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Pattern Matching
The Privatized Internet Is Failing Our Kids
The failure of online schooling highlights a basic flaw in our digital infrastructure: It wasn’t built to supply public goods.
Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.
Across much of the United States this week, schools “opened” via the internet, following others that had started remote learning last week or the week before. The results have been, at best, uneven; at worst, heartbreaking.
America’s Covid spring offered a glitchy preview of how replacing school buildings and classrooms with home Wi-Fi and Zoom rooms might work. Now it’s our Covid fall, and this is no longer a test but an emergency. In the face of that emergency, the technologies our society is counting on to rescue our educational system are being exposed as inadequate — and deeply unequal.
The global internet that the U.S. government pioneered and Silicon Valley developed represents a particular vision of cyberspace. With scant regulation or accountability, it has evolved from a Wild West into a sort of corporate feudal state in which giant platform owners and internet service providers set the rules and own…
