George W Bush famously pluralised the word “internet” in his 2004 campaign by mistake. Fifteen years on, there really appears to be three internets: an American, a Chinese, and a reluctant European.



The Chinese internet has been technically severed from the rest of the world for quite a while. Meanwhile, with new waves of state- and EU-wide regulations on data protection, privacy, hate speech and copyright, the European internet is practically turning into a separate legal sphere from the US one. It is still dominated, however, by the US super-platforms (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft), which are exponentially imposing their private interests over European public values, such as diversity, solidarity, and liberty. It is now time for Europe to adopt a new strategy.



The super-platforms regulate desire, gaze, songs, rides, jobs and news. But perhaps most alarming for a democracy is how they regulate the public sphere and control the public conversation through the way they distribute cultural products, especially journalistic output. Media outlets have never lost so much control over the distribution of their content.



The algorithms behind these platforms now decide who sees what and when. They personalise the realities people live inside, creating a cocoon of comfort for each of us based on the massive amount of data they have collected (or bought) on our behaviour, habits and tastes. They are effectively destroying the very notion of society by crumbling anything that was public into private (economic) and personalised (political). Public broadcast, public health, public education, public intellectuals, public transport, public libraries and even public spaces (through headphones) are all moving towards extinction in many parts of the world.

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Europe has tried to resist via a wide range of regulatory measures. However, the failure of the platforms to fully comply with them and also the way Huawei is falling victim to the escalating US-China rivalry must wake Europe up: Europe needs its own platforms based on its own values, now.

For many who agree with this argument, it might still seem like an unrealistic goal. But I have a viable strategy to suggest: public broadcast companies in the UK and Europe, such as the BBC and Channel 4, France Télévisions, ARD and DW-TV in Germany, should join forces and resources and create a minimal public social media platform for their journalistic output, governed and funded collectively and available only in Europe and the UK– regardless of Brexit.



The advantage of this platform over Facebook, for instance, is that its algorithms would be not only transparent, but designed to accommodate values most European countries uphold, such as diversity, solidarity and privacy, while flexible enough to privilege local languages, cultures and media products.

The platform could be expanded to include other media organisations and provide other services. For instance, national newspapers could join the platform to distribute their output and participate in its governance. The platform could also prepare the technical infrastructure (such as cloud services or a content delivery network) to encourage and facilitate European entrepreneurs to provide rival services to the US super-platforms.

As the media scholar José van Dijck and her co-authors lay out in their recent book The Platform Society, squeezed between two platform ecosystems of China and the US, it is “crucial for Europe to develop an encompassing strategy with regard to platform societies – both in economic market terms and in ideological-political terms”.

This proposal would have sounded idealistic a few years ago. But initiatives such as BritBox (BBC and ITV’s rival to Netflix) reveal its feasibility. Europe deserves its own platform strategy and ecosystem – unabashedly.

• Hossein Derakhshan is a media researcher at the MIT Media Lab. He recently co-authored the report Information Disorder for the Council of Europe