based on the belief that his administration can exert pressure on foreign governments to refrain from onerously regulating American companies. Shortly after I announced my resignation from Meta in January 2025, the company caused controversy by shifting its stance on content moderation, including loosening some of its restrictions on what content is allowed on its platform, and replacing its independent fact-checking programme in the US with a crowdsourced X-style ‘community notes’ approach. Mark Zuckerberg made the politics of the shift clear when he announced the changes, saying:
We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government.
While it’s too early to tell how this assertion of technounilateralism in the United States will play out – uniting Silicon Valley and Washington DC against foreign laws and norms – two things seem most likely: first, that given America’s extraordinary economic and technological weight the US government will succeed on some key issues in imposing its will on
others; second, that it is equally certain that over time there will be a reaction from sovereign countries elsewhere, if for no other reason than that it will be politically impossible in places as varied as India, Brazil, Indonesia and France simply to meekly do what they’re told by Uncle Sam.
So the new rules of the internet are being written at a time when the international order is unravelling, with superpowers flexing their muscles on the world stage and nations of all shapes and sizes determined to assert greater sovereign control over their economies and their ways of life. Had the techlash occurred in the political climate of a generation ago, it is conceivable that this spate of policymaking might have been approached differently. The internet is by its very nature global. Every nation state is grappling with versions of the same problems and concerns. In the era of globalisation, when international institutions like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization were at the height of their powers and even many autocratic states were seeking to open up their economies, it is conceivable that international treaties or other global mechanisms could have brought a level of cohesion to the way the rules of the internet were written and applied. Instead, nation states are ploughing their own furrows, creating a complicated patchwork of local laws with little or no attempt to coordinate across jurisdictions. The net result is that the global internet is splintering into national and regional silos, with potentially huge knock-on effects for the global economy, the trajectory of technological innovation, and ultimately the freedoms and opportunities that will shape billions of lives.
In fact, the global internet in its truest sense no longer exists. China, Russia and others have built digital walls at their borders, effectively segregating their online worlds and creating an alternative internet model. For those of us living in western democracies, the only version of the internet we have ever known is one in which a piece of information can reliably be sent from one digital address to another without any government deciding how – or whether – that happens. In this alternative model,
nation states exercise top-down control over information and citizens are cut off from the world beyond their borders. The temptation for other nations – democracies and autocracies alike – to follow suit has only increased with time.
We have arrived at a crossroads – and at a crucial moment. Just as the techlash and deglobalisation are changing the character of the internet from the outside, powerful advances in generative AI are changing it from within. If we continue along our current path, we will soon find ourselves in a world where the internet has changed beyond recognition. As countries develop different versions of the internet, segregated by national or regional borders, divergent AI technologies risk deepening and entrenching the divisions between and within our societies. As fears about the perils of technologies like social media and AI dominate public discourse, and with the political world reacting by seeking to assert national control over the once borderless internet, we risk losing what has made it so liberating. As I set out in the second half of the book, this will have hugely damaging effects not only on global trade and economies everywhere, but also on medical and scientific research, cross-border policing, academia, journalism and more. Ultimately, the world will be less innovative, less open and less free.
But there is an alternative path, one that could lead us away from this divided future by salvaging and protecting the best of the global internet and ensuring that the benefits of AI are spread to the largest possible number of people. At its heart, the internet is a revolutionary experiment in openness: from the way its early pioneers hardwired the open flow of information into its design, to the way it has opened up access to the public sphere to billions of people, creating a messy but ultimately empowering marketplace of ideas, creativity and commerce. Openness, I believe, is also the key to saving it.
This will require the democratic world to make common cause around our technological future. In reality, this means the United States needs to recognise that its own best interest lies in pooling some of its technological advantage with a coalition of
nations that share its democratic values – not least India and the European Union. In the final chapter, I propose a US-led global deal to keep the flow of data between these techno-democracies open and to share access to vital AI infrastructure, establish global standards for the technology’s responsible development, and enable cooperation between allies on sensitive areas like security and intelligence. Such a deal may seem counter-intuitive at a time when President Trump’s America is escalating its trade war with China, imposing or threatening tariffs on long-term allies like Canada, Mexico and the European Union, and when governments in India, Europe and elsewhere are imposing ever greater sovereignty over the internet within their national borders. But I believe there are strong political incentives for all sides that make it plausible.
For any of this to happen, we first need to forge a new relationship between tech and society. To save the open internet, I will argue that Big Tech itself is going to have to become a lot more open. A small number of private companies have accrued immense economic and political power in recent years, and this power needs to be wielded transparently and held to account. In the penultimate chapter, I will propose some concrete steps that Big Tech companies can take to open up their platforms to much greater scrutiny, devolve decision-making power over content that is shared online, bring their users into their policymaking processes and, crucially, give them far greater control over their online experience – including how their data is used.
It may seem unrealistic to expect companies that have spent years amassing power to voluntarily start giving it away. But it is in their long-term self-interest to do so. If the masters of Silicon Valley refuse to open up, the choice will be taken out of their hands. The political world has many ways to assert sovereignty over private enterprises – not least by breaking them up or even one day nationalising the vast AI infrastructure that they have spent billions upon billions of dollars building. These sorts of drastic government interventions would be bad, for a
number of reasons I will set out later in this book, but they could prove hard to resist for politicians eager to assert control over Big Tech. The best hope for avoiding them is if Big Tech lets the sunlight in itself. We need a radical level of transparency and accountability, which in turn will provide the basis for well-informed, multilateral rule-making underpinning the open internet.
Fundamentally, this is a book about power. Future historians will decide where the digital revolution of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries ranks alongside the likes of the Industrial Revolution, the Reformation and the other great societal upheavals of history. But it will be up there with them. And like these other great historic disruptions, the digital revolution has disrupted power – shifting it away from many of the traditional gatekeepers and institutions of power, to new people and new institutions. In doing so it has created a paradox that goes to the heart of many of today’s biggest debates about technology: on the one hand, digital technologies, from the internet and social media to generative AI, have greatly democratised power, and promise to continue to do so, loosening the control of political and media gatekeepers, leapfrogging geographic boundaries, and giving billions of people access to information, economic and social opportunities and the ability to express themselves in ways that were once the preserve of a privileged elite; on the other, they have centralised economic and political power in the hands of a small number of vast internet platforms.
This power paradox raises profound questions. How do we curb the power of the platforms without also curbing the power of the people? What does Silicon Valley need to do to ensure it maintains society’s permission to innovate? Can nation states ever truly control the internet within their borders; and, if so, at what cost? What level of risk are we prepared to accept in return for the extraordinary benefits that are available to us from AI, and how do we go about creating those rules in a way that ensures everyone buys into them?
These are not questions that any single book or individual can or should resolve alone. But we urgently need to come together to negotiate answers to these questions. My hope is that this book might provide some insight into how we could do that, and why it is so essential that we do.
But first, I should tackle a more immediate question: why should anyone listen to me?
The Corridors and Campuses of Power
I’m not a creature of Silicon Valley. I didn’t study computer science. I’ve never written a line of code. I haven’t spent my career – the bulk of it anyway – immersed in the processes, debates and science of technological progress. I came to Meta, Facebook as it then was, in 2018 as an émigré from the world of British and European politics and stayed until 2025. In my twenties I worked in the European Commission as a trade negotiator before embarking on a career in elected politics in my thirties. I was elected first as a Member of the European Parliament, then as a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom. In late 2007, I became Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third party. Just over two years later I led the Liberal Democrats into an election that resulted in a hung parliament (where no party has an overall majority) and ultimately became the deputy prime minister in the UK’s first coalition government since the Second World War. It wasn’t until three years after that government ended that I first set foot in Silicon Valley. I wasn’t really sure what to expect.
‘Silicon Valley’ sounds like a made-up place – a nickname or shorthand rather than an actual geographic location. In reality, it describes a long stretch of suburban California that starts where urban San Francisco ends on the west side of San
Francisco Bay, then runs south along the route of Interstate 280, bordered on one side by the bay and the mountains of the Diablo Range, and on the other by the Santa Cruz mountains (hence the valley in the name). Further north is wine country. Further east is desert.
It’s in the towns that make up this sun-kissed stretch of suburbia – Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Cupertino and many more – that generations of tech start-ups have burgeoned in the hope of becoming the next big thing. And many of them did. Silicon Valley today is a beacon attracting software engineers and venture capitalists alike, all hoping to strike it rich with the next billion-dollar company. The streets of Palo Alto are full of young, smart, wealthy people from every corner of the US and the world, hanging out, wearing hoodies, carrying water bottles with slices of cucumber inside and driving eerily quiet Teslas.
As an Englishman, I never cease to be amazed by the sheer scale of America. It’s striking, when you first set foot in this part of Northern California, how remote it feels from the power centres of the east coast. It’s not just the nearly 3,000 miles that separate you from Washington DC and New York; the three-hour time difference means you feel oddly out of sync. The day’s news agenda is in full flight on the east coast before the west is awake. The biggest European stories broke the night before. Then, in the evening in California, it feels like the rest of the world is asleep. Californians watch the New Year being greeted with the Times Square Ball Drop, then enjoy three more hours of the previous year – or watch it three hours late as a re-run. It’s like you’re far away from everywhere.
It’s no wonder that people who want to strike out on their own, at a safe distance from the prying eyes of the men in suits, are attracted to this place. It’s a natural home for idealists who want to stick it to the man. This part of the world has been a haven for adventurers and anti-establishment figures for generations. The world’s tech centre is in the heart of gold rush country, and not far from where, a century or so after the gold
rush, the hippie movement started in San Francisco’s HaightAshbury district.
This might explain why Silicon Valley technologists are prone to talking about their work in visionary terms, perhaps best captured in the writer and cyberspace evangelist John Perry Barlow’s end-of-the-millennium manifesto A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. As he somewhat loftily put it: ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’ There’s something about the character of the place that lends itself to this libertarian utopianism. And if you’re looking for a more direct connection between technologists and hippies, Barlow could occasionally, when not extolling the internet’s freedom from authority, be found writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead.
There’s something intoxicating about Silicon Valley. This is a place where people say yes. It’s a magnet for smart people buzzing with creativity. There are no limits to ambition. Every obstacle is an opportunity. Every beautiful day could be the day something amazing happens. Anyone could have an idea that could change the world – and get filthy rich. If you build it, they will come. And the things that get built here – by these idealistic people in this dizzying environment – really do change the world. This is the home of modern computing, where the microprocessor and the personal computer were created, where the World Wide Web took off, as well as the first web browsers and search engines that helped us make sense of it, right through to social media, smartphones, cloud services and now generative AI.
But it is also an industrial-scale breeding ground for hubris, of a largely macho kind too (it is still a place where, on the whole, confident men with big egos rule the roost and smart, capable women have to fight for their place every step of the way). The isolation that makes it the perfect petri dish for new
ideas is also what distances it from the lives of ordinary people. The wealth of the place distances it from their struggles. Its idealism distances it from the messy realities of their lives.
One of the biggest culture shocks I experienced in Silicon Valley had nothing to do with differences between the UK and the US, per se. It was because the worlds I had moved in ever since I first left home for university in the mid 1980s – studying social anthropology at Cambridge, and throughout my brief career in journalism and my significantly longer one in politics – were ones where the primary way of succeeding was through the power of words. Politics, at its heart, is a competition between different stories about how things should be. That’s what liberalism, socialism, conservatism and fascism ultimately are: stories that give us different ways of looking at the world, different diagnoses of our problems, and different solutions too. You win elections if more people sympathise with your telling of events and your vision of the future than with those of your opponents.
But Silicon Valley is full of people who see the world a different way: engineers. Theirs is a world of facts and process. The engineer’s mindset is to identify a problem and fix it, then move on to the next problem. They operate in a maze of acronyms, as if language itself is a time-wasting exercise that needs to be boiled down to its most abbreviated form. On arrival, I was immediately plunged into a world of XFNs, STOs and FOAs, where every roadmap has a playbook, every community is part of an ecosystem, and where every subject is either a tl;dr or a deep dive (but never, seemingly, the right length). And everything – everything – has to be quantified. In an early meeting, I remember being asked by one of the company’s most senior engineers what the percentage likelihood was that government X would pass a law about Y. I laughed. I thought it was a playful joke. The idea that political processes could be boiled down to a sort of faux-science seemed silly to me. He didn’t laugh. So I said something like, ‘Oh, well, 23.67 per cent.’ He nodded earnestly. I have since come to realise that in order
to persuade people in Silicon Valley, compelling stories are useless without data points for every argument and probabilities for every outcome. And I must admit, it has rubbed off on me. Approaching problems in a systematic way, however faux the science might be, helps to order your thought process and guide you towards clear decisions.
But it is also reductive. It commodifies everything, removes nuance and instinct and all the intangible aspects of human nature. When I talked to engineers in my early days at the company about data, they talked about it the way a carpenter would talk about wood – a material to be used to make amazing things, not people’s precious personal information. That mindset has changed in the years since, in part because of a wider cultural shift in people’s expectations of privacy and data protection, and in part because change has been forced upon the company by regulators. But the primacy of logic and reason over emotion and gut instinct gives a clue, perhaps, as to why Silicon Valley can often seem a little tone deaf to the concerns of people beyond the walls of its primary-coloured campuses. Perhaps inevitably, now that we are a generation or more deep in the internet revolution, the early utopianism of Silicon Valley has turned from sounding visionary and inspiring to occasionally appearing naive and self-serving. Google’s infamous ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto was never meant to be ironic. But it’s hard to sense the winds of public opinion changing direction when you’re sunning yourself in Santa Cruz.
In a way, Silicon Valley has become its own worst enemy. When the financial crash and its economic and political aftershocks were reshaping the agenda, companies that were built to sell sunlit uplands were painfully late to the change in mood. The lofty idealism started sounding hollow. The eye-watering amounts of money being generated made tech companies obvious targets as governments wrestled with growing deficits and people faced rising costs and cuts to their public services. Tech leaders made missteps, failing to distinguish clearly between legitimate concerns and trivial ones. Convinced of their own
anti-elitist self-image, they soon cemented themselves in the public imagination as a new class of out-of-touch elite. Nerdy heroes transformed into capitalist villains.
Suddenly the Silicon Valley tech bro is the archetypal villain of movies, from blockbusters like Jurassic World and Glass Onion to animated movies like The Mitchells vs The Machines and Ron’s Gone Wrong. A Superman reboot sees Lex Luthor reimagined as a tech bro, played by the same actor – Jesse Eisenberg – who shot to fame playing the young Mark Zuckerberg. Tech bros are the villains du jour, just as mad scientists with German accents, Russian hard men, heartless Wall Street bankers and shady Middle Eastern terrorists were before them.
Still to this day, tech leaders don’t always help themselves. During a virtual session of the Seoul AI summit in 2024 – the follow-up to the 2023 UK-led Bletchley Park summit in Milton Keynes – which brought together leaders of the G7 nations, South Korea and others with business leaders from the big AI companies to discuss the responsible development of the technology, Elon Musk appeared live from his private jet. Hunched over his laptop, front-lit against a dark background, he appeared as if in a hostage video shot on the Death Star, before reprimanding everyone about how AI needs to be ‘maximally truthful’ and not focused on the ‘fashion for social justice’. An instant later his link went down, leaving world leaders and diplomats staring nonplussed at their Zoom screens. Eventually he came back online, declared ‘honesty is the best policy’, and promptly disappeared again. Another tech leader appeared to be eating his breakfast throughout the summit.
As a recovering politician, I know a thing or two about being caricatured as a villain. I was in government for five years – from 2010 to 2015 – as deputy prime minister in a Liberal Democrat–Conservative coalition. For all the achievements (and there were many) of the coalition government overall and of the Liberal Democrats within it, they came at a high political price for the party and for me personally. I had a brief moment in the sun during the 2010 election campaign when, in the wake
of introducing myself to the British public in the UK’s first ever televised leaders’ debate, I was fleetingly the most popular politician in the country. But I was soon knocked off my perch, even becoming something of a hate figure on both sides of the aisle, accused by the right of holding the Conservatives back from enacting a true-blue agenda, and by the left of betraying my principles and enabling the hated Tories. I’ve been protested against, satirised, vilified by both the right-wing and the leftwing press, even hanged in effigy. So one result of my time as a politician is that I know intimately what it means to lose control of the narrative.
What I also learned from being in government is something of the way that technology is viewed by the political class: how technological advances resuscitate age-old political dilemmas like the tension between privacy and security, or individual liberty and top-down state control. Above all, it revealed to me a significant disconnect between the sometimes politically naive technologists building these remarkable innovations and the often technologically illiterate politicians charged with regulating them.
The government wants to spy on you
I remember encountering, relatively early on in my time as deputy prime minister, a consistent temptation within the government to seek to curtail technology and/or to use it for surveillance of people in the name of national security. As I discovered, the British security apparatus is adept at taking wet-behind-the-ears ministers and exposing them to chilling presentations of numerous new threats in order to instil the requisite alarm to justify whatever draconian policies are contained on the next slide. In opposition during the Blair–Brown years, I’d campaigned against Labour Home Secretaries – the cabinet ministers in charge of what Americans refer to as Homeland Security – trying to introduce illiberal measures like the
introduction of compulsory ID cards and up to ninety days’ detention without charge for terror suspects.
Shortly after I entered government, the Home Office argued that the move from itemised billing of phone calls to flat-rate monthly contracts and unmetered internet use was a national security concern. This is because, historically, telecoms companies collected and stored every number you called in order to bill you, based on time and distance. This meant the ‘communications data’ (whom you called, when, from where, and for how long – though not the actual content of the message) was also, coincidentally, available (with the appropriate permissions) to the police and the intelligence agencies. With the spread of mobile phones in the early 2000s, companies had increasingly done away with itemisation and as a result no longer had a business case to collect the data. The mobile internet was accelerating this trend – lots more data, but very little of it available for law enforcement or surveillance. The Home Office wanted to pass legislation – a Communications Data Bill – to shore up the previous model, requiring telecoms companies to effectively act on the state’s behalf in collecting information about their customers’ communications for which they themselves had no use. This would also be extended to text messages, emails and web browsing, including social media activity. The press predictably and accurately enough dubbed the bill the ‘Snoopers’ Charter’.
Every proposed piece of legislation that hadn’t been included in the original coalition agreement – the programme for government hammered out by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats prior to forming the government – had to be agreed by both parties. The Snoopers’ Charter wasn’t part of the coalition agreement, which ultimately meant that it couldn’t proceed if I couldn’t support it. The Conservatives and the security services were strongly in favour and applied considerable pressure on me and my party’s ministers. We gave only partial consent, insisting the legislation should be published in draft rather than in full, and sent to a special committee of both Houses
(the Commons and the Lords) to be scrutinised, including by liberals who were wary of government overreach on issues of civil liberties. The committee published a critical report with a number of recommended changes to the bill, which became the subject of heated debates between the coalition parties. Ultimately, I insisted the bill couldn’t proceed unless it was rewritten substantially. When it became clear this wasn’t going to be done in a way that we felt was palatable, I eventually blocked the bill in April 2013.
A few weeks later, in June 2013, the Guardian and the New York Times began publishing a large number of top-secret documents leaked by US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, revealing an array of sophisticated surveillance programmes. The reports of mass surveillance were jaw-dropping. The NSA had been collecting data on millions of innocent people’s phone and internet activity without their knowledge or consent. Buried in Snowden’s anarchic data dump was evidence of the existence of top-secret surveillance programmes like PRISM, which allowed the NSA to collect data from tech companies including Google, Facebook and Apple. And the UK was implicated too. The leaks revealed that the UK’s intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had been working closely with the NSA to collect and analyse data on people’s phone and internet activity. One of the programmes exposed by Snowden was called Tempora, which allowed GCHQ to tap into transatlantic fibreoptic cables and collect vast amounts of data on internet traffic, including emails, web browsing history and other online activity.
One thing that was painfully obvious was that the Home Office and the UK’s intelligence service at GCHQ had withheld significant information from me and other democratically elected ministers. We learned far more about their work from reading the Guardian than we ever did from them. It severely deepened the mistrust between us and the Conservatives when relations were already at a low ebb after I had nixed the Snoopers’ Charter. We pushed them to agree to a review of surveillance
powers, which they resisted. They eventually relented in July 2014, when the Home Office asked David Anderson QC – a respected barrister who served as the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation – to lead a review. He produced a 300-page report the following year which formed the basis of a new, comprehensive Investigatory Powers Act, passed in 2016.
These and other experiences in government left me with a bad taste in my mouth. But they also piqued my interest. Throughout my time in government I would meet representatives from companies like Google or Microsoft to understand how they grappled with government data collection demands. To my surprise, I often found myself more sympathetic to the technologists than the government. These were global companies with a global outlook, trying to navigate a new and increasingly fraught area of politics and strike a balance between liberty and security, and seemed to be doing so with greater appreciation of the trade-offs than the Home Office itself.
In my life after government, I found myself increasingly curious about the interaction of tech and politics. Through Open Reason, a think tank I established after leaving government, I dipped my toes into issues around social media, artificial intelligence and tech regulation. I talked to entrepreneurs and start-ups about the challenges they faced, and those they hoped to help solve. I began to explore the idea of creating a forum where up-and-coming politicians could meet and engage with innovators and businesses in the tech world. I wanted to find a way to bridge the divide between what seemed to me to be a world of technologists who didn’t speak the language of politics, and the world of politics that didn’t remotely understand the technology it was supposed to be regulating.
It was while I was tiptoeing into these debates that a series of events began to unfold that would come to be foundational moments in the development of the techlash – and Facebook was at the centre of them. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US Presidential election, it became clear that entities based in Russia had attempted to use social media platforms
like Facebook to sow disinformation, including spreading fake news and running ads aimed at American voters using bogus accounts linked to Russia’s notorious Internet Research Agency bot farm. This was followed by a second scandal, when it was revealed that an academic named Aleksandr Kogan had sold data related to millions of Facebook users – data that he had access to strictly for academic and not commercial purposes – to a political advisory firm called Cambridge Analytica, which then claimed to have used that data to help Mr Trump’s campaign target US voters. (Widespread claims that the firm also helped the Vote Leave campaign to target British voters during the 2016 Brexit referendum were later debunked by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office.) Around the same time, Facebook was also alleged to have been used to spread hate speech and incite violence against the Rohingya people in Myanmar during a genocidal campaign by the military. Suddenly Big Tech – and Facebook in particular – was in the firing line in a way it hadn’t been during my years in office. Big problems had been exposed. Silicon Valley had lost the benefit of the doubt. Not only was it under scrutiny as never before, but all good faith had been lost.
The unwinding of globalisation
I’m very much a child of globalisation. I grew up in leafy middle England, but I’ve always considered myself European. My mother is Dutch and my father has Russian heritage. As a young man I studied at the College of Europe in Bruges, where I met Miriam, my wife, a proud Spaniard. We raised our three boys in a bilingual house. In my time as a trade negotiator in the European Commission and later as an MEP representing a region of one country in a vast parliament with twenty-four other Member States, I was on the very front lines of globalisation. The coalition government came to power in the wake of two seismic political events. The first was the financial crash. I
was less than a year into leading the Liberal Democrats when the 2008 crash happened – the collapse of Lehman Brothers occurred on the same weekend as my first autumn party conference as leader. The banking crisis was a cataclysmic event, causing hardship and heartache for millions in the years that followed. Developed economies are still dealing with its aftershocks today. It has been a wrecking ball for the UK’s public finances, leaving a long tail of unsavoury economic repercussions for the coalition, and every government since, to deal with.
The second event, probably unknown to readers outside the UK, but also of seismic importance within its shores, was the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal, which laid bare the misuse of public funds – some egregious, some trivial – by dozens of British politicians of all parties, which eroded further what little trust the British public had in their political class.
I don’t claim to have seen the backlash against globalisation and the rise of anti-establishment populism coming. But I did have a front-row seat. In many ways, my political rise during the 2010 general election was fuelled by popular anger at Britain’s two old establishment parties. The politics I preached was one of change and political reform, for which there was a ready appetite among voters fed up with the status quo. And when I found myself in government, I saw close-up how our governing partners, the British Conservative Party, became ever more entranced by populist nationalism.
The David Cameron with whom I negotiated the coalition was a self-described ‘liberal conservative’, campaigning on the National Health Service and his environmental credentials (even being photographed hugging huskies in the Arctic to underline the point). But soon the populist headbangers on the right of his party were exerting an ever greater grip over its politics. The UK Independence Party, an outright nationalist party, rose in popularity and influence, and chewed away at the Conservatives’ base of support. As it did, right-wing Conservative MPs and their cheerleaders in the media and the party’s grassroots became ever more vocal. To keep them on side, Cameron and
his Chancellor, George Osborne, threw them ever more red meat – from proposing ever harsher cuts to welfare spending (which I spent considerable political capital blocking), to giving tax breaks to married couples (which I agreed to in exchange for the introduction of free school meals for 4–7-year-olds) – culminating in his promise to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union if he won a majority of his own in the 2015 general election, which he duly did. Despite pandering to the Brexiteers in their party, Cameron and Osborne campaigned for Britain to remain in the EU, alongside the Liberal Democrats and most prominent Labour politicians. But the battle was lost.
Brexit was heartbreaking for me. My identity as a European is a fact of my family history, just as Britain’s place in Europe is a fact of geography. I’ve devoted much of my career to the idea of European solidarity and the institutions of European cooperation. As a politician, I have advocated passionately that we are stronger together than apart, better able to solve shared challenges when we work collectively than in isolation. I believe this not just for Europe but for the world, which makes me what some might describe as a globalist – though that word is almost exclusively used as an insult these days. But I mean it in the sense that I believe in international cooperation. I believe that co-dependency and mutual shared interest between nations is the best way to avoid conflict, and that pooling a small portion of national sovereignty in order to act collectively is the only way we will rise to truly global challenges like climate change and cross-border crime. It is also the best way, in my view, to manage a borderless entity like the internet.
Glutton for punishment
By now it may be clear that I am a serial holder of unpopular positions. I was the leader of the third party in a country that had been led by one of two larger parties – Labour and
Conservative – for about a hundred years. I was the deputy prime minister in a coalition government in a country that hadn’t had a coalition since the Second World War. I’m a European from a country that voted to leave Europe. I’m a liberal centrist in an era of populism on both the right and the left. I’m a staunch internationalist at a time of deglobalisation and resurgent nationalism. And, being the glutton for punishment that I evidently am, I then worked for Meta at a time when social media was being blamed for many of the world’s ills. But, however unfashionable an opinion it may be, I believe that progress happens when people are empowered, not when politicians, the media, elites or anyone else decree it, and in my view that, fundamentally, is what the internet and social media are all about.
Even so, while I had my curiosity piqued by my experiences in government and afterwards, I am probably not the sort of person you would expect to find in the gleaming campuses of Silicon Valley. I spent my career in a suit and tie, not a hoodie and flip-flops. My first instinct when confronted with the hundreds of brightly coloured sloganeering posters that adorn the walls of every meeting room and corridor of Facebook’s extraordinary MPK campus (another acronym, this one a somewhat unnecessary shortening of Menlo Park), was to do something very English: apply gentle mockery. In one of the first meetings I held with one of the teams I had just taken charge of, a poster on the wall declared the ubiquitous Silicon Valley mantra: ‘Bring Your Authentic Self to Work’. To try to break the ice, I said, ‘Please don’t bring your authentic self to work. You wouldn’t like my authentic self if I brought it to work. So just bring your inauthentic self to work from nine to five and then you can go home and be yourself and we’ll get on perfectly well.’ Stony silence. One of the team came up to me rather coyly afterwards to say that the message had been quite disconcerting for them. I knew then that I wasn’t in Kansas any more.
The fact that I was approached for the role at all is a recognition that what was then Facebook is not simply a technology company. Its sheer scale and the ubiquity of its products, coupled
with it finding itself in the crosshairs of public debate, make it an inherently political institution too – regardless of whether it wants to be or not (it doesn’t). The techlash has meant its ability to operate is not simply a question of its inventiveness, technical know-how and financial muscle, but of its role in society. Put simply, the techlash has thrown into doubt whether Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon and other tech companies have society’s blessing to do what they do. To ensure that these companies can continue to innovate in the years and decades ahead, they have realised that they need to be in a dialogue with the world of politics, not a shouting match.
It was in the aftermath of Facebook’s 2016–2018 controversies that I had a series of conversations with leaders at the company. My friend and predecessor as MP for Sheffield Hallam, Richard Allan, introduced me to Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s then (and soon-to-depart) Vice President for Policy and Communications. Before long I was approached by its Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, and flown out to California to meet her and Mark Zuckerberg.
It was obvious to me from our first encounters that Mark and Sheryl were a formidable duo. It is commonly understood that Mark Zuckerberg is a visionary innovator, but the two things that struck me most about him are his endless curiosity and his indefatigable competitiveness. Lots of people who achieve great personal success, especially at a young age, can tend to get stuck in their ways and rest on their laurels. Mark, on the other hand, has the humility, drive and appetite to keep learning. If he thinks he doesn’t know something, he will grill the people who do and devour every bit of wisdom and insight he can on the subject. He’ll think long and hard and consider every angle. And no one – I mean no one – can hold a silence like Mark. I’m a talker – if there’s so much as a moment of silence in a conversation, I’ll burble on witlessly to fill the void. Mark will let the silence hang in the air as he muses, often to an excruciating degree. But when he does open his mouth, the response is invariably thoughtful and considered. He may be perceived as