Fixing the Internet: Three Visions from Wu, Clegg, and Berners‑Lee

The internet is widely seen as both indispensable and damaged. Three recent books by Tim Wu, Nick Clegg, and Tim Berners‑Lee offer competing blueprints for repair, each rooted in the author’s background and faith in particular levers of change.

The problem: extraction, convenience, and centralization

All three authors describe how the web evolved from an open, interoperable system into a landscape dominated by a handful of powerful platforms. Tim Wu frames this shift as one of extraction: platforms no longer primarily give value; they extract it from users and competitors by leaning on convenience and integrated ecosystems. Nick Clegg highlights the scale and social consequences of platform dominance but emphasizes practical governance and content rules over structural breakups. Tim Berners‑Lee stresses the loss of the web’s original decentralization and proposes technical tools to return control to users.

Wu’s argument: antitrust, utility rules, and line‑of‑business limits

Tim Wu traces platform dominance to a failure to constrain concentrated market power. Drawing on historical antitrust interventions, he argues that existing legal frameworks remain our most viable instruments. Wu proposes aggressive antitrust action, utility‑style caps on what dominant firms can charge or control, and line‑of‑business restrictions that stop platform giants from operating across incompatible markets.

Wu shows how convenience becomes a competitive moat: seamless ecosystems make switching costly and allow winners to entrench themselves. His practical orientation relies on court action and regulatory enforcement, but his own account skirts some past antitrust failures and leaves open whether courts will consistently deliver the remedies he wants in the platform era.

Clegg’s case: regulation, transparency, and shared governance

Nick Clegg rejects breakups as both harmful to user experience and unnecessary. Instead he presses for comprehensive regulation aimed at content standards, platform transparency, and user participation in governance. Clegg envisions platforms opening their decision making and sharing more power with users, and he calls for global agreements to harmonize rules so companies do not face a patchwork of conflicting national laws.

His plan is shaped by his experience inside government and inside Meta, and that vantage point explains his confidence that rules and industry cooperation can avert worse outcomes. Skeptics point to his selective treatment of scandals and to the practical limits of persuading platforms to make deep reforms from within.

Berners‑Lee’s approach: Solid pods and user data sovereignty

Tim Berners‑Lee proposes a technical, user‑centric repair. His Solid concept gives individuals control over a single private repository of their data. Instead of letting apps hoard user information in silos, Solid aims to let users authorize selective access, moving the web toward a more portable and privacy‑centric model.

Berners‑Lee argues that centralizing user consent and storage in personal pods could reduce redundant data entry, prevent vendor lock‑in, and enable smarter personal services. Critics worry about practical risks: combining sensitive health records, payment details, and device telemetry into one place could create powerful targets for abuse if protections fail. Berners‑Lee acknowledges some limits to regulation but hopes technical standards and user control can ‘course‑correct’ the web.

Points of overlap and tension

All three authors converge on certain goals: more user control, better data privacy, and greater accountability for Silicon Valley. Yet their remedies differ markedly. Wu trusts public law and competition remedies. Clegg favors tailored regulation, industry transparency, and governance reforms. Berners‑Lee focuses on distributed technical infrastructure to put data back in users’ hands.

Political and practical constraints

Implementation matters. Recent antitrust attempts have had mixed results, and courts have sometimes balked at structural remedies. Regulatory and diplomatic realities complicate global treaties or uniform rules, especially when national politics and trade stances influence enforcement. Technical fixes like Solid face adoption hurdles and security tradeoffs.

A pragmatic path forward

There is unlikely to be a single silver bullet. Progress may come from a mix of approaches: targeted enforcement where markets are demonstrably abusive, clear regulations that protect rights and children, incentives for platforms to increase transparency and governance participation, and standards or tools that give users more direct control over their data. Recognizing the limits and blind spots in each vision can help policymakers, technologists, and the public combine tools rather than bet all hopes on one strategy.