All of this can improve things, though its a lot of work to administer, and the city government may lack the resources and technical expertise to investigate every claim of corporate mafeasance, and to perform the technical analysis to evaluate corporate excuses for slow connections and bungled repairs.

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That's the worst model: governments clear the way for a monopolist to set up your internet, offering them a literally priceless subsidy in the form of rights of way, and then, maybe, try to keep it honest.

Here's the other extreme: the government puts in the fiber itself, running conduit under all the streets (either with its own crews or contract crews) and threading a fiber optic through a wall of your choice, terminating it with a box you can plug your wifi router into.

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The government builds a data-center with all the switches for providing service to you and your neighbors, and hires people to offer you internet service at a reasonable price and with reasonable service guarantees.

This is a pretty good model! Over 750 towns and cities - mostly conservative towns in red states - have this model, and they're almost the only people in America who consistently describe themselves as happy with their internet service:

ilsr.org/articles/municipal-br…

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(They are joined in their satisfaction by a smattering of towns served by companies like Ting, who bought out local cable companies and used their rights of way to bring fiber to households.)

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This is a model that works very well, but can fail very badly. Municipal governments can be pretty darned kooky, as five years of MAGA takeovers of school boards, library boards and town councils have shown, to say nothing of wildly corrupt big-city monsters like Eric Adams (ten quintillion congratulations to Zohran Mamdani!). If there's one thing I've learned from the brilliant No Gods No Mayors podcast, it's that mayors are the weirdest people alive:

patreon.com/collection/869728?…

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Patreon

Patreon is empowering a new generation of creators. Support and engage with artists and creators as they live out their passions!

^Patreon

Remember: Sarah Palin got her start in politics as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Do *you* want to have to rely on Sarah Palin for your internet service?

patreon.com/posts/119567308?co…

How about Rob Ford? Do you want the crack mayor answering your tech support calls? I didn't think so:

patreon.com/posts/rob-ford-par…

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But that's OK! A public fiber network doesn't have to be one in which the government is your only choice for ISP. In addition to laying fiber and building a data-center and operating a municipal ISP, governments can *also* do something called "essential facilities sharing":

transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Com…

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Governments all over the world did this in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and some do it still. Under an essential facilities system, the big phone company (BT in the UK, Bell in Canada, AT&T and the Baby Bells in the USA) were required to rent space to their competitors in their data centers. Anyone who wants to set up an ISP can install their own switching gear at a telephone company central office and provide service to any business or household in the country.

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If the government lays fiber in your town, they can both operate a municipal fiber ISP *and* allow anyone else to set up their own ISP, renting them shelf-space at the data-center. That means that the town college can offer internet to all its faculty and students (not just the ones who live in campus housing), and your co-op can offer internet service to its members. Small businesses can offer specialized internet, and so can informal groups of friends. So can big companies.

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In this model, everyone is guaranteed both the right to *get* internet access and the right to *provide* internet access. It's a great system, and it means that when Mayor Sarah Palin decides to cut off your internet, you don't need to sue the city - you can just sign up with someone else, over the same fiber lines.

That's where essential facilities sharing starts, but that's not where it needs to stop.

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When the government puts conduit (plastic tubes) in the ground for fiber, they can leave space for more fiber to fished through, and rent space in the conduit itself. That means that an ISP that wants to set up its own data center can run physically separate lines to its subscribers. It means that a university can do a point-to-point connection between a remote scientific instrument like a radio telescope and the campus data-center.

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A business can run its own lines between branch offices, and a movie studio can run dedicated lines from remote sound-stages to the edit suites at its main facility.

This is a truly *public* internet service - one where there is a publicly owned ISP, but also where public infrastructure allows for lots of different kinds of entities to provide internet access.

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It's insulated from the risks of getting your tech support from city hall, but it also allows good local governments to provide best-in-class service to everyone in town, something that local governments have a pretty great track record with.

The Eurostack project isn't necessarily about fiber, though. Right now, Europeans are thinking about technological sovereignty through the lens of software and services.

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That's fair enough, though it *does* require some rethinking of the global fiber system, which has been designed so that the US government can spy on and disconnect every other country in the world:

pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/wea…

Just as with the example of fiber, there are a lot of ways the EU and member states could achieve "technological sovereignty."

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They could just procure data-centers, server software, and the operation of social media, cloud hosting, mobile OSes, office software, and other components of Europeans' digital lives from the private sector - sort of like asking a commercial operator to run your town's internet service.

The EU has pretty advanced procurement rules, designed to allow European governments to buy from the private sector while minimizing corruption and kickbacks.

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For example, there's a rule that the lowest priced bid that conforms to all standards needs to win the contract. This sounds good (and it is, in many cases) but it's how Newag keeps selling trains in Poland, even after they were caught boobytrapping their trains so they would immobilize themselves if the operator took them for independent maintanance:

media.ccc.de/v/38c3-we-ve-not-…

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We've not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure

You've probably already heard the story: we got contracted to analyze a bunch of trains breaking down after being serviced by independent...

^media.ccc.de

The EU doesn't have to use public-private partnerships to build the Eurostack. They could do it all themselves. The EU and/or member states could operate public data centers. They could develop their own social media platforms, mobile OSes, and apps. They could be the equivalent of the municipal ISP that offers fast fiber to everyone in town.

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As with public monopoly ISPs, this is a system that works well, but fails badly. If you think Elon Musk is a shitty social media boss, wait'll you see the content moderation policies of Viktor Orban - or Emmanuel Macron:

jacobin.com/2025/06/france-sol…

Publicly owned data centers could be great, but also, remember that EU governments have never given up on their project of killing working encryption so that their security services can spy on everyone.

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Austria's doing it right now!

yahoo.com/news/austrian-govern…

Ever since Snowden, EU governments have talked a good line about the importance of digital privacy. Remember Angela Merkel's high dudgeon about how her girlhood in the GDR gave her a special horror of NSA surveillance?

bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-2…

Apparently, Merkel managed to get over her horror of mass surveillance and back total, unaccountable, continuous digital surveillance over all of Germany:

hrw.org/news/2021/06/24/german…

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Austrian government agrees on plan to allow monitoring of secure messaging

VIENNA (Reuters) -Austria's coalition government has agreed on a plan to enable police to monitor suspects' secure messaging in order to thwart militant...

^{Reuters (Yahoo News)}

So there's good reasons to worry about having your data - and your apps - hosted in an EU cloud.

To create a European public internet, it's neither necessary nor desirable to have your digital life operated by the EU and its member states, nor by its private contractors. Instead, the EU could make Eurostack a provider of technological *public goods*.

For example, the EU could work to improve federated social media systems, like Mastodon and Bluesky.

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EU coders could contribute to the server and client software for both. They could participate in future versions of the standard. They could provide maintenance code in response to bug reports, and administer bug bounties. They could create tooling for server administrators, including moderation tools, both for Mastodon and for Bluesky, whose "composable moderation" system allows users to have the final say over their moderation choices.

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The EU could perform and/or fund labelling work to help with moderation.

The EU could also provide tooling to help server administrators stand up their own independent Mastodon and Bluesky servers. Bluesky needs a lot of work on this, still. Bluesky's CTO has got a critical piece of server infrastructure to run on a Raspberry Pi for a few euros per month:

justingarrison.com/blog/2024-1…

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Run a Bluesky PDS From Home

Take ownership—and responsibility—of your social data

^{Justin Garrison}

Previously, this required a whole data center and cost millions to operate, so this is great. But this now needs to be systematized, so that would-be Bluesky administrators can download a package and quickly replicate the feat.

Ultimately, the choice of Mastodon or Bluesky shouldn't matter all that much to Europeans.

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These standards can and should evolve to the point where everyone on Bluesky can talk to everyone on Mastodon and vice-versa, and where you can easily move your account from one server to another, or one service to another. The EU already oversees systems for account porting and roaming on mobile networks - they can contribute to the technical hurdles that need to be overcome to bring this to social media:

pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fir…

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In addition to improving federated social media, the EU and its member states can and should host their own servers, both for their own official accounts and for public use. Giving the public a digital home is great, especially if anyone who chafes at the public system's rules can hop onto a server run by a co-op, a friend group, a small business or a giant corporation with just a couple clicks, without losing any of their data or connections.

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This is essential facilities sharing for *services*. Combine it with public data centers *and* tooling for migrating servers from and to the public server to a private, or nonprofit, or co-op data-center, and you've got the equivalent of publicly available conduit, data-centers, and fiber.

In addition to providing code, services and hardware, the EU can continue to provide regulation to facilitate the public internet.

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They can expand the very limited interoperability mandates in the Digital Markets Act, forcing legacy social media companies like Meta and Twitter to stand up APIs so that when a European quits their service for new, federated media, they can stay in touch with the friends they left behind (think of it as Schengen for social media, with guaranteed free movement):

eff.org/interoperablefacebook

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Interoperable Facebook

In this video, we discuss the forces that keep us using services like Facebook long after we stop enjoying them (hint, it's not because social media is "addictive") and we present a short "design fiction" explaining what it might be like to use socia…

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

With the Digital Service Act, the EU has done a lot of work to protect Europeans from fraud, harassment and other online horribles. But a public internet also requires protections for service providers - safe harbors and carve outs that allow you to host your community's data and conversations without being dragged into controversies when your users get into flamewars with each other.

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If we make the people who run servers liable for their users' bad speech acts, then the only entities that will be able to afford the lawyers and compliance personnel will be giant American tech companies run by billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kaw…

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A "public internet" isn't an internet that's run by the government: it's a system of publicly subsidized, publicly managed *public goods* that are designed to allow *everyone* to participate in both *using* and *providing* internet services. The Eurostack is a brilliant idea whose time arrived a decade ago.

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