On Decommodifying the Internet

Written in April 2025. Edited by my friend Rose.


First, I want to start by saying I'm not (yet) an information professional. I'm passionate about information science and will begin my master's degree in September. I will approach this text more as a personal take on decommodifying the Internet, and anti-capitalism within information systems. I'm hoping to develop the skills and methodology necessary to come back to this text in a few months/years and write something less personal, and more scientific.

I hesitated between using the word "decolonizing" instead of "decommodifying" because capitalism is a direct consequence of colonization and imperialism. In the 90s and early 2000s, the Internet was a space focused on communities and connecting with others rather than selling products. It was taken over by capitalist empires to make a profit on the back of information accessibility. YouTube, an information-sharing website, is now crawling with ads that can only be removed by a premium subscription, Google is drowning useful ressources under AI-based research often showing misinformation, news articles are hidden under paywalls... I see this as a form of internet colonization from capitalist companies. But I decided to go with "decommodifying" because the Internet has been turned into a product used to make a profit, instead of an information-sharing space, and that is the problem I will be focusing on in this text.

Of course, since its creation, the Internet has always been a commodity. In most countries, you must pay a vendor for Internet access, whether at home or an Internet cafe. However, non-profit or municipal libraries exist that offer free Internet access. I volunteer as a tech support at my local library, where I help people (mostly seniors, unhoused people, or newly-arrived immigrants) create CVs, apply for jobs, and manage their data. I absolutely adore volunteering there, because I believe access to the Internet is a right.

In this day and age, where everything is linked to the internet, accessing it is necessary for a comfortable life: applying for a job or a loan, accessing your banking information, communicating with your community… Of course, this statement comes with a question : should it be the case? Should our entire life be dependent on access to the Internet?

I believe the Internet to be a fantastic tool. You can access all the information you want at any time (for free if you know how to do it). What a fantastic privilege! So many past societies have suffered from the lack of information. Imagine the things we could do if an open-access Internet was our reality! Although there is a lot of fantastic open-access sites, libraries, and encyclopedias. they are becoming increasingly rarer, especially with the rise of fascism, as most depend on donations or public funding.

Growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s, I had access to the Internet before I even knew how to read. I grew up using forums and Flash-based games. I was a curious kid, browsing all kinds of websites, and started running my first website at 12 with Skyrock, a French blog-based social networking site. I joined Tumblr in 2012 and started learning HTML a few months later.

As an autistic kid who had trouble connecting with others in person, I found refuge in Internet communities. However, my relationship with the Internet greatly changed in the last years, with the rise of subscription-based platforms and ad-heavy social media platforms.

The term Information Capitalism started surfacing in the mid-2010s. Sociology theorist Gabe Ignatow describes it as, "the increasing importance of information within capitalism under conditions of globalization and rapid technological development." (2017, 1) In 1962, the American economist Fritz Machlup introduced the now well-studied concept of the Knowledge Industry. With the rise of the Internet, our economy has moved to a focus on information and its related technologies, with Microsoft quickly rising as one of the most profitable companies in the world.

Now, capitalist countries and empires continue their monopole onto cyberspaces: "The globe is increasingly divided between technology haves, who reap the benefits of technological development and economic growth, and have-nots who are mtechnologically backward and excluded, unable to either innovate or adopt and adapt new technologies." (2017, 5)

On their blog, librarian and researcher Char Booth wrote on a concept they call information privilege: "The concept ofinformation privilege situates information literacy in a sociocultural context of justice and access.Information as the media and messages that underlie individual and collective awareness and knowledge building; privilege as the advantages, opportunities, rights, and affordances granted by status and positional via class, race, gender, culture, sexuality, occupation, institutional affiliation, and political perspective." (Booth) I live in Canada. Here, access to the Internet is divided by class and location. People living in rural Canada don’t have access to the same Internet speed as people living in urban settings, and only 42.9% of households on First Nation Reserve have access to high-speed Internet. (2023, Reports 1 to 4 of the Auditor General of Canada to the Parliament of Canada.) Then, how to explain the relationship between colonialism and information accessibility? Are we keeping Indigenous people and working-class people in Canada away from information accessibility as a way to keep them from accessing better conditions? One cannot fight for their rights if they don't have access to the information that will help them realize the status of their condition.

I wish I had better tools to navigate these subjects, and I'm hoping to explore them more in-depth during my studies in information science. But for now, I want this text to explore possible scenarios on how to establish a post-capitalist Internet based on my own experience. Marxist theorist Mario Tronti talks about Autonomous Communism (Tronti, 2020), described as a step towards a fully communist society where workers stop relying on capitalism and capital fetishism. I decided to take some steps to distance my Internet usage from capitalism. My first step was to stop using ad-heavy social media platforms that promote fascism. That includes X, Meta, TikTok… Second, I wanted to distance myself from Microsoft, after it had been shared that they contributed to the Palestinian genocide (Pratt, 2025). I bought a used ThinkPad and downloaded Ubuntu, an open-source Linux distribution. I stopped giving money to vampiristic streaming platforms and only consume media from free, open-access sources, either on the Internet or from the library. I also created a digital library on the post-capitalist internet to give people easy access to resources on the subject. You can find it here.

I believe there is hope in stepping away from a capitalist internet and promoting information accessibility within cyberspace. If we all disconnect from capitalist platforms and OS, we will stop depending on Internet capitalism and instead focus on open-source resources.

As I said above, I'm still new to the subject of post-capitalism Internet, but I would love to connect with fellow Internet socialists. Feel free to email me if you want to discuss: larrylechien@gmail.com.

Bibliography
2023 Reports 1 to 4 of the Auditor General of Canada to the Parliament of Canada. (2023) URL : https://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_202303_02_e_44205.html
Booth, C. (2014, December 1). On information privilege [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://infomational.com/2014/12/01/on-information-privilege/
Ignatow, Gabe. (2017). Information capitalism. 10.1002/9780470670590.wbeog299.pub2. \\Pratt, T. (2025, April 18). Microsoft faces growing unrest over role in Israel’s war on Gaza: “close to a tipping point.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/18/microsoft-ai-israel-gaza-war
Tronti, M. (2020, February 26). The autonomy of the political. ViewPoint Magazine. URL: https://www.citationmachine.net/bibliographies/e0feb927-c24f-4ceb-b574-bcbd3575f6a4

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