Who Owns The Internet & How It Owns Us | James Ball | Modern Wisdom Podcast 213
James Ball (guest), Chris Williamson (host)
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring James Ball and Chris Williamson, Who Owns The Internet & How It Owns Us | James Ball | Modern Wisdom Podcast 213 explores inside the Internet’s Hidden Empire: Power, Profit, and Surveillance Unmasked Journalist James Ball explains how the internet’s physical and technical foundations emerged from Cold War military projects and quietly evolved into today’s global critical infrastructure. He details how seemingly neutral systems—undersea cables, naming bodies like ICANN, and ad-tech auctions—centralize power, money, and data in the hands of a few corporations and governments. The conversation exposes the extreme invasiveness of programmatic advertising, the largely unregulated battlefield of cyberwarfare, and the weakness of current governance structures. Ball argues we must stop romanticizing the internet, treat it as industrial infrastructure, and build new rules, rights, and institutions so it serves citizens rather than simply states and venture-backed platforms.
Inside the Internet’s Hidden Empire: Power, Profit, and Surveillance Unmasked
Journalist James Ball explains how the internet’s physical and technical foundations emerged from Cold War military projects and quietly evolved into today’s global critical infrastructure. He details how seemingly neutral systems—undersea cables, naming bodies like ICANN, and ad-tech auctions—centralize power, money, and data in the hands of a few corporations and governments. The conversation exposes the extreme invasiveness of programmatic advertising, the largely unregulated battlefield of cyberwarfare, and the weakness of current governance structures. Ball argues we must stop romanticizing the internet, treat it as industrial infrastructure, and build new rules, rights, and institutions so it serves citizens rather than simply states and venture-backed platforms.
Key Takeaways
The internet was built for nuclear resilience, not social connection.
ARPANET’s packet-switching design was developed so U. ...
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Beneath the ‘cloud’ is a fragile, very physical global infrastructure.
The internet relies on hosepipe-thin undersea cables, land-based fiber, and huge data centers placed where land and power are cheap; cable breaks from anchors or sharks are real events that must be manually repaired, even as traffic seamlessly reroutes at light speed.
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A tiny, obscure nonprofit effectively steers the world’s addressing system.
ICANN, a low-profile body in Los Angeles, coordinates domain names and IP address allocation via consensus rather than hard legal authority, meaning critical questions—like who gets ‘. ...
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Programmatic ads create mass surveillance as a byproduct of monetization.
Every page load triggers a real-time bidding war in which ad networks read dozens of tracking cookies, infer who you are, and share your data with hundreds of companies in milliseconds, generating deeply personalized targeting that no individual user can meaningfully see or control.
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Cyberspace is an unregulated battlefield woven into civilian life.
State actors and criminals exploit the same networks we use for banking and messaging; attacks like Stuxnet and WannaCry show that malware can damage physical infrastructure and hospitals, yet there is no widely accepted equivalent of the Geneva Conventions for cyber operations.
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Venture-backed ‘information capitalism’ pushes everything toward monopoly and addiction.
Because tech businesses are optimized for hyper-growth over sustainability, they rely heavily on advertising, engagement maximization, and data hoarding, driving designs like infinite scroll and attention traps while squeezing out smaller, healthier digital businesses.
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We must treat data and digital power like industrial-era resources.
Ball argues we need new concepts of data ownership and benefit-sharing, international norms for cyber conflict, and regulation that curbs VC-driven excess—much as labor laws, environmental rules, and welfare states were built to tame industrial capitalism’s harms.
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Notable Quotes
“When you get into how online ads work, they are so, so much creepier than you ever give them credit for.”
— James Ball
“Everyone likes saying data’s the new oil. They sort of miss that that makes us the crushed up dinosaurs and plants.”
— James Ball
“Because all the companies use this really utopian mission language, it does have this halo, sort of lovely floaty image. And then you’re like, ‘God no, this is trench warfare.’”
— James Ball
“We personify the internet… giving it a personality and romanticizing about it appears to actually probably be making us a little bit weak to what’s properly going on.”
— Chris Williamson
“We built society to cope with what industrial capitalism wants to do… We need to now rebuild society to deal with what information capitalism or the internet wants to do.”
— James Ball
Questions Answered in This Episode
If data is treated as a shared resource rather than a corporate asset, what concrete models (e.g., data trusts, dividends, or public ownership) could realistically work at scale?
Journalist James Ball explains how the internet’s physical and technical foundations emerged from Cold War military projects and quietly evolved into today’s global critical infrastructure. ...
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What would a ‘Geneva Convention for cyberspace’ actually prohibit or require, and how could it be enforced when attribution of attacks is often murky?
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How can individuals meaningfully reduce their exposure to ad-tech surveillance when tracking is so deeply baked into the web’s economic model?
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Is it possible to build viable, smaller-scale online businesses that don’t rely on venture capital and hyper-growth, and what policy changes would make that easier?
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At what point does algorithmic persuasion and engagement design become a violation of autonomy, and who should decide where that line is drawn?
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Transcript Preview
When you get into how online ads work, they are so, so much creepier than you ever give them credit for. They stalk you around the internet. Like, if any human being, if any ex did this, they would be in jail, and rightly so. What happens every time you visit any website is you start this amazing bidding war for your attention. And they might literally know exactly who you are, or they might have built a picture of it.
I'm joined by James Ball. James, welcome to the show.
Pleasure to be here.
Absolute pleasure to have you on. I want to know, what's it like interviewing Edward Snowden in a stadium filled with 15,000 people?
So that was, that was something of a moment. I've got to say, they'd done this very dramatic sort of in, uh, video build-up, and then they killed every light in the place. And so I'm walking out to silhouette, and they've just been told to expect Edward Snowden. And you can see the disappointment on the face of the people (both laughing) around me. Like absolute crashing, "Have we been sold a bill of goods?"
(laughs) Yeah.
And, uh, my, my sort of script line to start it was, "Edward, are you listening?" At which point he's meant to appear on the big screens because, of course, it's video link. And you just have this sinking moment in your sort of, the longest sort of second and a half of my life, when you come on stage and, "Edward, are you listening?" And you just think, "If he doesn't come up on screen, this is going to be awful." (laughs)
Oh, man.
So, so obviously the rest of the interview after that was a total cakewalk because the nerves of that moment were so extreme.
Dude, it's like proper Metallica shit.
It, uh, honestly, it's... You know, you do, you, you go around and speak as a journalist, as a reporter, and a big crowd is 200. You know, that is like, that feels like prime time. And so you walk out to 13,000 at this like music concert venue.
(laughs)
And you're like, "Well, what the hell happened?"
How do you-
Like, I mean, I (laughs)
What happened in life for me to end up in this situation here?
Yeah. It's, it's just completely ridiculous. The, um, the venue did some photos from the back of the crowd, and you've just got this huge sort of stadium crowd. And then every screen, as it should be, massive picture of Edward Snowden. And there's this tiny dot on the stage.
(laughs)
It was like, "That's me! That's me!" (laughs)
"Yeah, look at me! Mom, I made it! I made it."
I did actually send it to my mom...
You've got it?
... uh, who has, who has got it in a little frame. (laughs)
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