The Internet has gone bad. Public media can save it.

A healthy public sphere needs a healthy public media. We’ve built the equivalent for television and radio. Now it’s time to do it for the Internet. The simplest way to proceed is to tax major technology companies to pay for better content.  A billion-dollar federal funding infusion to upgrade public media would be a start — perhaps paid for by a “journalism tax” on the largest tech platforms, as has been proposed in Britain. But Congress and the Federal Communications Commission could also take creative advantage of these services to get high-quality news and smart children’s programming in front of all Americans. Congress and the FCC could grant an updated mandate to guarantee that high-quality educational and informational public media is distributed on major tech platforms at limited or no cost to the public. There’s precedent to do so: In the ’90s, Congress passed the Children’s Television Act, which gave the FCC regulatory authority to require commercial TV broadcasters to air such content. What the Internet needs is a fresh infusion of public media, properly funded and paired with federal policy that puts the public interest first. 

[Erik Martin is a graduate student at the Oxford Internet Institute, and was a policy adviser at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.]