Internet for the People

“Ben Tarnoff is the best kind of visionary: deeply knowledgeable, intensely practical, and utterly committed to the transformation of an abusive and corrupt status quo. We are profoundly fortunate to have his fine mind focussed on reimagining the tools that have remade our lives. An extraordinary and urgent book.”
—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough

“The privacy-invading, throttled, and ad-filled Internet we have is not the Internet we deserve. But as Ben Tarnoff lucidly lays out, if we want to manifest the latent democratic potential of our communications infrastructure, we will have to wrest control from the privatizers and profiteers and transform the underlying political economy. Internet for the People provides an engaging and enraging account of how the online world was hijacked by corporate interests, excavating the past so we can envision and organize for a better future. Ben Tarnoff has done a public service writing this book. Now we need to get busy building the movements and popular power that can fight for an Internet in the public interest.”
—Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone and The People’s Platform.

“Tarnoff offers not only an eloquent and essential guide to the history of our capitalist internet, he also charts the myriad ways in which alternatives are emerging. A key book for imagining a better digital future.”
—Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism

“Throughout this easy-reading narrative history, Tarnoff weaves his thesis that the internet must be de-privatized for the good of users … Tarnoff’s politically infused history and critical analysis of the privatized internet is a useful, brief primer.”
—Grace O’Hanlon, Library Journal

“A helpful reframing-from thinking about how to avoid a horrible internet to how to create a good one … Tarnoff wants to bring the internet back to its publicly owned, civically oriented roots, and whether or not that’s the right thing to do, it’s the right question to ask.”
—Gabriel Nicholas, Washington Post

“Strikes a happy middle ground between technical history and polemic.”
—Evan Malmgren, Nation

“In this stalled conversation, Ben Tarnoff’s new book, Internet for the People, makes a striking intervention … his book reveals the hidden history of the internet and expands our ideas about its possible futures.”
—Sarah Leonard, New Republic