We believe digital technology can and should have a positive impact on society.
This belief comes from our Silicon Valley DNA.
We aspire to build a global technological ecosystem that reaches and works for everyone: One that balances innovation with responsibility, regardless of whether technology is deployed by individuals, companies, or governments.
That’s why Omidyar Network makes strategic investments and promotes ideas, technologies, and policies that help ensure a digital world that is safe, fair, and compassionate. We support organizations committed to making positive changes— and apply pressure to those that may be more resistant. In doing so, we can ensure that future technological innovation promotes well-being and individual liberty, while building in safeguards to manage its risks and unintended consequences.
What We're Working On
Omidyar Network works to create a fair and competitive technology ecosystem. We must rein in big tech’s power that can hurt individual well-being, liberty, and innovation. We support efforts to introduce and enforce checks and balances, contribute new evidence, act as a watchdog, and include historically marginalized voices as we collectively develop policy solutions.
Learn more about our point of view on concentrated power in the tech ecosystem here.
Omidyar Network works to stop the viral spread of conspiracy theories, destabilizing hoaxes, fake news, false claims, minority-targeting speech, and organized disinformation campaigns. To do so, we must make private messaging platforms safer and more trustworthy. We support individuals and organizations that conduct research and educate tech companies and governments on how to preserve privacy protections, including encryption, while making the necessary product design, policy, and incentive changes.
Read more about why we’ve invested in fighting disinformation on encrypted messaging platforms.
Read our full vision and strategy for trustworthy messaging in a viral world.
Every time you explore the internet, you enter into a lopsided bargain: in exchange for access to the digital economy, you surrender your data. Your data is extracted by businesses and governments—to use however they choose. When this assumption goes unchallenged, it perpetuates harmful incentives that fuel extractive business models, exacerbate surveillance risks, and concentrate power and wealth. Today’s mental models preference extractors over users, limit data’s full societal value, and slow innovation. We believe that if upstream assumptions evolve, the rest of the data economy system can operate more equitably. Omidyar Network supports that evolution by surfacing new ideas, creating coalitions to inspire new norms, supporting entrepreneurial experiments, and seeding a new narrative that makes the digital economy equitable for all stakeholders.
The Tech We Want
Omidyar Network is lifting up a new wave of leaders, companies, and technologies in pursuit of a thriving tech system built on inclusivity, mutualism, sustainability, accountability, and responsible innovation. We believe that without the right infrastructure, institutions, “beacon” examples, and a shared narrative, this burgeoning movement will face longer odds to succeed. Our support for healthy alternatives, and the tech leaders who want to build them, will help ensure tech workers, consumers, and investors can all enjoy an equitable technology future.
Ideas We're Exploring
At Omidyar Network, we believe young people are both partners and stakeholders in the fight to create more responsible technology. To support their efforts, we are working to better understand which tech and tech-adjacent issues animate Gen Z-led decentralized organizing, identify the barriers and resource gaps exists in young people’s ability to create positive change, and prioritize ways in which Omidyar Network can elevate youth leadership in the responsible technology movement.
The Internet — the vast, invisible infrastructure that undergirds our daily lives — cannot operate without open-source software. Code that everyone has the freedom to edit, modify and reuse operates the power grids, hospitals, communication and transportation systems, phones, cars, and planes that make commerce and industry possible. However, the sustainability, stability, and security of the open source system is at risk. Omidyar Network and its partners are helping to educate policymakers about these issues, support developer communities, inform new standards, attract funding, and communicate about the value of open source system to our democracy, economy, technological innovation, and societal wellbeing.
Video gaming is an integral and influential part of 3 billion+ people’s lives at the unique intersection of art, storytelling, and technology. The $90B market, however, is facing some growing pains: anti-competitive business practices, data-hungry business models, limited diversity, and expansions to Web3 and multiverses. Omidyar Network is exploring how gaming will continue to transform the future of technology and how best to ensure the industry is inclusive and equitable. We are learning about gaming as a collective identity, how in-game economies will shape the new global economy, and gaming as a form of collective protest.
