The Possibilities of a ‘Public Service’ Intervention to Support a Good Digital Society

This paper advocates that policymakers take a more proactive role in delivering a ‘good’ digital society, with a particular focus on fostering a healthy digital public sphere. It highlights the limitations of current business, philanthropic and policy approaches, noting that the current debate on digital policy has been shaped by dominant political systems and therefore has tended to have a narrow focus on fostering economic growth and minimising negative harms, rather than considering more ‘positive’ interventions aimed at supporting better social and democratic outcomes.

This is in contrast to UK media policy, where public service broadcasting has been a dominant theme since the creation of the BBC in 1922, and which has sought to deliver positive civic ‘freedoms’ oriented at the public good through public models, funding and regulation. This paper therefore draws from the fields of media and communications, policy studies and critical political economy to examine what we can learn from the UK’s historical approach to media policy to support notions of a ‘good’ digital society and what a digital ‘public service-style' intervention could look like.