The internet is on the precipice of a significant transformation. The relevance of many of the most popular platforms people have used over the past decade to engage with one another and access information is increasingly in question. New and emerging technologies are affecting this shifting landscape. Generative AI, the source and subject of endless hype and horror, has the potential to disrupt vital aspects of our information ecosystem, including how we search for and consume information, how we create and consume content, and how we communicate with one another. While the internet today largely resembles the internet from 10 years ago, it is likely that the internet 10 years from now will look nothing like the internet today. 

The evolving digital landscape provides civil society and those working to advance the public interest with a fresh opportunity to change the course of digital society and build toward an equitable future. New nonprofit platform models could be built upon principles of transparency, equity, privacy, and the public good. They could help transition digital society into a new era of the internet that considers a healthy information ecosystem and community safety central to the vitality of civic discourse and democracy – an internet with platforms that measure success through the value it provides to its users as opposed to the value its users provide to shareholders. 

The internet and digital technologies have never lived up to their early promise of becoming the great equalizer. Instead, these technologies have exacerbated many of society’s deepest inequalities, encasing discrimination beneath the hood of black box algorithms that regulators and civil society have struggled to access. Instead of strengthening democracy, digital and data-driven technologies have consistently undermined it; rather than serve the public good, they have damaged public health, defunded local journalism, accelerated online hate and harassment, and enhanced the organizing efforts of extremist groups around the world. 

The next three years are critical. Will we allow the internet to further entrench exploitation and extraction, prioritizing profit and market dominance above all else, or will we move the internet closer toward its early promise – a connective digital space that supports equity, fosters community, and democratizes the world’s knowledge and information?

In the pursuit of that promise, NetGain Partnership is focused on three strategic priorities for the crucial years ahead:

  • Developing a better understanding of the incentive structure and profit models that drive platform algorithms is critical to designing interventions that best serve the public interest.

    As digital society shifts into a new era that incorporates untested technology, NetGain will build upon its previous work by supporting real-time research to identify new harms and propose innovative solutions.

  • The NetGain Partnership and associated grantees are working to advance a robust regulatory framework for digital society that supports transparency, equity, privacy, and the public good.

    Requiring compatible multimodal strategies that include fostering convening and gathering opportunities among civil society advocates from the Global South, this work will leverage progress made in the European Union to move other G7 nations into action, and develop finance-focused strategies to hold platforms directly accountable.

  • In 2023, the buzz around Generative AI sent the world scrambling. Many in civil society are grappling with learning more about these new technologies, incorporating them into their strategies, and finding sources of expertise that can help them better understand the implications.

    By lifting expert and experienced voices, NetGain is helping better inform philanthropic discourse about new tech, including introducing values-based assessments of these technologies that can foreground key perspectives likely missing from the conversation; centering educational programming around the impact of these technologies on other issues central to philanthropy, such as democratic engagement, climate, human rights, and other topics; and providing expert guidance for foundations that are concerned, but don’t know how to leverage that concern into impact.

These strategies will both immediately fill gaps across the field and provide longer term support that strengthens the civil society infrastructure needed to continue building technology and digital spaces that serve the public interest.