Dick Pountain /Political Quarterly/ 11th October 2025
Book Review: How To Save The Internet: The Threat to Global Connection in the Age of AI and Political Conflict by Nick Clegg; Bodley Head; 4 Sept. 2025; £17.17
Nick Clegg has been unlucky in two of his major career decisions. In 2010 he chose the suave David Cameron over the tetchy Gordon Brown and allied his Liberal Democrats in a coalition with the Tories. Thereafter he, an ardent European, was dragged helplessly along as Cameron fumbled us into Brexit (along the way saddling UK students with the ruinous loans he’d promised to prevent). Having lost his parliamentary seat in the 2017 election that undid the coalition, Clegg exited UK politics, moved to the USA and was snapped up by Meta, the corporation formerly known as Facebook, as their vice‑president of global affairs and communications. He most likely believed that Meta’s founder, chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his neo-liberal reformist world-view, though he would also have enjoyed the Silicon Valley Sized Salary. He was to be disappointed again when not only did ‘Zuck’ ignore his recommendations for ethical reforms of Facebook’s operations, but proceeded to join the other Silicon oligarchs in a stunningly acrobatic volte face to offer support for Donald Trump’s 2nd-term presidency. Clegg left Facebook in January 2025, just before the true extremity of Trump’s assault on democracy became fully visible.
Presumably he’d started writing How To Save The Internet under the Biden administration (ie. in a different world) but its Prologue makes clear that he knew what Trump was up to, if not its degree. In that prologue he clearly sets out his platform, that the internet is an innovation on a par with the printing press in its potential to change the world; that in earlier days it was a democratising force; that it’s since become problematic in matters of privacy, copyright, mental health and far more; and that this is provoking calls for censorship of its content (which he largely opposes). He also asserts that deep changes in the wider world – the retreat of globalisation and rise of neo-nationalisms – threatens to ‘balkanise’ the internet, with different nations isolating their networks and applying different levels of censorship:
“ …the global internet is splintering into national and regional silos, with potentially huge knock-on effects for the global economy, the trajectory of technological innovation, and ultimately the freedoms and opportunities that will shape billions of lives. In fact, the global internet in its truest sense no longer exists. China, Russia and others have built digital walls at their borders, effectively segregating their online worlds and creating an alternative internet model.”
Clegg refers to this process as the ‘techlash’ and his intention in writing the book was to explore policies, conceived during his seven-year employment at Facebook, for resisting it and thus ‘saving the internet’. These measures are described, in perhaps rather too much detail, in Part
Four of the book, but unfortunately for him the sheer savagery of Trump’s assault on both the US state and the international order have made the prospect of any of them being adopted vanishingly small. Equally unfortunately for him, the techlash has deepened and intensified on both the Left and Right of politics – and even within apolitical public opinion – to such an extent that his book has been greeted with viciously hostile reviews, from scorn to outright slander. This leaves him looking like a lonely globalist-centrist-optimist stuck in a howling gale of invective from both sides. Having inspected many of these reactions for myself I felt a distinct temptation to join the mob and throw my own shovelful onto the heaping pile of ordure, but in all conscience I can’t do that. That’s because, when wearing my other hat as a technology journalist, I share some of Clegg’s earlier optimism; because he understands the technology better than most of our current crop of politicians, so parts of his book remain deserving of attention; and finally because I also find myself out of sympathy with the neo-Luddite tone of some of his Left critics.
Perhaps most cogent but damaging is Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of the best-selling ‘The Anxious Generation’ about the effects of phone addiction on young peoples’ mental health, who accuses Clegg of conflating ‘the internet’, which is generally popular, with ‘social media’ which is increasingly not. In the book Clegg asks the rhetorical question of which online services people would be prepared to give up, and Haidt answers it with his own research (gathered via Harris Polls) that found only around 17% of GenZ would give up the internet altogether but close to 50% regret using TikTok and X (none of them use Facebook which is for dads).
Paul M. Barrett in Tech Policy.press goes further, claiming that while social media companies certainly employ popularity-based algorithms which tailor content to maximize user engagement, nevertheless:
“Social media companies do not seek to boost user engagement because they want to intensify polarization [...] They do so because the amount of time users spend on a platform, liking, sharing, and retweeting, is also the amount of time they spend looking at the paid advertising that makes the major platforms so lucrative. Content that elicits partisan fear or indignation is particularly contagious and helps fuel this advertising business model”.
Emily Maitliss roasted Clegg on ‘The News Agents’ podcast, pelting him with facts about US lawsuits over harm caused to teenagers (with an intensity that puts me in mind of ‘The Crucible’). Even Francis Fukuyama has declared that history has restarted, and that:
“ ... the advent of the internet can explain both the timing of the rise of populism, as well as the curious conspiratorial character that it has taken. In today’s politics, the red and blue sides of America’s polarization contest not just values and policies, but factual information like who won the 2020 election or whether vaccines are safe. The two sides inhabit completely different information spaces; both can believe that they are involved in an existential struggle for American democracy because they begin with different factual premises as to the nature of the threats to that order.”
So what sort of defence does Clegg assemble against such criticism? Rather little, since ‘polarisation’ appears only four times, on the same single page :
“The conclusion I’d encourage you to draw is not that there is no relationship between social media and polarisation. It is simply that it’s not clear if there is a relationship or what it is, and therefore the accepted wisdom that social media makes us more polarised is far from established fact”.
or the more defiant:
“A crucial first step towards tackling these challenges is to acknowledge that they are not simply the fault of Big Tech’s algorithms. Consider, for example, the presence of bad and polarising content on private messaging apps – iMessage, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp – used by billions of people around the world. None of those apps deploy content or ranking algorithms”.
The first of these assertions calls for some debate while the second is true, but what they really show is that Clegg’s concerns inhabit a different domain altogether. It’s as well to remember that Clegg was a contributor to the Liberal Democrats’ ‘Orange Book’ – committed to market solutions, competition and choice and very far indeed from being anti-capitalist. He recognises that causing social harms will be bad for Meta as a business but failed to convince Zuckerberg to spend serious money on remedies. He’s fundamentally opposed to content censorship and to charging for connecting links, which he believes would destroy the internet entirely. His own proposed solutions involve stuff like age-restricting usage by determining a user’s age at operating system level:
“But there is an obvious solution: mandate the operating systems (iOS and Android) to share device users’ ages when they download apps from the app stores – data the operating systems get as part of the hardware acquisition already.”
He remains an internationalist who thinks in terms of laws, of treaties, of EU versus US regulations:
“…whatever the pros or cons of the laws themselves, it is striking how much the EU has been able to get done in comparison with the partisan bickering in the US. In terms of technological innovation, the US is the hare to the EU’s tortoise. But in the race to set the rules of the internet, the tortoise has long since passed the hare”.
However the MAGA revolution is rendering that whole approach to internet reform moot, because the Tech Titans have joined the bad guys for keeps and are no longer governed by any scruples that would be recognisable to those of progressive outlook. So is there any reason to buy How To Save The Internet at all? His final chapters do contain feasible suggestions like technology transfer agreements, AI sharing, transparency and data privacy that might become useful were the world to revert to any kind of pre-Trump order, but I can’t tell you how likely that is, and neither can Nick Clegg…
