The Great Power Show: The Internet’s Lost Promise of Freedom

For most of the past two decades, the assumption baked into how we talked about the internet was that it would push power downwards. Social media would route around gatekeepers, information would be harder to control, and citizens would end up with more leverage over states than they had before. The Arab Spring seemed to confirm it.

That is not the world we are living in now. What we have instead is a steady consolidation of control by states, and by a small number of companies that increasingly find it easier to work with states than constrain them. And sitting beneath both of them, weaker than it has been in a long time, is civil society.

Manoj's guest for this episode of The Great Power Show is Prateek Waghre, who has spent years working on technology policy in India and thinking about how information moves, who shapes it, and who gets to decide what stays up. He describes the current scenario as an inverted triangle: states and companies at the top, society at the bottom, and a balance that has tipped decisively in the wrong direction over the past five years.

Manoj asks him whether treating privately owned platforms as the global public square was a misreading from the start, and what that error set us up for. Who is actually sovereign in the digital public square—the state, the company, or the algorithm? And what happens to civil society when the infrastructure it uses to organise can be throttled by a government, switched off by a company, or quietly reshaped by an algorithm?

Most importantly, they discuss the governance models on offer for the digital world, from Beijing to Brussels to Washington, and whether they are as different as they claim or converging on similar tools with different justifications.

"Underneath all of it is a question I keep coming back to: What actually separates regulation that protects people from a toolkit for controlling them? I’m not sure the distinction is as clean as we’d like it to be." -- Manoj Kewalramani

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