What would it look like to have a government that genuinely served public rather than private interests? (One can dream.)

Consider the Finns, who treat infrastructure less as a profit center than as part of the basic fabric of everyday life. In Finland, broadband access is treated as a legal right, and communication networks, education, and public services are designed around security, accessibility, and social trust rather than short-term financial return.

Or consider the United States after World War II, when government poured public investment into highways, power grids, water systems, research universities, and early computing. These were not understood as acts of charity or corporate subsidy, but as long-term investments in shared prosperity, mobility, and national capacity. (Hello economic expansion for the next 25 years.)

Peter Bihr works where technology, democracy, and public life intersect. He’s concerned that when a handful of global tech platforms control the infrastructure of communication, identity, and information, societies lose the ability to set their own rules or respond coherently to crises. So he argues we should stop treating digital systems as neutral consumer products and start treating them as political infrastructure—systems whose design, funding, and governance should be deliberately shaped to protect rights, reduce concentrations of corporate power, and strengthen democratic institutions.

His bias is clear. He consistently favors decentralizing power, supporting open standards and open-source systems, and shifting control away from dominant platforms toward institutions that are at least theoretically accountable to the public. He does so because he thinks societies can’t tackle long-term challenges like climate, inequality, or democratic backsliding if the core infrastructure for coordination and debate is owned by a few firms whose incentives are defined by quarterly earnings and shareholder value.

Bihr believes we have already allowed the digital economy to hard-wire the opposite: infrastructure organized as opaque, extractive platforms that concentrate power, externalize social costs, and steadily erode democratic capacity. In that world, even well‑intentioned governments struggle to regulate disinformation, curb surveillance, or coordinate ambitious public projects, because the underlying systems are optimized to defend the business models of those who already dominate them.

So he wrote this short manual. In it, he outlines an alternative approach, showing how governments, funders, and civil society can use legislation, procurement, and institutional reform to rebuild digital systems as genuine public infrastructure. He envisions open, interoperable and accountable systems that and designed for the public good rather than maximal private gain.

If we are going to do anything more than vaguely dream about “government for the people,” digital infrastructure is a good place to look. It is where power is encoded, services are delivered, and the public interest either gets built in—or designed out.

This is valuable reading for anyone who wants to think seriously about the real levers of society—policy, procurement, standards, and institutional design—that shape whether digital systems ultimately serve democracy or undermine it. If we don’t change how those levers are used, Bihr suggests, we will keep asking a small group of unaccountable companies to solve problems their own power has helped create.

ESSAY: The Little Book of Public Interest Technology

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