Building a Family-first Digital Economy: New IFS Policy Brief

Artificial Intelligence and the digital economy are broken. Despite the gains in economic growth and efficiency Silicon Valley has produced, those benefits have often come at an enormous cost to American families and communities. Over the last decade, addictive digital products, like smartphones and social media, have rewired the brains of an entire generation, leaving many addicted, lonely, depressed, and diminished in their moral, social, and rational capacities.

Even now, as parents and states gain ground in the fight to hold Big Tech accountable for its harms to children, a new danger is imminent. Generative and agentic AI—if left on their current trajectory—threaten to further hollow out American family life and erode the social, religious, economic, and political structures upon which human flourishing depends.

The evidence is all around us. AI companions are displacing human relationships and exacerbating a crisis in marriage and family formation. Employers are increasingly leaning into AI “bosses,” if not to replace their workers, then to reduce them to biological appendages of machines optimized for efficiency and short-term profit maximization. AI is also shaping consequential decisions from government services, healthcare, and education to the price families pay for groceries and other necessities. Even human thought and agency are now at risk with AI systems driving the mass offloading of human cognitive labor, like reading, writing, and independent creativity.

AI threatens to disempower American families and communities, in large part, because those bedrock institutions lack a voice in shaping AI’s course of development and its governance. Consequently, the incentives of tech corporations are often fundamentally out of step with those of most Americans and are corrosive to the social fabric.

Generative and agentic AI—if left on their current trajectory—threaten to further hollow out American family life.

Part of the answer, then, is to recognize that nearly all data fueling the digital economy and AI is a co-produced good. Governance of digital systems and their outputs should be shared by the communities who co-produced the underlying data and who are most impacted by its use. Congress and the States should empower co-producers—through a new right of digital association and collective informational bargaining—to secure terms from tech corporations that advance community-specific privacy, control, and economic interests

In a new policy paper, we unpack this claim in three parts:

Part I argues that data is a co-produced good. Yet, control over its collection and use is concentrated in the hands of tech firms. Individuals, families, and communities have fundamental interests of privacy: restricting access to their information; control: deciding the purposes for which information they co-produce is used; and fair value: sharing in the economic benefits derived from co-produced data. However, because tech firms have asymmetric power to set digital terms of data collection and use, communally specified privacy, control, and economic interests are often undermined. As a result, the incentives driving the digital economy often cut against the flourishing of human scale communities. 

Part II makes the case for why both individual data rights and top-down data privacy regimes often fail to vindicate privacy, control, and economic interests. 

Part III proposes a new class of informational rights: 

• The Right of Digital Association: This right gives individuals, households, civil society institutions, and small enterprises (data subjects) the ability to join or form new intermediaries—Data Rights Associations (DRAs)—to secure terms governing data collection and use from tech corporations (counterparties) that advance community specified privacy, control, and economic interests. 
• The Right to Collective Informational Bargaining: This right empowers DRAs to secure fair terms from counterparties by imposing a duty to bargain in good faith and providing a neutral arbitration mechanism to resolve impasses. 
• The Right to Fair Representation: This right lays out specific duties that DRAs owe to their members, including duties of care and loyalty. 

Part III also proposes standards for regulator certification and oversight of DRAs, recommends general obligations for tech corporations (counterparties) subject to collective informational bargaining, considers questions of financial and technical feasibility, and explores how a robust DRA ecosystem would advance pro-human, pro-family innovation.

Download the full IFS policy brief, Toward Associational Data Rights, here.