humanet3: the third attempt at a human-centered internet
The group analyzes, deconstructs, and contributes to initiatives aiming at a human-centered digital transformation. Its focus will be the digital public space, as space for debate and expressing opinion on the internet. This space is defined by its accessibility and its function, not by its ownership. It includes, in particular, all platforms which claim to contribute to the public good, are generally open to everyone, and are used by the people to communicate personal and political views to a broad audience.
The starting point of the group’s research is the recognition that the internet in its function as digital public space is currently experiencing a pivotal moment for its future. Our collective ability to exchange opinions, emotions, and experiences lies at the core of what distinguishes the Web2.0 from its predecessor, the static Web1.0, which understood users as passive receivers, not as active speakers. However, the democratic, utopian vision which has driven the development of the Web2.0 as ‘social web’ in its beginning has been impeded by an unprecedented concentration of private power over digital global infrastructures. Users are understood as ad-targets, the quality of content is conflated with the quantity of engagement, and attention has evolved into the new currency of success.
This has caused an unprecedented momentum for digital regulation. In 2021, the European Union has presented its vision for the digital transformation by publicly ringing in ‘Europe’s Digital Decade’. With its European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade, the European Commission aims explicitly towards a human-centred digital transformation. As part of this undertaking, several landmark laws have been enacted. These include the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act as the most prominent ones, but also the Data Act, the Data Governance Act, and most recently the AI Act.
At the same time, multiple movements are denouncing the departure of Web 2.0 as a centralized and purely profit-orientated space in the hands of a few corporations. They share the common claim to build the Internet around the individuals and their rights. This can be understood, after Web1.0 and Web2.0, as a third attempt at a human-centered Internet. To only name a few, they include (i) what is now subsumed under the ‘Metaverse’, a vision to seamlessly blend digital and physical worlds, (ii) a so-called ‘Web3’ community, based on blockchain technology, promising independence from centralized powerful actors and (iii) the ‘Fediverse’ as a decentralized federation of online communities embracing normative pluralism.
In the last years, the rise of generative artificial intelligence applications, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, is creating new challenges. While such AI tools have existed in the past, the mass availability and high quality of their output is a novelty. Public discourse is based on trust and a common ground of knowledge and ‘truth’. Growing uncertainty about the authenticity or forgery of content, and even about the human quality of one’s interlocutor, will reshape the way our discussion culture functions. The economic effects of generative AI on human creativity, the traditional human-based innovation system, and concentration of private power still remain uncertain and yet may well require additional regulatory action. Moreover, existing biases in the training data of AI systems – and in society – can be replicated on a new scale. This could exacerbate current patterns of discrimination against minorities and other marginalized groups. Against the backdrop of these factual and normative developments, the group analyzes, deconstructs, and contributes to initiatives aiming at a human-centered digital transformation from the perspective of public law, competition law, and computational social sciences in cooperation with other researchers from the Max Planck network and beyond.