Why we need to talk about power
Digital rights are founded on human rights, which exist to uphold human dignity. Human rights have been created in legal, philosophical and political traditions from around the world to protect people from the abuse of power, usually state power. Their modern expression is the product of this wider international development through organisations such as the United Nations, not a tradition belonging to Western Europe alone.
The threat of concentrated power to human rights
The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was created in 1950 in response to the atrocities of the Second World War and the Holocaust. It was designed to prevent a state from committing such abuses ever again. It is this framework that informs the UK’s Human Rights Act (1998) which sets out human rights under British law.
In the last 20 years, we have seen the rise of global tech corporations that not only possess power through their wealth but also control how the world’s populations access information, and communicate with each other. This massive shift in power undermines our democracy and the rule of law upon which human rights depend.
The rule of law requires a reasonable distribution of power, so that no single voice or interest dominates over others, and where law, which is also subject to issues of fairness, power and access, can be altered as society needs and demands. So as a human rights organisation, we must challenge this concentration of power. We cannot sit on the sidelines and simply wonder why fundamental rights are not getting a look in.
The responses to tech platforms’ political and speech power tends to be to ask the state to interfere more in what tech giants are doing. But answering concentrated corporate power solely with concentrated state power merely invites the future merger of both. We have to ask how a future far right government could wield powers in the Online Safety Act to restrict content or access private messages.
“We cannot sit on the sidelines and simply wonder why fundamental rights are not getting a look in.
Answering concentrated corporate power solely with concentrated state power merely invites the future merger of both.
Concentrated corporate power is corrosive. It seeps through our political system, it works to ensure it is not held accountable, and it distorts the social fabric as resources are diverted to corporate ends.”
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Jim Killock
ORG Executive Director
The US gives us a strong indication of how corporate and state power are already merging, and why. Russia and China also have strong state-corporate tech power alignments. The UK’s trend is to fall into the US tech alignment, especially as we stand outside of the EU’s structures and laws.
Government collaboration with Europe, even policy awareness, has collapsed and civil society groups, such as ORG, work hard to maintain links via organisations such as EDRi with reduced funding opportunities for this work. But we need strong mutual policy reinforcement with Europe if the UK is going to challenge the US tech giants.
What this means for ORG’s work
So when we talk about human rights, we must also talk about power. ORG believes that concentrations of power must be dealt with structurally. For ORG, this means:
- Defending communities that are targeted by state power as scape goats for social and economic problems
- Understanding what systemic change in tech actually means, and what it would require from governments and institutions
- Working with other critical organisations concerned about existing economic structures that create tech monopolies
- Supporting the development and everyday use of the alternatives to Big tech
For our advocacy, this means arguing that concentrations of power can be addressed by:
- Breaking up tech monopolies and exploitative and harmful “anti-social” media
- Enforcing competition law and data protection to stop corporate abuses
- Investing and promoting the alternatives, especially open source tech and open, pro-social networks
- States ensuring they have capacity, analysis and strategies to confront systemic digital monopoly threats
- Using state power to build shared open source technologies and Digital Sovereignty
- States working with other states to build open source alternatives
- Trusting people and communities, far more than states and corporations, to do the right thing
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Human rights and digital rights have become a matter of power.
It is not a left or right matter, but rather one of democratic survival. Concentrated corporate power is corrosive. It seeps through our political system, it works to ensure it is not held accountable, and it distorts the social fabric as resources are diverted to corporate ends. These lessons were learnt in the last century, yet have been abandoned in the last decades.
Andy Burnham’s call to change economic direction could be much more more profound than many people have yet realised, and certainly not a call to go back to the past; digital technologies represent an ongoing and future threat. However, Labour remain close to digital giants, and their discourse remains focused on regulating users’ access to tech, rather than challenging the power of the tech monopolies.
While we cannot say that this is the last chance to save democracy, we should be under no illusions how serious the problem is. That is why ORG is talking about power, and how we challenge it, as a human rights organisation.