Early in his book How to Save the Internet (2025, Vintage), Nick Clegg makes the following observation:
Politics, at its heart, is a competition between different stories about how things should be. That’s what liberalism, socialism, conservatism and fascism ultimately are: stories that give us different ways of looking at the world, different diagnoses of our problems, and different solutions too.
[…] But Silicon Valley is full of people who see the world a different way: engineers. Theirs is a world of facts and process. The engineer’s mindset is to identify a problem and fix it, then move on to the next problem.
I find this quote very illuminating. Because on the surface it makes perfect sense; it’s the sort of thing you can imagine Sam Seaborn mulling over while looking moodily out of a West Wing window in the middle of a rainstorm.
But (as I hope Toby Ziegler would point out) it’s complete and utter bullshit.
Politicians don’t see the world in terms of facts and process? A perusal of the politics section in any newspaper will make it clear that is not the case. Politicians wield facts and data like a weapon, often cherry picking, and use it to justify their actions.
Famously, the government that Nick Clegg co-lead, based its justification on austerity on a research paper called “Growth in a Time of Debt” by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. Then chancellor George Osborne and then deputy prime minister Clegg both justified their economic policy in Parliament by citing this paper. Of course, equally famously, it emerged that that report was fatally flawed — an undergraduate student called Thomas Herndon found that, among other things, the economists had omitted the data from 5 of the 20 countries they were investigating from their findings. Nonetheless, this revelation did not cause the coalition government to announce a mea culpa or reverse their policies.
So in a sense, Clegg is right: politicians are more focused on narratives than data. But it’s data they use to justify their policies these days. Indeed, far from modern politics being a vibrant competition of ideas in the way Clegg suggests, modern anglophone politics has been dominated by just one since the 1980s: There Is No Alternative.
Any deviation from the norm of market fundamentalism that Nick Clegg has spent his career espousing has always been expunged, for the most part in the same way that the coalition government did, by scaring people with carefully curated data. The fact that over the last decade this style of centrism is increasingly being challenged by a particularly unhinged form of nativist populism would suggest how dominating politics with the TINA hegemony has created a vacuum to be filled, rather than a healthy marketplace of ideas.
But what about these Silicon Valley engineers; are they solely concerned by data and fixing the problems in front of them? Clegg would have you believe that during his time at Meta he was the sole socially adjusted guy working with a hive of automatons. He’s fond of an anecdote in which a senior engineer insisted he give a precise percentage value, down to two decimal places, on the likelihood of a specific piece of legislation passing. The nerd! Of course, he makes an exception in the case of his former boss, Sex Creep Mark Zuckerberg, by describing him as a “visionary innovator”.
But the idea that computer engineers are all logical savants with the personality of a pocket calculator (just say “autistic”, Nick, this is taking forever), falls apart if you ever take the time to get to know a computer engineer. Indeed, Silicon Valley is absolutely teeming with ideas and narratives. A good account of these can be found in More Everything Forever by Adam Becker (2025, Basic Books UK). These range from effective altruism and longtermism to transhumanism. A leading proponent of many of these ideas is Marc Andreeson, the founder of Netscape, Meta board member and author of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. And that’s before we get into the Christian Nationalism and Dark Enlightenment ideas supported by, among other people, Sex Creep associate Peter Thiel — who stumped up Facebook’s initial funding and served on Meta’s board until 2022.
Indeed, for better or worse Silicon Valley is fizzing with ideas, ideologies and, yes, stories these days in a way that Westminster and Washington most decidedly is not. In a very important sense, not least in the context of this book because of how it is likely to impact on the future of the internet and how legislators respond to it, the reality is the opposite of how Clegg describes it here. One wonders how, after working in California for seven years, he could have missed it. Indeed, as I intend to explore in this essay, appreciating how Silicon Valley is not only teeming with ideology but seeking to influence public policy, might have better informed this book’s conclusions.
But then, if there’s one thing that characterises Nick Clegg’s career, it’s his lack of curiosity.
Incuriosity Clegg
How to Save the Internet is, in fact, the second book to be published in 2025 written by a former senior staffer at Facebook/Meta.
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (2025, MacMillan), by Sarah Wynn-Williams, also begins with the author setting out to, in Clegg’s words “to build bridges between the worlds of technology and politics”. It starts with the author veritably harassing Sheryl Sandberg, asking “gizza job” Boys from the Blackstuff style until she said yes. Wynn-Williams would go on to serve as Facebook’s Director of Public Policy from 2011-2017.
Her book highlights a number of problems at Facebook, from the handling of internet.org, through to its inadvertent role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar from 2016-2017. It also alleges several acts of sexual misconduct by chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and then vice president of global public affairs Joel Kaplan. Sarah Wynn-Williams alleges that her formal complaint of sexual harassment by Kaplan resulted in the company firing her on the grounds of “poor performance and toxic behaviour”.
To be clear, I consider Wynn-Williams to be an unreliable narrator. She has a tendency to present her own actions in the best possible light, and the actions of Facebook and Sex Creep Mark Zuckerberg in the worst. But at the same time the book is awash with details that can’t simply be dismissed.
In particular, making allegations of sexual harassment, knowing full well how much public scrutiny that is likely to result in, is not something that any woman — or book publisher — would undertake lightly. Notably, Meta’s response to this book has not been to provide any detailed rebuttal but to invoke Sarah Wynn-Williams’ non-disclosure agreement, forcing her into silence rather than face bankruptcy.
Naturally, journalists wanted to know what Clegg thought of Wynn-Williams’ book when he was doing the rounds of promoting his own. “No. I haven’t read it for very good reasons. You’ll have to ask her why she wrote it eight years after she left, I’m writing mine eight months after announcing leaving Meta,” he cuttingly told Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell you what those “very obvious reasons” are. Surely, as an advocate of openness, and someone whose job involved many of the same responsibilities, he’d be very interested to read an account giving a different side of the story?
He went on to say “Joel Kaplan was always an exceptionally decent, diligent, principled guy who worked with me, so I can’t give you a running commentary on a book I haven’t read about a person I don’t know at a time when I wasn’t even at the company.” Clegg was appointed to his role at Meta in October 2018, a few weeks after Joel Kaplan had spent time in Congress supporting his close personal friend Sex Creep Brett Kavanaugh in his ultimately successful bid to be appointed to the US Supreme Court. It is surprising that this act did not at least raise an eyebrow for Clegg.
This all seems very familiar for me however. In 2013, Nick Clegg found himself in the middle of a shitstorm when four women came forward alleging innappropriate sexual behaviour by former Liberal Democrat chief executive Chris Rennard. Clegg initially sought to deny any knowledge of these complaints, until eventually admitting to hearing of “indirect and non-specific concerns“.
This surprised me, not least of all because in 2010 one of the women who made these allegations spent a week hiding out in our spare bedroom due to these allegations being leaked to the Daily Mail (this was of course before the phone hacking scandal blew up, when the UK tabloid press was at its worst). During that period, the woman concerned was in frequent contact with both the leader’s office and the party’s press office. I accept that it’s possible that Clegg remained ignorant of these direct and specific concerns, but only by establishing a culture among his closest advisors that ensured he was shrouded in ignorance of anything that he might consider to be inconvenient.
(Coincidentally as I was drafting this article, as a result of the fallout surrounding the latest tranche of documents being released concerning Jeffrey Epstein, Lib Dem Leader Ed Davey announced that Chris Rennard would again be suspended from the Lib Dem Parliamentary Party and a new investigation into his conduct would be carried out).
I think this is worth pausing to consider, because this self imposed veil of ignorance seems to pervade this book and Clegg’s overall approach. I was struck when he admitted that despite seven years at Meta, he still hasn’t written a line of code; why wouldn’t he take it upon himself to learn? That’s striking because if you don’t have even the basics of programming, how do you begin to assess when engineers start explaining to you what can and can’t be done? At what point do you stop managing the tool and simply become a tool?
Enshittifying Assholes
The 2010 film The Social Network (directed by David Fincher, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin), hinges around the question: is Mark Zuckerberg an asshole?
Rooney Mara’s character Erica Albright calls Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) this in the first scene, as she dumps him in a bar. This proves to be the inciting incident in the film, causing him to create Facemash — a website that encouraged its users to compare photographs of female college students to determine who is “hotter“. Facemash caught the intention of the Winklevoss twins who recruit him to build a college dating site, Zuckerberg gets bored of the idea in favour of a more ambitious social media site… and the result was Facebook and the youngest billionaire in history.
At the conclusion to the film, Rashida Jones’s character Marylin Delpy declares:
“You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.”
The film ends with Zuckerberg “friending” Albright on Facebook and obsessively refreshing his laptop to see if she’s accepted.
This is a pretty familiar framing; it’s Citizen Kane (1941) and Albright is Zuckerberg’s Rosebud — the symbol of his lost innocence, and the film is structured similarly to that seminal film. We’re lead to conclude that Zuckerberg isn’t some monster, he just got caught up in all of the excitement and somehow lost his moral compass along the way. There’s only one problem with this narrative:
Erica Albright does not exist.
As far as I can see, there is no evidence that Zuckerberg created Facemash in a drunken binge as an act of revenge in response to getting unceremoniously dumped by a girl, but simply because he thought it would be funny. This reframes the context of the whole film because it means that perhaps, just perhaps, Zuckerberg was an asshole all along?
One thing that Sorkin, Wynn-Williams and Clegg can all agree on is that Zuckerberg is competitive. There is an amusing anecdote in Wynn-Williams’ book in which she describes Zuckerberg repeatedly cheating playing the game of Catan and his team letting him get away with it because they didn’t want to piss him off by beating him. Nick Clegg by contrast cites Zuckerberg’s interest in Mixed Martial Arts (ever the sycophant, Clegg can’t resist mentioning that his ex-boss would have totally beaten up Sex Creep Elon Musk if the latter hadn’t chickened out of fighting him in a cage fight).
One thing that’s striking about the 2010 film is that it basically discusses the concept of enshittification 13 years before that term was coined. The plot hinges not on if Facebook should monetise itself through advertising, but when. Andrew Garfield’s character Eduardo Saverin wants them to begin advertising straight away, but Zuckerberg wants to wait until they are bigger — much bigger. This tension leads to Saverin being forced out of the company and the ending of their friendship.
To be clear, all websites must monetise themselves somehow; the internet might be a miraculously cheap medium by historical standards, but nothing is free. But this practice of sucking up millions (now billions) of users with the offer of a free service, only to bombard it with advertising once everyone is locked in and it has become an indispensible part of their daily lives has become all too familiar to those of us living in 2026. And that money is not going towards paying costs; it has gone on to make Zuckerberg and his fellow founders very rich indeed.
Indeed, if anything that’s the real innovation of Facebook. It didn’t invent social networks by any means, but it did follow the business model of Amazon and apply it to them. By offering a superior, free ad-free service (for a while), they drove their competitors like Friendster, MySpace and Friends Reunited under — and then brought in the ads and the shitty algorithm once there was nowhere else to go.
Indeed, the story of Facebook is not one of innovation but of buying up or copying innovation. They bought Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus VR. In response to Snapchat, they introduced Stories. In response to TikTok they introduced Reels. In response to OpenAI, they introduced… whatever Meta is doing with AI right now (it’s very unclear what their plan is here, other than encourage Facebook users to click on banal and often very dumb auto-generated prompts in response to video content).
It’s also a story of failure. Remember the Facebook Phone? Me neither. Internet.org was a disaster. Despite Nick Clegg dedicating a substantial portion of his book hyping the Metaverse, by the time it was published, Zuckerberg had declared that it was being massively scaled back after years of what can best be described as universal indifference to the project. It has since scaled back even further.
And as for Facebook itself? It is certainly the case that the Facebook described in Clegg’s book bears no relationship to the Facebook I (sadly) use on a daily basis. But then, has Nick Clegg ever used Facebook? I used to be Facebook friends with Clegg back in the day (he’s either subsequently deleted his account or blocked me; maybe he now uses it under a pseudonym in breach of Facebook terms and conditions), and I don’t recall him posting anything other than the odd article, interview or press release — I suspect it was run by a member of his staff team. So when he lauds the “virtuous circle” of Facebook’s “user experience” I have to assume that he’s simply taking Facebook’s marketing team’s word for it.
I still use Facebook for two reasons: firstly, while we don’t spend any money advertising on it (the very idea!), I do still find a marginal benefit in promoting things on it for my business. Secondly, I have a small circle of old contacts that it’s occasionally fun to interact with (at least it’s fun ever since I changed my settings to personal only so I no longer get randos popping up on my page to start pointless arguments). I have far better sources for news, and any actual social organising I do is conducted through platforms like Discord and WhatsApp (a relatively unshittified part of the Meta basket of apps).
When I do use Facebook, it involves clawing through an endless stream of slop: some AI generated (which gets an instant block from me), most simply brainless content such as “‘Member this from that Avengers movie you watched once? ‘Member this old sitcom?”. Because I’m easily distracted, I admit that I occasionally get drawn into things like the Reels feed, although it almost unerringly makes me feel slightly grubby when I do.
You can sort of train it to follow your preferences. The infamous racist rage bait that you hear about rarely permeates my bubble, and it’s got the basic idea that I like cats and Star Wars. But if there’s a page on those topics that I don’t like, I seem to be rarely able to block it from appearing on my feed for more than a few months before it creeps back.
As Nick Clegg points out, there is a friends-only feed on Facebook which you can access instead of its algorithmically generated feed. What his handlers probably didn’t mention is that to access it you have to access it via, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, the proverbial bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’. Every third post on it is an advert and, emphatically, you cannot set it as your home page.
The person I feel most sorry for is Chris Packham. I joined Ecotalk last month after seeing his adverts pop up for them, saving myself a fair bit of money on phone charges. But since I did so, Facebook has increased the number of times I see his cheeky face pop up — no matter how many times I click on the “show less” button. As a result, far too big of a chunk of my phone bill is currently going on adverts for a service I’m already signed up for. Similarly, a certain cat food brand which our cats despise keep sending me their cynical guilt-inducing adverts, no matter how many times I block them. Did I mention that my business wouldn’t even dream of wasting our money on Facebook ads?
It is remarkable that this platform still makes any money at all, and the answer appears to be that for an older generation, it remains an important social lifeline — particularly as they have fewer places to go and their switching costs would be considerably higher. For now, Sex Creep Mark Zuckerberg has them under his thumb; but in 10 years time? There’s a reason Facebook reinvented itself as Meta and attempted to pivot to VR, and why its desperately repivoting to AI now: they know Facebook’s days are numbered as well as I do.
Notably, Clegg doesn’t engage with any of this, despite it being an existential threat to Meta in the long term if it doesn’t come up with an alternative cash stream soon; he simply pretends it isn’t an issue.
Does Facebook eat brains?
One of the things that Nick Clegg is remarkably incurious about is polarisation. That the political divide seems greater than ever, he does not question. He is extremely keen to absolve social media platforms such as Facebook of any blame in causing it, but does not appear to have any answers as to how it came about.
Might it have anything to do with politicians such as Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg who, reeling from the financial crisis of 2008 and hiding behind dodgy spreadsheets, announced a series of austerity measures which drastically increased poverty while protecting the assets of the wealthiest? Regardless of the behaviour and effectiveness of Russian bots and content farms, might that have had a decisive effect on the Brexit vote, for instance? He does not speculate. His key focus is getting Facebook off the hook.
And look, he has a point. People can exaggerate the power social media has over people’s minds. In this respect, I agree with Nick. But I’m not sure Nick agrees with Nick.
In 2010, the newly formed coalition government established in the Cabinet Office the “Nudge Unit“, or Behavioural Insights Team — which seeks to apply the insights of behavioural science to public policy. This is an acknowledgement that people are not the rational actors that classical economics liked to present us as, and to develop ethical approaches to influence human behaviour positively.
Nick Clegg the politician was a big fan of this emerging field. Not only did he play a key role in introducing the Nudge Unit, but it’s clear it extended past his time in government. In 2018 in the Guardian hosted a jovial chat with Clegg and one of the idea’s main proponents, Nobel prize for economics winner Richard Thaler. The truth is though, behavioural economics didn’t start with Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book Nudge. These are insights that, among others, the advertising industry has understood for decades. We might not be able to literally change people’s minds, but we can mislead them. We can manipulate them. And we can decide what information sources they have access to and what gets buried. There’s a reason they paid Don Draper a lot of money.
I wonder what that Nick Clegg would make of the 2025 Nick Clegg’s assertion that any attempt to apply behavioural science to how we might be influenced by adverts on social media as “deeply patronising”. Throughout this book, Clegg repeatedly uses the term “agency” as a talisman against the suggestion that social media and advertising can have any influence over our behaviour. He’s a big fan of bringing out social critic Tristan Harris as a convenient supplier of straw man arguments, such as the notion that Facebook has “hijacked our minds” — he’s much less keen on examining more nuanced arguments.
But it’s possible to both have concerns with the way in which social media platforms have allowed dark money to influence the public debate, to acknowledge that polarisation was not directly caused by social media, and to suggest that it may well have played a role in making it worse. Clegg however is only interested in engaging with the argument that it controls minds, which even among Facebook’s critics is surely a minority view. In fairness, he does acknowledge a wider debate than the one he illustrates in the book, but rather than engage with that wider debate, prefers to focus on a simplistic (and ironically, pluralised) aspect of it:
You can be in one camp or the other – as you’d expect, I’m sympathetic to the latter – but what you certainly can’t claim is that there is consensus.
It should surprise no-one that someone as incurious as Clegg would employ the argument from ignorance fallacy. But it’s a little odd that, just a few pages after asserting that social media can have no role in influencing human behaviour, he goes on to spend much of the following chapter arguing that the print media, in fact, has done. Clegg cites the example of the myth of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which many falsely believed resulted in a mass panic due to people believing the events in the radio drama were really happening:
The fact that we all know – and almost all believe – the legend of the War of the Worlds panic shows just how effective the media can be at constructing and spreading a narrative. So much so that the legend is still repeated uncritically in textbooks, popular histories and documentaries […]. It is a remarkable demonstration of both the power of the press and the way the press responds when it feels its power is threatened by new technologies.
Isn’t Nick Clegg troubled by the implication that the media has “taken over our minds” to make us believe this narrative? Doesn’t he find this notion “patronising” or an attack on our personal agency? Isn’t he describing here precisely the process by which social media can spread false information and mislead public debate? This isn’t an argument, this is an attempt to bamboozle by pointing every which way. It’s a classic Chewbacca Defence.
Network Effects and Switching Costs
Clegg talks a lot in his book about his support for what he calls the “open internet” but it’s worth exploring how he defines it.
He talks about the current incarnation of the internet, dominated as it is by enormous tech platforms, as providing the ultimate in terms of free competition and open expression for all. He contrasts that with the early internet which was a bit of a mess. Greybeards such as myself can remember the time before Google, when it was really hard to find anything (newspapers used to run columns recommending interesting websites; can you imagine that now?).
The move towards platforms is presented as an unalloyed good, almost a law of the internet. In that respect he cites Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory which describes how platforms manage to turn the old supplier/distributor/buyer model on its head, with suppliers and distributors working in lockstep to compete for buyers being replaced by a system in which a single distributor (the platform) dominating the customer base to such an extent that sellers have to come to them instead.
As a result we end up with companies such as Uber, Airbnb and Ticketmaster dominating an industry to such an extent that all suppliers have to be on the platform in order to compete.
Clegg presents this as an unalloyed good for consumers because of network effects. The more suppliers on the platform, the more open the market and thus the consumer can be assured of getting the best deals. Meanwhile, the market owner has to ensure they provide the best platform because, for example, it’s competitors might offer lower fees to suppliers, or might do a better job at weeding out all of the crooks who want to sell you a lemon. This results in a virtuous circle, right?
Well, yes and no. It’s notable that while Clegg is keen to bandy the phrase “network effect” around, not once does he mention its dark mirror “switching costs”. A switching cost is what it costs you to change from one supplier to another. In the past, it was extremely difficult and frustrating to change your mobile phone contract and keep your phone number. Similarly, if you decide you no longer like Amazon, you can’t bring the books, music or TV shows you bought from them onto a new platform. The platform has you locked in.
At the same time, platforms have a nasty habit of dominating the industry they are focused on. Google has managed to leverage its market dominence in the case of internet search by crowding out the competition. Amazon either buys up or forces out its competitors. And as we’ve already seen, when Sex Creep Mark Zuckerberg made his devil’s bargain with Peter Thiel, he was able to kill off the existing social network companies and either buy out or limit the growth of any new potential competitors.
Far from Ben Thompson’s “virtuous circle” we’ve ended up with, well, Facebook in 2026 (there’s quite a useful summary of Aggregation Theory and its flaws in this short video by the Verge).
And so we end up with the neoligism “enshittification”, first coined by Cory Doctorow. While his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It came out at around the same time as Nick Clegg’s, he had been writing out it since 2023, so it is a shame — and notable — that Clegg didn’t even try to engage with it (that old incuriosity again).
Interestingly, Doctorow and Clegg actually agree on a number of points. On the topic of content moderation, Clegg says this:
The key trade-off for any content platform is between freedom of expression and safety. Both concepts are shaped by subjective opinion, culture and local history – in some places they are also shaped by law and constitutions, while in others they are not. Turning up the dial on freedom of expression necessarily makes it more likely that someone will be offended or, worse, feel unsafe. And freedom of expression and safety are both concepts which need to be applied at great speed to vast amounts of content on platforms used by billions of human beings around the world. There is no perfect content-moderation recipe.
Doctorow essentially agrees:
So there is nothing wrong with the idea of protecting social media users from harassment and hate speech.
But a rule that says that platforms must accomplish this through content moderation and account deletions is very hard to administer.
Where they differ however is what conclusions they draw from this dilemma. For Clegg, the answer is simple: you just have to lump it and understand that platforms like Facebook are doing their best. For Doctorow on the other hand, the answer is that you should be able to take your business elsewhere — without the high switching costs that entails.
Both bring up the Fediverse (or Mastodon), in their books. Mastodon is an open sourced piece of software which you can set up on your own server, register users, and network them in the same way that any other social network operates. Where it differs is that each server is potentially federated with every other one running the same software. So I could read your social media feed on my server, despite it being hosted on a completely different one. What’s more, the software is designed to make switching servers as easy as possible; you simply request the change and it all happens authomatically, with your list of followers in tact.
(For the record, I have a Mastodon account, but I found it a bit of a challenge to get into — mainly because that with so few users I found it extremely dominated by gatekeepers who were more focused on policing new users than welcoming them. So I’ve defaulted to BlueSky which feels like a better fit for me for now — although I expect it to enshittify eventually and would welcome it if it chose to federate).
Both Clegg and Doctorow point out that Meta’s Threads is federated with the network. But while Doctorow sees this as a potential solution to the moderating policies of Facebook and X — creating a legal right for such social networks to federate and allow users to seemlessly switch without losing their social network, Clegg merely mentions it in passing and seems uninterested in its wider implications for Facebook. In fairness, Facebook with its groups and large video output, isn’t instantly as natural a fit with Mastodon as Threads is, but that doesn’t seem like an insurmountable problem.
The reality, I suspect, is that Facebook is perfectly aware that if it opened up its content and made it easier for users to switch platforms, the trickle of users leaving would turn into a flood and their advertising revenue would take a hit. I suspect it has calculated that it is better to hold their users in a loveless embrace rather than try to fix anything at this point.
Enclosures vs the commons
Talk of the fediverse brings up a wider issue, which is that the open internet that Clegg praises is not, in fact, very open at all. Clegg gives a partial history of the internet, but ignores the fact that, briefly, we envisioned a very different future of the internet compared to what we have now.
In the early 2000s, there was a lot of fevered debate around the term Web 2.0. It’s debatable whether Web 2.0 itself was actually a thing, as opposed to a natural development of simply how the internet worked in practice anyway, but the dream being pitched was of an internet focused on mass participation and interoperability, all powered through open source software. With products such as Facebook, we certainly got the mass participation bit, but once they had achieved dominance, the focus on openness withered and they shifted their focus on becoming walled gardens.
In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Bodley Head, 2023), economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis compares this shift to an internet dominated by platforms with the UK enclosure acts of the 18th and 19th century, which forced people off the land and into cities. In turn, he argues that these platforms dominate the internet — and society more widely — to such an extent that they have effectively ended the era of capitalism and replaced it with technofeudalism (or cloud capitalism), in which the dominant economic force is not on exploiting labour but exploiting rents.
I want to park further discussion of this idea for now, but he does briefly sketch out an alternative path of development for the internet. What if, instead of platforms such as Uber and Airbnb, we had open source protocols, and software which linked potential suppliers with consumers directly? To what extent do we need these platforms at all, and could we imagine a world in which code and much smaller interoperable agents could replace them, all competing for market share?
Clegg argues that they are in fact vital, but remember this is a man who is proud to declare that he hasn’t written a line of code. In 2021, President Joe Biden appointed Lina Khan as chair of the US Federal Trade Commission. She immediately embarked on a mission to reverse the US’s 40 year laissez-faire approach to antitrust legislation (or competition law) in favour of a more activist approach which challenged mergers and even called for the breaking up of companies.
It will not surprise you to learn that Nick Clegg is not a fan, or that Cory Doctorow is. At one point Clegg makes a curious claim:
The traditional logic of antitrust law doesn’t work. These companies act as a marketplace where users and suppliers interact. For the many platforms that people flock to online, far from driving up prices and lowering standards, the reverse is true. The bigger the marketplace, the lower the prices and the better the user experience.
For the many reasons cited in this article, and that I’m confident you can come up with yourself, how can he justify this? We aren’t enjoying a period of prices going down; quite the opposite. And those prices include baked in fees from companies such as Apple and Amazon, and conditions for suppliers to ensure that they can’t sell their products elsewhere at lower prices. Those taxi companies that went bust thanks to Mark Thompson’s aggregation theory were somehow capable of delivering a service that was far cheaper than Uber provides now; and they went bust because Uber was able to dominate the market by using its start up capital to subsidise every cab journey on its app for years. In what way can Clegg justify platforms using predatory pricing in the interests of gaining “network effects”? Alas, he declines to explore this line of thought any further.
It’s hard therefore to argue that Clegg really envisions an open internet at all; what he’s defending is the very much closed internet of the status quo, against the perfidious interests of non-US legislators.
One Internet Under Pax America
One of Nick Clegg’s big areas of concern in this book is that we are on the verge of seeing the Internet split into numerous national and regional Internets.
As evidence that we might be heading in that direction, he of course cites the Great Firewall of China, which cuts Chinese citizens off from directly accessing the rest of the internet. But he also cites the censorship of authoritarian regimes in India and Russia as examples, and even the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act.
To an extent, I agree that this is a risk — although to be clear here the threat of nationalism and the carving up of the world into spheres of influence has far more troubling implications than just how easy it might be to send a friend living in Pakistan an email. By the same token, reversing the current trend towards nationalism will undoubtedly fix the firewalling of the global internet. Understanding this also suggests that the US is a force for regression rather than the democratising force that Clegg still seems to cling to.
On numerous occasions in this book, Clegg asserts that he welcomes regulation of the internet, but on reading it, it’s hard to imagine a piece of legislation that he could bear to support in practice.
Clegg lists a litany of examples of imbecilic politicians and regulators who signally fail to understand the genius of Silicon Valley and how it would be threatened by their lumpen-handed attempts at regulation. The former EU Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton is presented as particularly egregious example of a politician who was “renowned in Silicon Valley for pontificating at, but never listening to, tech leaders”, and I have already mentioned his low opinion of Lina Khan.
Despite having such a problem with legislators in practice, Clegg does suggest a couple of ways forward. The first is what he calls “a radical level transparency.” Happily for Meta, this involves doing all the things they already do, such as publishing details of how they regulate themselves and allowing experts and users to participate in their decision making processes. These aren’t bad things per se, but despite Meta adopting all of these in the last few years it hasn’t resulted in a more user-friendly Facebook or Instagram; indeed they have coincided with both platforms becoming progressively worse.
His other big solution is for an “open internet treaty”; a multilateral agreement to protect free expression, free enterprise and core democratic principles. Crucially, this treaty would, in his opinion, need to be lead by the US.
He cites the Bretton Woods agreement as a model for going forward on this, while acknowledging that this post-war deal has been criticised for enshrining American hegemony. And yet, at the same time, he believes the US should lead these talks to ensure that US companies “remain the pre-eminent global platforms” — which sounds an awful lot like hegemony to me.
I could go into more detail about how he proposes this will all work, but it feels superfluous. I need to stop here to point out the Republican Elephant in the room: Sex Creep Donald J Trump.
It’s simply baffling that this book was published towards the end of 2025, a year in which Trump’s policies had seen him rampaging across the globe tearing up or ignoring every international treaty, agreement or organisation he came near to (this came to a height in January 2026 when he comitted a veritable bonfire of the international treaties).
More to the point, this was a project that was actively supported by Silicon Valley’s biggest beasts. Famously, that includes Sex Creep Elon Musk, but Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesson — two people who are absolutely central to Meta — have also played a definitive role. And while Sex Creep Mark Zuckerberg himself has not played quite as active a role as either of them, his response to Donald Trump getting elected was to donate $1 million to his inauguration fund. Almost as soon as Nick Clegg’s bum hit the exit door at Meta HQ, Meta announced that it would be ending the fact-checking system established by Clegg in favour of community notes.
I have an entirely unfounded theory that the basis of this book was originally pitched to Sex Creep Mark Zuckerberg, who in response laughed him out the door and made it clear that his position was untenable. There are certainly echoes of it in his Metaverse-hosted interview in the FT (apparently being interviewed in the guise of a dead eyed cartoon character was considered a wise PR move in 2022).
In light of this, it’s simply wild to suggest, as Clegg does, that one of the crucial parts of this multilateral open internet treaty would be to persuade the EU to pay greater respect to the First and Fourth Amendments of the US constitution, as if the EU has no equivalent protections. As a former staffer at the European Commission and Member of the European Parliament, Nick Clegg knows perfectly well that all member states are bound by the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes Article 5 – liberty and security, Article 6 – fair trial, Article 9 – conscience and religion, Article 10 – expression and Article 11 – association. And without wishing to get into a pissing contest over this, right now Europe appears to be taking its own charter of rights a hell of a lot more seriously than the US is taking its (Peter Thiel’s Palantir is a service provider for ICE).
Bored of Peace
In January 2026, the US unveiled its vision for what will be built over the rubble of Gaza. This is intended to be primarily a tourist destination consisting of glass skyscrapers. The Palestinian residents will be allowed to live in residential areas cut off from each other by large areas of parkland and leisure facilities. According to the plans unveiled, almost as much land will be given over to datacentres and “advanced manufacturing”. Silicon Valley, in other words, is going to be receiving a large part of the spoils of war. Facebook financer and close friend of Jeffrey Epstein Peter Thiel of course performed a central role in the mass destruction of Palestine via his data analytics firm Palantir, which specialises in providing intelligence for the military.
One of the members of the “Board of Peace” that will be overseeing all this is former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose own Tony Blair Institute is directly funded by Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle and currently the world’s richest man. Tony Blair doesn’t write books on how to save the internet, but no doubt plays a far more central role in influencing tech policy than Nick Clegg could dream of, certainly here in the UK where the Tony Blair Institute has been using it’s close links to government to push for artificial intelligence and a national identity database.
Right now, the notion that the President of the United States has the will, the capacity or the trust to lead negotiations on a global internet treaty in the name of openness and democracy is simply laughable. And the bad news is that the damage wrought by Sex Creep Donald Trump would make such a treaty unlikely in the first term of even a potentially sympathetic successive Democratic President. Clegg is probably onto something here, and that guaranteeing basic internet freedoms by some kind of multilateral agreement does sound like a good idea. But one which excluded the US (at least at first) would elicit howls of outrage within Silicon Valley — not least of all because it no doubt perceives Washington to be more easily bought.
So what does Silicon Valley want exactly? Well, it’s not a monolith and there are numerous personalities with different ideas. In the short term, we can be pretty sure that it is very concerned that the vast sums being invested into AI yields significantly more vast rewards. Similarly, we can be sure that if this AI bet does not pay off (and that is looking increasingly likely), then it will be able to socialise any losses that it incurs.
But the idea that Silicon Valley is leading the charge for global democracy and an open, interoperable internet is simply laughable. It seems incredible to me that Nick Clegg does not know this, which begs the question of what the purpose of his book is? It can’t be to influence tech leaders, who have laughed him out of the valley. Is it too cynical of me to suggest that he is merely offering them political cover? Or maybe this is just a last attempt to rinse a dime out of his time adventuring in California.
In all honestly, I didn’t intend to write a book review of How to Save the Internet. I’ve been more interested in the influence of Big Tech in politics, the rise of AI, and some of the genuinely scary ideologies which permeate both projects. I hoped Nick Clegg would provide some insight into this from a more sympathetic insiders’ perspective. But instead I’m left asking how he seemed to spend seven years in Silicon Valley missing quite so much.
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