Our talk presents an imaginary alternative timeline of technological and political history, one in which Big Tech conglomerates do not exist due to certain laws and policies in place and the collective actions of citizens. 

In the year 2006, web technology was in a nascent and transitional period.  Google had newly become the dominant search engine by providing a good user experience and delivering relevant results. Amazon was primarily known as an online bookstore that had expanded into other retail categories. Facebook had not IPO-ed and was a popular service that felt private and personal and mainly for connecting with people you already knew.

The experience was much less commercialized and algorithm-driven. In the collective conscious was a sense of optimism and possibility during this so-called Web 2.0 era.

A group of activists who were afraid of history repeating itself via a pattern of hyper-growth at all cost (e.g. railroad and telegraph monopolies, commercialization of radio and television) organized and fought for regulations that would ensure that the Internet would not follow the same fate. They wanted to ensure that policymakers and technologists had the same commitment to public interest and that services were not dictated mainly by profits and advertiser interests.

In this alternate timeline, policies and technological systems regarding education, labor, climate, social discourses look very different from the landscape we live in today.