The System Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us, reviewed

By Simon Cocking, review of The System, Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball. Available from Bloomsbury here.

The internet is a network of physical cables and connections, a web of wires enmeshing the world, linking huge data centres to one another and eventually to us. All are owned by someone, financed by someone, regulated by someone.

We refer to the internet as abstract from reality. By doing so, we obscure where the real power lies.

In this powerful and necessary book, James Ball sets out on a global journey into the inner workings of the system. From the computer scientists to the cable guys, the billionaire investors to the ad men, the intelligence agencies to the regulators, these are the real-life figures powering the internet and pulling the strings of our society.

Ball brilliantly shows how an invention once hailed as a democratising force has concentrated power in places it already existed – that the system, in other words, remains the same as it did before.

The System Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us, reviewed

This book feels like it is aimed at the wider, more general reader, looking to build on, and tap into the concerns raised by Shoshana Zuboff in her influential book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. While that book was perhaps one of those books that influenced many, but was probably not read from cover to cover. Ball’s book on the other hand is a much briefer affair, while still aiming to cover a wider range of aspects of what the internet means, and who the main players are.

This approach works to some degree, especially for those grabbing the book for a European length flight, say about two to three hours reading. At the same time, at such a whistle stop pace, it often felt at times that you were only beginning to tackle the nuances of the subtopics that he was digging into, and then, whoosh, you were onto another chapter and a new topic. It is always a challenge perhaps to avoid being neither fish nor fowl.

As a contribution to the genre of nudging people to question more deeply what they do, and how they do it, this is a useful book. We would certainly encourage people to read this as a primer for being more aware of what is happening around us. At the same time hopefully it will also stimulate those same readers to follow up on the books cited and dig deeper to question more rigorously what we are being told and who is telling it to us.

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