The Commonet Vision
A Canadian Model for Public-Interest Digital Infrastructure
Why are public services posting on platforms we fundamentally do not trust?
For two decades, the dominant internet business model has rewarded platforms for capturing attention, harvesting data, and shaping behavior at massive scale. These platforms now function as the most powerful communication infrastructures in human history — while remaining largely outside democratic accountability and public-interest governance.
Governments use them to reach citizens. Communities rely on them. Schools ban them. Parents fear their effects on children. News organizations depend on them while being blocked by them.
And now artificial intelligence is accelerating that concentration of power even further.
The platforms shaping public discourse, visibility, identity, and access to information were not designed to serve the public interest. Yet society increasingly depends on them as critical infrastructure.
We've faced infrastructure challenges before.
This Is What Canadians Do
Canada has a long history of building shared infrastructure when something becomes essential to public life.
Railways connected the country.
Public broadcasting, and newspapers connected communities.
Hydro, roads, and telecommunications became foundations for economic participation and civic life.
These systems were not built because they were the fastest path to profit.
They were built because functioning societies require reliable infrastructure — and because markets alone do not always produce systems with the right incentives, access, resilience, or accountability.
Digital infrastructure is now part of that story.
Commonet exists to explore what public-interest digital infrastructure could look like. Not government-controlled platforms. Not surveillance-driven monopolies. Not anti-business idealism.
Digital infrastructure may require a new institutional category altogether.
Systems built with startup energy, long-term thinking, and public-interest alignment from the beginning.
The Model Changed, Not the Landscape
The early internet was a landscape of possibility: email, Wikipedia, blogs, instant messaging, online communities, open knowledge — tools that expanded what people could do, create, and share.
But somewhere along the way, we got lost.
At some point, the business model became the design philosophy.
Many of the systems now shaping public discourse, childhood development, journalism, and institutional trust were built to optimize for extraction — because extraction is what the market rewarded.
But infrastructure cannot be built on the same logic as addiction.
Infrastructure exists to increase societal capability: making communication more reliable, knowledge more accessible, and communities more resilient.
That requires a different model. One that still rewards founders, investors, and early supporters — but measures success by long-term public value, not endless extraction.
The Missing Middle
Some systems become too important to be treated purely as products.
But traditional institutions are often too slow to build them, while venture markets reward extraction, lock-in, and short-term growth.
That leaves a gap:
between startups and public infrastructure,
between public benefit and sustainable business,
between innovation and long-term stewardship.
One built collaboratively by the people and institutions that depend on it:
Municipalities.
Communities.
Builders.
Researchers.
Public institutions.
Investors.
Citizens.
Not a closed platform. An ecosystem.
A national capacity to build and steward digital infrastructure in the public interest.
Why This Matters Now
Communication infrastructure now shapes emergency response, democratic participation, education, journalism, local economies, and community resilience.
Much of that infrastructure is controlled by a small number of foreign platforms optimized for engagement, dependency, and extraction — not long-term public reliability.
At the same time, artificial intelligence is accelerating the concentration of data, communication, identity, and institutional power at unprecedented scale.
The architecture of the next generation of digital life is being decided now.
Canada needs the capacity to build and steward critical digital systems in the public interest — not out of nationalism for its own sake, but because resilient societies require resilient infrastructure.
This moment will shape the next fifty years.
There is still time to participate in building it.
Join the Coalition
Tell us who you are, how you'd like to participate, or what this future could look like in your community.