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Tag: “internet freedom”

Richard Hill — Knots of Statelike Power (Review of Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age)

a review of Bernard Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard, 2015)

by Richard Hill

~

This is a seminal and important book, which should be studied carefully by anyone interested in the evolution of society in light of the pervasive impact of the Internet. In a nutshell, the book documents how and why the Internet turned from a means to improve our lives into what appears to be a frightening dystopia driven by the collection and exploitation of personal data, data that most of us willingly hand over with little or no care for the consequences. “In our digital frenzy to share snapshots and updates, to text and videochat with friends and lovers … we are exposing ourselves‒rendering ourselves virtually transparent to anyone with rudimentary technological capabilities” (page 13 of the hardcover edition).

The book meets its goals (25) of tracing the emergence of a new architecture of power relations; to document its effects on our lives; and to explore how to resist and disobey (but this last rather succinctly). As the author correctly says (28), metaphors matter, and we need to re-examine them closely, in particular the so-called free flow of data.

As the author cogently points out, quoting Media Studies scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, we “assumed digitization would level the commercial playing field in wealthy economies and invite new competition into markets that had always had high barriers to entry.” We “imagined a rapid spread of education and critical thinking once we surmounted the millennium-old problems of information scarcity and maldistribution” (169).

“But the digital realm does not so much give us access to truth as it constitutes a new way for power to circulate throughout society” (22). “In our digital age, social media companies engage in surveillance, data brokers sell personal information, tech companies govern our expression of political views, and intelligence agencies free-ride off e-commerce. … corporations and governments [are enabled] to identify and cajole, to stimulate our consumption and shape our desires, to manipulate us politically, to watch, surveil, detect, predict, and, for some, punish. In the process, the traditional limits placed on the state and on governing are being eviscerated, as we turn more and more into marketized malleable subjects who, willingly or unwillingly, allow ourselves to be nudged, recommended, tracked, diagnosed, and predicted by a blurred amalgam of governmental and commercial initiative” (187).

“The collapse of the classic divide between the state and society, between the public and private sphere, is particular debilitating and disarming. The reason is that the boundaries of the state had always been imagined in order to limit them” (208). “What is emerging in the place of separate spheres [of government and private industry] is a single behemoth of a data market: a colossal market for personal data” (198). “Knots of statelike power: that is what we face. A tenticular amalgam of public and private institutions … Economy, society, and private life melt into a giant data market for everyone to trade, mine, analyze, and target” (215). “This is all the more troubling because the combinations we face today are so powerful” (210).

As a consequence, “Digital exposure is restructuring the self … The new digital age … is having profound effects on our analogue selves. … it is radically transforming our subjectivity‒even for those, perhaps even more, who believe they have nothing to fear” (232). “Mortification of the self, in our digital world, happens when subjects voluntarily cede their private attachments and their personal privacy, when they give up their protected personal space, cease monitoring their exposure on the Internet, let go of their personal data, and expose their intimate lives” (233).

As the book points out, quoting Software Freedom Law Center founder Eben Moglen, it is justifiable to ask whether “any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the United States government has led not only its people but the world” (254). “This is a different form of despotism, one that might take hold only in a democracy: one in which people loose the will to resist and surrender with broken spirit” (255).

The book opens with an unnumbered chapter that masterfully reminds us of the digital society we live in: a world in which both private companies and government intelligence services (also known as spies) read our e-mails and monitor our web browsing. Just think of “the telltale advertisements popping up on the ribbon of our search screen, reminding us of immediately past Google or Bing queries. We’ve received the betraying e-mails in our spam folders” (2). As the book says, quoting journalist Yasha Levine, social media has become “a massive surveillance operation that intercepts and analyses terabytes of data to build and update complex psychological profiles on hundreds of millions of people all over the world‒all of it in real time” (7). “At practically no cost, the government has complete access to people’s digital selves” (10).

We provide all this data willingly (13), because we have no choice and/or because we “wish to share our lives with loved ones and friends” (14). We crave digital connections and recognition and “Our digital cravings are matched only by the drive and ambition of those who are watching” (14). “Today, the drive to know everything, everywhere, at every moment is breathtaking” (15).

But “there remain a number of us who continue to resist. And there are many more who are ambivalent about the loss of privacy or anonymity, who are deeply concerned or hesitant. There are some who anxiously warn us about the dangers and encourage us to maintain reserve” (13).

“And yet, even when we hesitate or are ambivalent, it seems there is simply no other way to get things done in the new digital age” (14), be it airline tickets, hotel reservations, buying goods, booking entertainment. “We make ourselves virtually transparent for everyone to see, and in so doing, we allow ourselves to be shaped in unprecedented ways, intentionally or wittingly … we are transformed and shaped into digital subjects” (14). “It’s not so much a question of choice as a feeling of necessity” (19). “For adolescents and young adults especially, it is practically impossible to have a social life, to have friends, to meet up, to go on dates, unless we are negotiating the various forms of social media and mobile technology” (18).

Most have become dulled by blind faith in markets, the neoliberal mantra (better to let private companies run things than the government), fear of terrorism‒dulled into believing that, if we have nothing to hide, then there is nothing to fear (19). Even though private companies, and governments, know far more about us than a totalitarian regime such as that of East Germany “could ever have dreamed” (20).

“We face today, in advanced liberal democracies, a radical new form of power in a completely altered landscape of political and social possibilities” (17). “Those who govern, advertise, and police are dealing with a primary resource‒personal data‒that is being handed out for free, given away in abundance, for nothing” (18).

According to the book “There is no conspiracy here, nothing untoward.” But the author probably did not have access to Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski’s The Real Cyberwar: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom (2015), published around the same time as Harcourt’s book, which shows that actually the current situation was created, or at least facilitated, by deliberate actions of the US government (which were open, not secret), resulting in what the book calls, quoting journalist James Bamford, “a surveillance-industrial empire” (27).

The observations and conclusions outlined above are meticulously justified, with numerous references, in the numbered chapters of the book. Chapter 1 explains how analogies of the current surveillance regime to Orwell’s 1984 are imperfect because, unlike in Orwell’s imagined world, today most people desire to provide their personal data and do so voluntarily (35). “That is primarily how surveillance works today in liberal democracies: through the simplest desires, curated and recommended to us” (47).

Chapter 2 explains how the current regime is not really a surveillance state in the classical sense of the term: it is a surveillance society because it is based on the collaboration of government, the private sector, and people themselves (65, 78-79). Some believe that government surveillance can prevent or reduce terrorist attacks (55-56), never mind that it might violate constitutional rights (56-57), or be ineffective, or that terrorist attacks in liberal democracies have resulted in far fewer fatalities than, say, traffic accidents or opiod overdose.

Chapter 3 explains how the current regime is not actually an instantiation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, because we are not surveilled in order to be punished‒on the contrary, we expose ourselves in order to obtain something we want (90), and we don’t necessarily realize the extent to which we are being surveilled (91). As the book puts it, Google strives “to help people get what they want” by collecting and processing as much personal data as possible (103).

Chapter 4 explains how narcissism drives the willing exposure of personal data (111). “We take pleasure in watching [our friends], ‘following’ them, ‘sharing’ their information‒even while we are, unwittingly, sharing our every keyboard stroke” (114). “We love watching others and stalking their digital traces” (117).

Yet opacity is the rule for corporations‒as the book says, quoting Frank Pasquale (124-125), “Internet companies collect more and more data on their users but fight regulations that would let those same users exercise some control over the resulting digital dossiers.” In this context, it is worth noting the recent proposals, analyzed here, here, and here, to the World Trade Organization that would go in the direction favored by dominant corporations.

The book explains in summary fashion the importance of big data (137-140). For an additional discussion, with extensive references, see sections 1 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation. As the book correctly notes, “In the nineteenth century, it was the government that generated data … But now we have all become our own publicists. The production of data has become democratized” (140).

Chapter 5 explains how big data, and its analysis, is fundamentally different from the statistics that were collected, analyzed, and published in the past by governments. The goal of statistics is to understand and possibly predict the behavior of some group of people who share some characteristics (e.g. they live in a particular geographical area, or are of the same age). The goal of big data is to target and predict individuals (158, 161-163).

Chapter 6 explains how we have come to accept the loss of privacy and control of our personal data (166-167). A change in outlook, largely driven by an exaggerated faith in free enterprise (168 and 176), “has made it easier to commodify privacy, and, gradually, to eviscerate it” (170). “Privacy has become a form of private property” (176).

The book documents well the changes in the US Supreme Court’s views of privacy, which have moved from defending a human right to balancing privacy with national security and commercial interests (172-175). Curiously, the book does not mention the watershed Smith vs. Maryland case, in which the US Supreme Court held that telephone metadata is not protected by the right to privacy, nor the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act, under which many e-mails are not protected either.

The book mentions the incestuous ties between the intelligence community, telecommunications companies, multinational companies, and military leadership that have facilitated the implementation of the current surveillance regime (178); these ties are exposed and explained in greater detail in Powers and Jablonski’s The Real Cyberwar. This chapter ends with an excellent explanation of how digital surveillance records are in no way comparable to the old-fashioned paper files that were collected in the past (181).

Chapter 7 explores the emerging dystopia, engendered by the fact that “The digital economy has torn down the conventional boundaries between governing, commerce, and private life” (187). In a trend that should be frightening, private companies now exercise censorship (191), practice data mining on scales that are hard to imagine (194), control worker performance by means beyond the dreams of any Tayorlist (196), and even aspire to “predict consumer preferences better than consumers themselves can” (198).

The size of the data brokerage market is huge and data on individuals is increasingly used to make decision about them, e.g. whether they can obtain a loan (198-208). “Practically none of these scores [calculated from personal data] are revealed to us, and their accuracy is often haphazard” (205). As noted above, we face an interdependent web of private and public interests that collect, analyze, refine, and exploit our personal data‒without any meaningful supervision or regulation.

Chapter 8 explains how digital interactions are reconfiguring our self-images, our subjectivity. We know, albeit at times only implicitly, that we are being surveilled and this likely affects the behavior of many (218). Being deprived of privacy affects us, much as would being deprived of property (229). We have voluntarily given up much of our privacy, believing either that we have no choice but to accept surveillance, or that the surveillance is in our interests (233). So it is our society as a whole that has created, and nurtures, the surveillance regime that we live in.

As shown in Chapter 9, that regime is a form of digital incarceration. We are surveilled even more closely than are people obliged by court order to wear electronic tracking devices (237). Perhaps a future smart watch will even administer sedatives (or whatever) when it detects, by analyzing our body functions and comparing with profiles downloaded from the cloud, that we would be better off being sedated (237). Or perhaps such a watch will be hijacked by malware controlled by an intelligence service or by criminals, thus turning a seemingly free choice into involuntary constraints (243, 247).

Chapter 10 show in detail how, as already noted, the current surveillance regime is not compatible with democracy. The book cites Tocqueville to remind us that democracy can become despotic, and result is a situation where “people lose the will to resist and surrender with broken spirit” (255). The book summarily presents well-known data regarding the low voter turnouts in the United States, a topic covered in full detail in Robert McChesney’s Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (2014) which explains how the Internet is having a negative effect on democracy. Yet “it remains the case that the digital transparency and punishment issues are largely invisible to democratic theory and practice” (216).

So, what is to be done? Chapter 11 extols the revelations made by Edward Snowden and those published by Julian Assange (WikiLeaks). It mentions various useful self-help tools, such as “I Fight Surveillance” and “Security in a Box” (270-271). While those tools are useful, they are not at present used pervasively and thus don’t really affect the current surveillance regime. We need more emphasis on making the tools available and on convincing more people to use them.

As the book correctly says, an effective measure would be to carry the privatization model to its logical extreme (274): since personal data is valuable, those who use it should pay us for it. As already noted, the industry that is thriving from the exploitation of our personal data is well aware of this potential threat, and has worked hard to attempt to obtain binding international norms, in the World Trade Organization, that would enshrine the “free flow of data”, where “free” in the sense of freedom of information is used as a Trojan Horse for the real objective, which is “free” in the sense of no cost and no compensation for those the true owners of the data, we the people. As the book correctly mentions, civil society organizations have resisted this trend and made proposals that go in the opposite direction (276), including a proposal to enshrine the necessary and proportionate principles in international law.

Chapter 12 concludes the book by pointing out, albeit very succinctly, that mass resistance is necessary, and that it need not be organized in traditional ways: it can be leaderless, diffuse, and pervasive (281). In this context, I refer to the work of the JustNet Coalition and of the fledgling Internet Social Forum (see also here and here).

Again, this book is essential reading for anybody who is concerned about the current state of the digital world, and the direction in which it is moving.

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Richard Hill is President of the Association for Proper internet Governance, and was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). He writes frequently about internet governance issues for The b2o Review Digital Studies magazine.

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February 12, 2018
Dissecting the “Internet Freedom” Agenda

a review of Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski, The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom (University of Illinois Press, 2015)
by Richard Hill
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Disclosure: the author of this review is thanked in the Preface of the book under review.

Both radical civil society organizations and mainstream defenders of the status quo agree that the free and open Internet is threatened: see for example the Delhi Declaration, Bob Hinden’s 2014 Year End Thoughts, and Kathy Brown’s March 2015 statement at a UNESCO conference. The threats include government censorship and mass surveillance, but also the failure of governments to control rampant industry concentration and commercial exploitation of personal data, which increasingly takes the form of providing “free” services in exchange for personal information that is resold at a profit, or used to provide targeted advertising, also at a profit.

In Digital Disconnect, Robert McChesney has explained how the Internet, which was supposed to be a force for the improvement of human rights and living conditions, has been used to erode privacy and to increase the concentration of economic power, to the point where it is becoming a threat to democracy. In Digital Depression, Dan Schiller has documented how US policies regarding the Internet have favored its geo-economic and geo-political goals, in particular the interests of its large private companies that dominate the information and communications technology (ICT) sector worldwide.

Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski’s seminal new book The Real Cyber War takes us further down the road of understanding what went wrong, and what might be done to correct the situation. Powers, an assistant professor at Georgia State University, specializes in international political communication, with particular attention to the geopolitics of information and information technologies. Jablonski is an attorney and presidential fellow, also at Georgia State.

There is a vast literature on internet governance (see for example the bibliography in Radu, Chenou, and Weber, eds., The Evolution of Global Internet Governance), but much of it is ideological and normative: the author espouses a certain point of view, explains why that point of view is good, and proposes actions that would lead to the author’s desired outcome (a good example is Milton Mueller’s well researched but utopian Networks and States). There is nothing wrong with that approach: on the contrary, such advocacy is necessary and welcome.

But a more detached analytical approach is also needed, and Powers and Jablonski provide exactly that. Their objective is to help us understand (citing from p. 19 of the paperback edition) “why states pursue the policies they do”. The book “focuses centrally on understanding the numerous ways in which power and control are exerted in cyberspace” (p. 19).

Starting from the rather obvious premise that states compete to shape international policies that favor their interests, and using the framework of political economy, the authors outline the geopolitical stakes and show how questions of power, and not human rights, are the real drivers of much of the debate about Internet governance. They show how the United States has deliberately used a human rights discourse to promote policies that further its geo-economic and geo-political interests. And how it has used subsidies and government contracts to help its private companies to acquire or maintain dominant positions in much of the ICT sector.

Jacob Silverman has decried the “the misguided belief that once power is arrogated away from doddering governmental institutions, it will somehow find itself in the hands of ordinary people”. Powers and Jablonski dissect the mechanisms by which vibrant government institutions deliberately transferred power to US corporations in order to further US geo-economical and geo-political goals.

In particular, they show how a “freedom to connect” narrative is used by the USA to attempt to transform information and personal data into commercial commodities that should be subject to free trade. Yet all states (including the US) regulate, at least to some extent, the flow of information within and across their borders. If information is the “new oil” of our times, then it is not surprising that states wish to shape the production and flow of information in ways that favor their interests. Thus it is not surprising that states such as China, India, and Russia have started to assert sovereign rights to control some aspect of the production and flow of information within their borders, and that European Union courts have made decisions on the basis of European law that affect global information flows and access.

As the authors put the matter (p. 6): “the [US] doctrine of internet freedom … is the realization of a broader [US] strategy promoting a particular conception of networked communication that depends on American companies …, supports Western norms …, and promotes Western products.” (I would personally say that it actually supports US norms and US products and services.) As the authors point out, one can ask (p. 11): “If states have a right to control the types of people allowed into their territory (immigration), and how its money is exchanged with foreign banks, then why don’t they have a right to control information flows from foreign actors?”

To be sure, any such controls would have to comply with international human rights law. But the current US policies go much further, implying that those human rights laws must be implemented in accordance with the US interpretation, meaning few restrictions on freedom of speech, weak protection of privacy, and ever stricter protection for intellectual property. As Powers and Jablonski point out (p. 31), the US does not hesitate to promote restrictions on information flows when that promotes its goals.

Again, the authors do not make value judgments: they explain in Chapter 1 how the US deliberately attempts to shape (to a large extent successfully) international policies, so that both actions and inactions serve its interests and those of the large corporations that increasingly influence US policies.

The authors then explain how the US military-industrial complex has morphed into an information-industrial complex, with deleterious consequences for both industry and government, consequences such as “weakened oversight, accountability, and industry vitality and competitiveness”(p. 23) that create risks for society and democracy. As the authors say, the shift “from adversarial to cooperative and laissez-faire rule making is a keystone moment in the rise of the information-industrial complex” (p. 61).

As a specific example, they focus on Google, showing how it (largely successfully) aims to control and dominate all aspects of the data market, from production, through extraction, refinement, infrastructure and demand. A chapter is devoted to the economics of internet connectivity, showing how US internet policy is basically about getting the largest number of people online, so that US companies can extract ever greater profits from the resulting data flows. They show how the network effects, economies of scale, and externalities that are fundamental features of the internet favor first-movers, which are mostly US companies.

The remedy to such situations is well known: government intervention: widely accepted regarding air transport, road transport, pharmaceuticals, etc., and yet unthinkable for many regarding the internet. But why? As the authors put the matter (p. 24): “While heavy-handed government controls over the internet should be resisted, so should a system whereby internet connectivity requires the systematic transfer of wealth from the developing world to the developed.” But freedom of information is put forward to justify specific economic practices which would not be easy to justify otherwise, for example “no government taxes companies for data extraction or for data imports/exports, both of which are heavily regulated aspects of markets exchanging other valuable commodities”(p. 97).

The authors show in detail how the so-called internet multi-stakeholder model of governance is dominated by insiders and used “under the veil of consensus’” (p. 136) to further US policies and corporations. A chapter is devoted to explaining how all states control, at least to some extent, information flows within their territories, and presents detailed studies of how four states (China, Egypt, Iran and the USA) have addressed the challenges of maintaining political control while respecting (or not) freedom of speech. The authors then turn to the very current topic of mass surveillance, and its relation to anonymity, showing how, when the US presents the internet and “freedom to connect” as analogous to public speech and town halls, it is deliberately arguing against anonymity and against privacy – and this of course in order to avoid restrictions on its mass surveillance activities.

Thus the authors posit that there are tensions between the US call for “internet freedom” and other states’ calls for “information sovereignty”, and analyze the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications from that point of view.

Not surprisingly, the authors conclude that international cooperation, recognizing the legitimate aspirations of all the world’s peoples, is the only proper way forward. As the authors put the matter (p. 206): “Activists and defenders of the original vision of the Web as a ‘fair and humane’ cyber-civilization need to avoid lofty ‘internet freedom’ declarations and instead champion specific reforms required to protect the values and practices they hold dear.” And it is with that in mind, as a counterweight to US and US-based corporate power, that a group of civil society organizations have launched the Internet Social Forum.

Anybody who is seriously interested in the evolution of internet governance and its impact on society and democracy will enjoy reading this well researched book and its clear exposition of key facts. One can only hope that the Council of Europe will heed Powers and Jablonski’s advice and avoid adopting more resolutions such as the recent recommendation to member states by the EU Committee of Ministers, which merely pander to the US discourse and US power that Powers and Jablonski describe so aptly. And one can fondly hope that this book will help to inspire a change in course that will restore the internet to what it might become (and what many thought it was supposed to be): an engine for democracy and social and economic progress, justice, and equity.
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Richard Hill is President of the Association for Proper internet Governance, and was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). He writes frequently about internet governance issues for The b2 Review Digital Studies magazine.

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April 29, 2015
The Internet vs. Democracy

a review of Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (The New Press, 2014)
by Richard Hill
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Many of us have noticed that much of the news we read is the same, no matter which newspaper or web site we consult: they all seem to be recycling the same agency feeds. To understand why this is happening, there are few better analyses than the one developed by media scholar Robert McChesney in his most recent book, Digital Disconnect. McChesney is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specializing in the history and political economy of communications. He is the author or co-author of more than 20 books, among the best-known of which are The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (with John Bellamy Foster, 2012), The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (2008), Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media (2007), and Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (1999), and is co-founder of Free Press.

Many see the internet as a powerful force for improvement of human rights, living conditions, the economy, rights of minorities, etc. And indeed, like many communications technologies, the internet has the potential to facilitate social improvements. But in reality the internet has recently been used to erode privacy and to increase the concentration of economic power, leading to increasing income inequalities.

One might have expected that democracies would have harnessed the internet to serve the interests of their citizens, as they largely did with other technologies such as roads, telegraphy, telephony, air transport, pharmaceuticals (even if they used these to serve only the interests of their own citizens and not the general interests of mankind).

But this does not appear to be the case with respect to the internet: it is used largely to serve the interests of a few very wealthy individuals, or certain geo-economic and geo-political interests. As McChesney puts the matter: “It is supremely ironic that the internet, the much-ballyhooed champion of increased consumer power and cutthroat competition, has become one of the greatest generators of monopoly in economic history” (131 in the print edition). This trend to use technology to favor special interests, not the general interest, is not unique to the internet. As Josep Ramoneda puts the matter: “We expected that governments would submit markets to democracy and it turns out that what they do is adapt democracy to markets, that is, empty it little by little.”

McChesney’s book explains why this is the case: despite its great promise and potential to increase democracy, various factors have turned the internet into a force that is actually destructive to democracy, and that favors special interests.

McChesney reminds us what democracy is, citing Aristotle (53): “Democracy [is] when the indigent, and not the men of property are the rulers. If liberty and equality … are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.”

He also cites US President Lincoln’s 1861 warning against despotism (55): “the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government.” According to McChesney, it was imperative for Lincoln that the wealthy not be permitted to have undue influence over the government.

Yet what we see today in the internet is concentrated wealth in the form of large private companies that exert increasing influence over public policy matters, going to so far as to call openly for governance systems in which they have equal decision-making rights with the elected representatives of the people. Current internet governance mechanisms are celebrated as paragons of success, whereas in fact they have not been successful in achieving the social promise of the internet. And it has even been said that such systems need not be democratic.

What sense does it make for the technology that was supposed to facilitate democracy to be governed in ways that are not democratic? It makes business sense, of course, in the sense of maximizing profits for shareholders.

McChesney explains how profit-maximization in the excessively laissez-faire regime that is commonly called neoliberalism has resulted in increasing concentration of power and wealth, social inequality and, worse, erosion of the press, leading to erosion of democracy. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the US, which is the focus of McChesney’s book. Not only has the internet eroded democracy in the US, it is used by the US to further its geo-political goals; and, adding insult to injury, it is promoted as a means of furthering democracy. Of course it could and should do so, but unfortunately it does not, as McChesney explains.

The book starts by noting the importance of the digital revolution and by summarizing the views of those who see it as an engine of good (the celebrants) versus those who point out its limitations and some of its negative effects (the skeptics). McChesney correctly notes that a proper analysis of the digital revolution must be grounded in political economy. Since the digital revolution is occurring in a capitalist system, it is necessarily conditioned by that system, and it necessarily influences that system.

A chapter is devoted to explaining how and why capitalism does not equal democracy: on the contrary, capitalism can well erode democracy, the contemporary United States being a good example. To dig deeper into the issues, McChesney approaches the internet from the perspective of the political economy of communication. He shows how the internet has profoundly disrupted traditional media, and how, contrary to the rhetoric, it has reduced competition and choice – because the economies of scale and network effects of the new technologies inevitably favor concentration, to the point of creating natural monopolies (who is number two after Facebook? Or Twitter?).

The book then documents how the initially non-commercial, publicly-subsidized internet was transformed into an eminently commercial, privately-owned capitalist institution, in the worst sense of “capitalist”: domination by large corporations, monopolistic markets, endless advertising, intense lobbying, and cronyism bordering on corruption.

Having explained what happened in general, McChesney focuses on what happened to journalism and the media in particular. As we all know, it has been a disaster: nobody has yet found a viable business model for respectable online journalism. As McChesney correctly notes, vibrant journalism is a pre-condition for democracy: how can people make informed choices if they do not have access to valid information? The internet was supposed to broaden our sources of information. Sadly, it has not, for the reasons explained in detail in the book. Yet there is hope: McChesney provides concrete suggestions for how to deal with the issue, drawing on actual experiences in well functioning democracies in Europe.

The book goes on to call for specific actions that would create a revolution in the digital revolution, bringing it back to its origins: by the people, for the people. McChesney’s proposed actions are consistent with those of certain civil society organizations, and will no doubt be taken up in the forthcoming Internet Social Forum, an initiative whose intent is precisely to revolutionize the digital revolution along the lines outlined by McChesney.

Anybody who is aware of the many issues threatening the free and open internet, and democracy itself, will find much to reflect upon in Digital Disconnect, not just because of its well-researched and incisive analysis, but also because it provides concrete suggestions for how to address the issues.

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Richard Hill, an independent consultant based in Geneva, Switzerland, was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). He frequently writes about internet governance issues for The b2 Review Digital Studies magazine.

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April 8, 2015
"Internet Freedom": Digital Empire?

a review of Dan Schiller, Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis (University of Illinois Press, 2014)
by Richard Hill
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Disclosure: the author of this review is mentioned in the Acknowledgements section of the reviewed book.

Computers and telecommunications have revolutionized and disrupted all aspects of human activity, and even behavior. The impacts are broad and profound, with important consequences for governments, businesses, non-profit activities, and individuals. Networks of interconnected computer systems are driving many disruptive changes in business practices, information flows, and financial flows. Foremost amongst those networks is the Internet, much of which is global, or at least trans-national.

According to some, the current governance arrangement for the Internet is nearly ideal. In particular, its global multi-stakeholder model of governance has resulted in a free and open Internet, which has enabled innovation and driven economic growth and well-being around the world. Others are of the view that things have not worked out that well. In particular, the Internet has resulted in mass surveillance by governments and by private companies, in monopolization, commodification and monetization of information and knowledge, in inequitable flows of finances between poor and rich countries, and in erosion of cultural diversity; further, those with central positions of influence have used it to consolidate power and to establish a new global regime of control and exploitation, under the guise of favoring liberalization, while in reality reinforcing the dominance and profitability of major corporations at the expense of the public interest, and the overarching position of certain national interests at the expense of global interests and well being. [1]

Dan Schiller’s book helps us to understand how rational and well-informed people can hold such diametrically opposing views. Schiller dissects the history of the growth of recent telecommunications networks and shows how they have significantly (indeed, dramatically) affected economic and political power relations around the world. And how, at the same time, US policies have consistently favored capital over labor, and have resulted in transfers of vast sums from developing countries to developed countries (in particular through interest on loans).

Participants wearing Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning masks at 2013 Berlin protests against NSA PRISM program (image source: Wikipedia)

Schiller documents in some detail how US policies that ostensibly promote the free flow of information around the world, the right of all people to connect to the Internet, and free speech, are in reality policies that have, by design, furthered the geo-economic and geo-political goals of the US, including its military goals, its imperialist tendencies, and the interests of large private companies based (if not always headquartered, at least for tax purposes) in the US. For example, strict copyright protection is held to be consistent with the free flow of information, as is mass surveillance. Cookies and exploitation of users’ personal data by Internet companies are held to be consistent with privacy rights (indeed, as Schiller shows, the US essentially denies the existence of the right to personal privacy for anything related to the Internet). There should be no requirements that data be stored locally, lest it escape the jurisdiction of the US surveillance apparatus. And very high profits and dominant positions in key Internet markets do not spark anti-trust or competition law investigations, as they might in any other industry.

As Schiller notes, great powers have historically used communication systems to further their economic and strategic interests, so why should the US not so use the Internet? Thus stated, the matter seems obvious. But the matter is rarely thus stated. On the contrary, the Internet is often touted as a generous gift to the world’s people, able to lift them out of poverty and oppression, and to bring them the benefits of democracy and (or) free markets. Schiller’s carefully researched analysis is thus an important contribution.

Schiller provides context by tracing the origins of the current financial and economic crises, pointing out that it is paradoxical that growing investments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), and the supposed resultant productivity gains, did not prevent a major global economic crisis. Schiller explains how transnational corporations demanded liberalization of the terms on which they could use their private networks, and received then, resulting in profound changes in commodity chains, that is, the flow of production of goods and services. In particular, there has been an increase in transnational production, and this has reinforced the importance of transnational corporations. Further, ICTs have changed the nature of labor’s contribution to production, enabling many tasks to be shifted to unskilled workers (or even to consumers themselves: automatic teller machines (ATMs), for example, turn each of us into a bank clerk). However, the growth of the Internet did not transcend the regular economy: on the contrary, it was wrapped into the economy’s crisis tendencies and even exacerbated them.

Schiller gives detailed accounts of these transformations in the automotive and financial industries, and in the military. The study of the effect of ICTs on the military is of particular interest considering that the Internet was originally developed as a military project, and that it is currently used by US intelligence agencies as a prime medium for the collection of information.

Schiller then turns to telecommunications, explaining the very significant changes that took place in the USA starting in the late 1970s. Those changes resulted in a major restructuring of the dominant telecommunications playing field in the US and ultimately led to the growth of the Internet, a development which had world-wide effects. Schiller carefully describes the various US government actions that initiated and nurtured those changes, and that were instrumental in exporting similar changes to the rest of the world.

Next, he analyzes how those changes affected and enabled the production of the networks themselves, the hardware used to build the networks and to use them (e.g. smartphones), and the software and applications that we all use today.

Moving further up the value chain, Schiller explains how data-mining, coupled with advertising, fuels the growth of the dominant Internet companies, and how this data-mining is made possible only by denying data privacy, and how states use the very same techniques to implement mass surveillance.

Having described the situation, Schiller proceeds to analyze it from economic and political perspectives. Given that the US was an early adopter of the Internet, it is not surprising that, because of economies of scale and network effects, US companies dominate the field (except in China, as Schiller explains in detail). Schiller describes how, given the influence of US companies on US politics, US policies, both domestic and foreign, are geared to allowing, or in fact favoring, ever-increasing concentration in key Internet markets, which is to the advantage of the US and its private companies–and despite the easy cant about decentralization and democratization.

The book describes how the US views the Internet as an extraterritorial domain, subject to no authority except that of the US government and that of the dominant US companies. Each dictates its own law in specific spheres (for example, the US government has supervised, up to now, the management of Internet domain names and addresses; while US companies dictate unilateral terms and conditions to their users, terms and conditions that imply that users give up essentially all rights to their private data).

Schiller describes how this state of affairs has become a foreign policy objective, with the US being willing to incur significant criticism and to pay a significant political price in order to maintain the status quo. That status quo is referred to as “the multi-stakeholder model”, in which private companies are essentially given veto power over government decisions (or at least over the decisions of any government other than the US government), a system that can be referred to as “corporatism”. Not only does the US staunchly defend that model for the Internet, it even tries to export it to other fields of human activity. And this despite, or perhaps because, that system allows companies to make profits when possible (in particular by exploiting state-built infrastructure or guarantees), and to transfer losses to states when necessary (as for example happened with the banking crisis).

Schiller carefully documents how code words such as “freedom of access” and “freedom of speech” are used to justify and promote policies that in fact merely serve the interests of major US companies and, at the same time, the interests of the US surveillance apparatus, which morphed from a cottage industry into a major component of the military-industrial complex thanks to the Internet. He shows how the supposed open participation in key bodies (such as the Internet Engineering Task Force) is actually a screen to mask the fact that decisions are heavily influenced by insiders affiliated with US companies and/or the US government, and by agencies bound to the US as a state.

As Schiller explains, this increasing dominance of US business and US political imperialism have not gone unchallenged, even if the challenges to date have mostly been rhetorical (again, except for China). Conflicts over Internet governance are related to rivalries between competing geo-political and geo-economic blocks, rivalries which will likely increase if economic growth continues to be weak. The rivalries are both between nations and within nations, and some are only emerging right now (for example, how to tax the digital economy, or the apparent emerging divergence of views between key US companies and the US government regarding mass surveillance).

Indeed, the book explains how the challenges to US dominance have become more serious in the wake of the Snowden revelations, which have resulted in a significant loss of market share for some of the key US players, in particular with respect to cloud computing services. Those losses may have begun to drive the tip of a wedge between the so-far congruent goals of US companies and the US government

In a nutshell, one can sum up what Schiller describes by paraphrasing Marx: “Capitalists of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the chains of government regulation.” But, as Schiller hints in his closing chapter, the story is still unfolding, and just as things did not work out as Marx thought they would, so things may not work out as the forces that currently dominate the Internet wish they will. So the slogan for the future might well be “Internet users of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the chains of exploitation of your personal data.”

This book, and its extensive references, will be a valuable reference work for all future research in this area. And surely there will be much future research, and many more historical analyses of what may well be some of the key turning points in the history of mankind: the transition from the industrial era to the information era and the disruptions induced by that transition.

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Richard Hill, an independent consultant based in Geneva, Switzerland, was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). An earlier version of this review first appeared on Newsclick.

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1. From item 11 of document WSIS+10/4/6 of the preparatory process for the WSIS+10 High Level Event, which provided “a special platform for high-ranking officials of WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) stakeholders, government, private sector, civil society and international organizations to express their views on the achievements, challenges and recommendations on the implementation” of various earlier internet governance initiatives backed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations specialized agency for information and communications technologies, and other participants in the global internet governance sphere.

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December 3, 2014