Digital technology is infrastructure. It’s a critical input to our businesses, essential to the operation of our governments, everywhere in the lives of our citizens.

Infrastructure is powerful. It shapes what runs on it and sets the rules that govern its users. Infrastructural power is even stronger when the infrastructure is programmable such that it can adapt the way in which it directs those who depend on it.

Authoritarian infrastructure leads to an authoritarian society. A tiny group of people has a near-unilateral say over the information we access, our communication channels, the taxes they levy on digital businesses, the rules of online commerce, the livelihood of our media, the labour conditions of millions, the operation of almost all critical internet services. The laws they set have a footprint that competes directly with those of the state.

This fast-growing encroachment on our sovereignty has created a doom loop in which authoritarian digital infrastructure undermines democracy, and weaker democracy is then incapable of containing the expansion of authoritarian infrastructure. Fixated on the myth that tech monopolies were built with innovation and can therefore be broken by innovation, our leaders have consistently missed the fact that what the monopolies do isn’t innovate but rather capture key control points in the architecture of digital systems. Tech sovereignty cannot come from innovation policy alone — it requires liberating our infrastructure from foreign, increasingly hostile control.

Over centuries, we have learnt to govern traditional infrastructure piece by piece so that it would serve us rather than the other way around. We have established models to operate infrastructure in the public interest, supporting businesses in focusing on their core competences and citizens in their ability to be and to do more.

But the sudden arrival of so many new infrastructural systems with the stunning growth of the digital sphere has created an infrastructure shock. If we care about democracy, we have to shock it back.

Our strategy to restore democratic power to the digital sphere and reverse the doom loop is threefold:

• We will bolster institutional capacity across society so that digital infrastructures are governed by their stakeholders.
• We will break the authoritarian control over tech by relentlessly going after their large-scale illegal behaviour and dismantling their abusive concentration of power.
• We will build infrastructure designed to support prosperity, resilience, and democracy through an ambitious deployment of tech, governance, and funding bringing together actors from government, the private sector, and the commons.

This is a daunting project but we have the technology, the people, and the know-how. We are experienced and pragmatic: we know that the result will be imperfect and have to be continuously refined. But we will take imperfect freedom over begging monopolies for crumbs. We will take the messy resilience of a creative society over Silicon Valley’s brittle and bland slop.

Democracy is daunting too, as well as imperfect — and there is no better way to be. Democracy is the future of technology. It’s time for this broad alliance to join forces across our society and to drive democracy deep into our digital sphere.