boundary 2

Tag: internet governance

  • Richard Hill — In Everything, Freedom for Whom? (Review of Laura DeNardis, The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch)

    Richard Hill — In Everything, Freedom for Whom? (Review of Laura DeNardis, The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch)

    a review of Laura DeNardis, The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch (Yale University Press, 2020)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    This highly readable book by a respected mainstream scholar (DeNardis is a well-known Internet governance scholar; she a professor in the School of Communication at American University and the author of The Global War for Internet Governance and other books) documents and confirms what a portion of civil society has been saying for some time: use of Internet has become pervasive and it is so deeply embedded in so many business and private processes that it can no longer be treated as neutral technology whose governance is delegated to private companies, especially not when the companies in question have dominant market power.

    As the author puts the matter (3): “The Internet is no longer merely a communications system connecting people and information. It is a control system connecting vehicles, wearable devices, home appliances, drones, medical equipment, currency, and every conceivable industry sector. Cyberspace now completely and often imperceptibly permeates offline spaces, blurring boundaries between material and virtual worlds. This transformation of the Internet from a communication network between people to a control network embedded directly into the physical world may be even more consequential than the shift from an industrial society to a digital information society.”

    The stakes of the Internet of Things (IoT) (which a respected technologist has referred to as the Internet of Trash) are high; as the author states (4): “The stakes of cybersecurity rise as Internet outages are no longer about losing access to communication and content but about losing day-to-day functioning in the real world, from the ability to drive a car to accessing medical care. Internet-connected objects bring privacy concerns into intimate spheres of human existence far beyond the already invasive data-gathering practices of Facebook, Google, and other content intermediaries”

    The author explains clearly, in non-technical language, key technological aspects (such as security) that are matters of concern. Because, citing Janet Abbate (132): “technical decisions can have far-reaching economic and social consequences, altering the balance of power between competing businesses or nations and constraining the freedom of users.” Standardization can have very significant effects. Yet (147): “In practice, the individuals involved in standards setting have been affiliated with corporations with a stake in the outcome of deliberations. Participation, while open, requires technical expertise and, often, funding to meaningfully engage.”

    The author also explains why it is inevitable that states will take an increasing interest in the governance of the Internet (7): “Technology policy must, in the contemporary context, anticipate and address future questions of accountability, risk, and who is responsible for outages, security updates, and reliability.”

    Although the book does not explicitly mention it (but there is an implicit reference at (216)), this is not surprising in light of the historical interest of states and empires in communications, the way in which policies of the United States 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, and the way in which United States has deliberately used a human rights discourse to promote policies that further those geo-economic and geo-political interests.

    As the author puts the matter (182, echoing others: “Powerful forces have an interest in keeping conceptions of freedom rooted in the free flow of content. It preserves revenue structures of private ordering and fuels the surveillance state.” However, “The free flow of information rests on a system of private surveillance capitalism in which possibilities for individual privacy are becoming increasingly tenuous. Governments then co-opt this infrastructure and associated data to enact surveillance and exert power over citizens. Tensions between openness and enclosure are high, with private companies increasingly using proprietary technologies, rather than those based on open standards, for anticompetitive means. Trade-secrecy-protected, and therefore invisible, algorithms make decisions that have direct effects on human freedom. Governments increasingly tamper with global infrastructure – such as local DNS redirection – for censorship.”  In this context, see also this excellent discussion of the dangerous consequences of the current dominance by a handful of companies.

    One wonders whether the situation might have been better if there had been greater government involvement all along. For example, as the author correctly notes (157): “A significant problem of Internet governance is the infinite-regress question of how to certify the authority that in turn certifies an online site.” In the original X.509 concept, there was no infinite-regress: the ultimate certification authority would have been an entity controlled by, or at least licensed by, a national government.

    The book focuses on IoT and the public interest, taking to task Internet governance systems and norms. Those who are not yet familiar with the issues, and their root causes, will be able to understand them and how to deal with them. As the book well explains, policymakers are not yet adequately addressing IoT issues; instead, there is a focus on “content” and social media governance issues rather than the emerging, possibly existential, consequences of the forthcoming IoT disruption. While many experts in Internet matters will find much familiar material, even they will benefit from the author’s novel approach.

    The author has addressed many issues in her numerous articles and books, mostly relating to infrastructure and the layers below content, as does this valuable book. However, in my view, the most important emerging issue of Internet governance is the economic value of data and its distribution (see for example the Annex of this submission and here, here and here.) Hopefully the author will tackle those subjects in the future.

    The author approvingly notes that Morozov has criticized (181) “two approaches: cyber-utopian views that the Internet can vanquish authoritarianism, and Internet-centrism that pushes technological solutions without regard to context.” She correctly notes (183) that “The goal of restoring, or preserving, a free and open Internet (backward-looking idealization) should be replaced with the objective of progressively moving closer to freedom (forward-looking).” While the book does explain (Chapter 6) that “free and open Internet” has been used as an agenda to further certain political and economic interests, I would have welcomed a more robust criticism of how that past idealization got us into the dangerous predicament that the book so well describes. The author asks (115): “A critical question is what provides the legitimacy for this privatization of governance”. I would reply “nothing, look at the mess, which is so well described in the book.”

    For example, the author posits (92): “Many chapters of Internet innovation have proceeded well without heavy regulatory constraints.” This is certainly true if “well” is intended to mean “have grown fast”; however, as the book well documents, it is not true if “well” is intended to mean “safely and deliberately”. As the author states (94): “From the Challenger space shuttle explosion to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the history of technological success is the history of technological failure.” Yes, and those failures, in particular for the cited examples, are due to engineering or operational mistakes. I posit that the same holds for the Internet issues that the book so clearly highlights.

    The author recognizes that (181) “The majority of human Internet users are not in the United States or even in so-called Western countries”, yet the book struck me as being US-centric, to the point of sometimes appearing biased. For example, by never adding “alleged” to references of Russian interference with US elections or cyber-espionage; by adding “alleged” to references of certain US actions; by not mentioning supposed or acknowledged instances of US cyber-activities other than the Snowden revelations; by stating (211) “Energy-grid sensors in the United States should not be easily accessible in Russia” when the converse is also the case. And by positing (88): “One historical feature, and now limitation, of privacy advocacy is that it approaches this area as an individual problem rather than a global economic and political problem.” Non-US advocates have consistently approached this area from the global perspective, see for example here, here and here.

    ***

    Chapter 1 reminds us that, at present, more objects are interconnected than are people, and explains how this results in all companies becoming, in sense, Internet companies, with the consequence that the (17): “embedding of network sensors and actuators into the physical world has transformed the design and governance of cyber infrastructure into one of the most consequential geopolitical issues of the twenty-first century.” As the author correctly notes (18): “Technical points of control are not neutral – they are sites of struggle over values and power arenas for mediating competing interests.” And (19): “the design of technical standards is political.” And (52): “Architectural constraints create political constraints.”

    Chapter 2 explains how the so-called Internet of Things is more accurately described as a set of cyber-physical systems or “network of everything” that is resulting in (28): “the fundamental integration of material-world systems and digital systems.” And it explains how that integration shapes new policy concerns, in particular with respect to privacy and security (38): “Cybersecurity no longer protects content and data only. It also protects food security and consumer safety.” (Market failures resulting in the current inadequate level of cybersecurity are well explained in the ISOC’s Global Internet Report 2016.)

    Chapter 3 explains how cyber-physical systems will pose an increasing threat to privacy. For example (60): “Privacy complications emerging in embedded toys underscore how all companies are now tech companies that gather and process digital data, not just content intermediaries such as Google but toy companies such as Mattel.” The author joins others in noting (61) that: “In the digital realm generally, it is an understatement to say that privacy is not going well.” As the author correctly notes (61): “Transparency and notice to consumers about data gathering and sharing practices should represent absolute minimal standards of practice. But even this minimal standard is difficult to attain.” I would have added that it is difficult to attain only because of the misguided neo-liberal policies that are still being pursued by the US and its allies, and that perpetuate the current business model of (61): “giving away free services in exchange for data-collection-driven targeted advertising” (for an in-depth discussion of this business model, see here). The author joins others in noting that (62): “This private surveillance is also what has enabled massive government surveillance of citizens”. And that (64):” This revenue model based on online advertising is only sustainable via the constant collection and accrual of personal information.” She notes that (84): “The collection of data via a constant feedback loop of sensors and actuators is part of the service itself.” And that (85): “Notice and choice are already problematic concepts, even when it is feasible to provide notice and gain consent, but they often do not apply at all to the Internet of things.”

    While it is true that traditional notice and consent may be difficult to implement for IoT, I would argue that we need to develop new methods to allow users to control their data meaningfully, and I believe that the author would agree that we don’t want IoT to become another tool for surveillance capitalism. According to the author (84): “Public policy has to realistically acknowledge that much social and economic good emanates from this constant data collection.” In my view, this has to be qualified: the examples given in the book don’t require the kind of pervasive data trading that exists at present. Yes, we need data collection, but not data exploitation as currently practiced. And indeed the author herself makes that point: it is indispensable to move towards the collection of only the data that are (88) “necessary for innovation and operational efficiency”. As she correctly notes (91), data minimization is a core tenet of the European Union’s GDPR.

    The chapter includes a good introduction of the current Internet economic model. While most of us acquiesce at least to some degree to that business model I would dispute the author’s assertion that (62): “it a cultural shift in what counts as the private sphere”, for the reasons explained in detail by Harcourt. Nor would I agree that (64): “It has also changed the norms of what counts as privacy.” Indeed, the EU’s GDPR and related developments elsewhere indicate that the norms imposed by the current business model are not well accepted outside the USA. The author herself refers to developments in the USA (82), the “Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs)”; I would have preferred a reference to the COE Convention 108.

    The author asks, I presume rhetorically, whether (65): “voluntary corporate measures suffice for protecting privacy”. The author correctly wonders whether, given the nature of IoT devices and their limited human interfaces (65): “traditional approaches such as notice, disclosure, and consumer choice even apply in cyber-physical systems”. That is, privacy problems are even more challenging to address. Yet, offline law applies equally online only, so I believe that we need to find ways to map the traditional approaches to IoT. As the author correctly says (84): “The question of what can and should be done faces inherent challenges” and conflicting values may need to be balanced; however, I don’t think that I can agree that (84): “In the realm of content control, one person’s privacy is another person’s censorship.”

    The author correctly states (88): “Especially in the cyber-physical arena, privacy has broad public purposes, in the same way as freedom of expression is not only about individual rights but also about public power and democratic stability.” See in this respect GDPR Recital 4.

    Chapter 4 explains well how insufficient cybersecurity is creating significant risks for systems that were traditionally not much affected by cyberthreats, that is, how what was previously referred to as the “physical world” is now inextricably tied to the cyberworld. As the book says, citing Bruce Schneier (106): “your security on the Internet depends on the security of millions of Internet-enabled devices, designed and sold by companies you’ve never heard of to consumers who don’t care about your security.” As the author says (109): “IoT devices are vulnerable, and this is a market failure, a political failure, and a technical failure.” (The market failures are well explained here).

    The chapter reminds us that cyberattacks have taken place and might turn into cyberwar; it also reminds us that some cyberattacks have been carried out using malware that had been stockpiled by the US government and that had leaked. The author outlines the debate involving (99): “the question of when governments should notify manufacturers and the public of vulnerabilities they detect, versus stockpiling knowledge of these vulnerabilities and exploits based on these bugs for cyber offense.” In my view, there is little to be debated: as the President of Microsoft said (cited at (123)), governments should agree not to stockpile vulnerabilities and immediately to notify them; further reasons are found in (125); for concrete proposals, see here.

    The author reminds us that (118): “Liability is an area in need of regulatory clarity.” This is reinforced at (225). As the author notes (120): “Those who purchase and install systems have a responsibility to be aware of the product’s privacy and security policies.” This is true, but it can be difficult or impossible in practice for consumers to have sufficient awareness. We expect people to check the pressure of the tires on their cars; we don’t expect them to check the engineering specifications of the brakes: manufacturers are liable for the engineering.

    The author also notes that (118): “the tradition, generally, has been immunity from liability for Internet intermediaries.” This is also discussed at (170). And, citing Jack Balkin (219): “The largest owners of private infrastructure are so powerful that we might even regard them as special-purpose sovereigns. They engage in perpetual struggles for power for control of digital networks with nation states, who, in turn, want to control and co-opt these powerful players.” As the author notes, there are some calls to move away from that tradition, see for example here, in particular because (221): “ Much of the power of private intermediaries emanates from massive data collection and monetization practices that underpin business models based on interactive advertising.” I disagree with the author when she posits that (223): “shifting to content-intermediary liability would create a disincentive to innovation and risk.” On the contrary, it might unlock the current non-competitive situation.

    The author asks, I trust rhetorically (121): “To what extent should back doors be built into cyber-physical system and device encryption for law enforcement access in light of the enormous consequences of security problems”. The answer is well known to anyone who understands the technical and policy issues: never (see also here and here). As the book puts the matter (126): “Without various types of encryption, there would be no digital commerce, no online financial systems, and no prospect whatsoever for private communications.”

    Chapter 5 explains why interoperability is at the heart of networks and how it has been evolving as the Internet moves away from being just a communications infrastructure, towards the infrastructure needed to conduct most all human activities. As the author correctly notes (145): “companies sometimes have an interest in proprietary specifications for anticompetitive effects and to lock in customer bases.” And (158): “social media platforms are, in some ways, closer to the proprietary online systems of the 1990s in which users of one online service could not communicate with users on other systems.” (A proposed solution to that issue can be found here). But it is worse that that (145): “intellectual property rights within connected objects enable manufacturers to control the flow of data and the autonomy and rights of individuals even after an object is purchased outright.” It would have been nice if the author had referenced the extensive criticism of the TRIPS agreements, which agreements are mentioned in the book (146).

    Chapter 6 reviews the “free and open Internet” mantra and reminds us that Internet freedom aspirations articulated by the US (164) “on the surface, comport with U.S. First Amendment traditions, the objective of maintaining the dominance of U.S. multinational tech companies, and a host of foreign-policy interventions contingent on spreading democratic values and attenuating the power of authoritarian regimes. Discourses around Internet freedom have served a variety of interests.” Indeed, as shown by Powers and Jabolonski, they have been deliberately used to promote US interests.

    Regarding Net Neutrality, as the author explains (177): “The complexity of the issue is far greater than it is often simplistically portrayed in the media and by policymakers.”

    The author correctly notes that (177) multistakeholder governance is a fetishized ideal. And that (167): “a … globally influential Internet freedom formulation views multistakeholder governance models as a mechanism for democratic ideals in cyberspace.” That view has been disputed, including by the author herself. I regret that, in addition to works she cites, she did not also cite her 2013 paper on the topic and other literature on multistakeholder governance in general (see the Annex of this submission to an ITU group), in particular that it has been criticized as being generally not fit for purpose.

    The chapter gives a good example of a novel cyber-physical speech issue (184): “Is a 3D-Printed Gun a Speech Right?”

    Chapter 7 summarizes the situation and makes recommendations. These have largely been covered above. But it worth repeating some key points (199): “Based on the insufficient state of privacy, security, and interoperability in the IoT, as well as the implications for human safety and societal stability, the prevailing philosophy of a private-sector-led governance structure has to be on the table for debate.” In particular because (199): “local objects are a global Internet governance concern”.

    The chapter also includes a good critique of those who believe that there are some sort of “invariant” architectural principles for the Internet that should guide policies. As the author correctly notes (210): “Setting aside global norm heterogeneity and just focusing on Western democracies, architectural principles are not fixed. Neither should they be fixed. … New architectural principles are needed to coincide with the demands of the contemporary moment.”

    Chapter 8 reminds us that the world has always changed, in particular due to the development of new technologies, and that this is what is happening now (215): “The diffusion of digital technologies into the material world represents a major societal transformation.” And (213): “Another sea change is that Internet governance has become a critical global political concern.” It includes a good discussion of the intermediary liability issues, as summarized above. And reinforces points made above, for example (227): “Voluntary industry self-regulation is inadequate in itself because there is not always an endogenous incentive structure to naturally induce strong security measures.”

    ***

    The author has written extensively on many topics not covered in depth in this book. People who are not familiar with her work might take certain statements in the book out of context and interpret them in ways with which I would not agree. For the sake of clarity, I comment below on some of those statements. This is not meant to be criticism of the book, or the author, but rather my interpretation of certain topics.

    According to the author (40): “Theft of intellectual property – such as trade secrets and industry patents – is a significant economic policy concern.” (The same point is made at (215)). I would argue, on the contrary, that the current intellectual property regime is far too strict and has become dysfunctional, as shown by the under-production of COVID vaccines. While the author uses the term “piracy” to refer to digitally-enabled copyright infringement, it is important to recall that piracy is a grave violent crime, whereas copyright infringement is an entirely different, non-violent crime.

    The author correctly notes (53) that: “The goal of preserving a ‘universal’ Internet with shared, open standards has always been present in Internet policy and design communities.” However, I would argue that that goal was related to the communications infrastructure (layers 1-5 of the OSI model), and not to the topics dealt with in the book. Indeed, as the book well explains (135), there is a clear trend towards proprietary, non-shared solutions for the cyber-physical infrastructure and the applications that it supports.

    The author states (54): “The need for massive pools of globally unique identifiers for embedded systems should provide an incentive for IPv6”. This is a correct, but a non-specialist may fail to understand the distinction between addresses (such as IP address) that identify a place to which information should be sent; and names, that uniquely identify an object or entity regardless of location. In that context, an IP address can be viewed as a temporary identifier of an object. The same caveat applies later (193): “A common name and number space is another defining historical characteristic of the Internet. Every device connected to the Internet, traditionally, has had a globally unique IP address.”

    The author states (66): “government surveillance primarily occurs via government requests to the private sector to disclose data”. My understanding of the Snowden revelations is different: the US government has its own extensive and pervasive data collection capabilities, quite independently of the private sector’s capabilities.

    According to the author, anonymous speech and behavior on the Internet were facilitated by (77): “Making unique Internet identifiers logical (software defined) rather than physical (linked to specific hardware)”. Again, a non-specialist may be induced in error. As the author well knows (having written authoritatively on the subject), it was only the shortage of IPv4 addresses that resulted in DHCP and widespread NATting; the original idea was that IP addresses would be statically device-specific; but they are addresses, not names, so they cannot be hard-coded, otherwise you couldn’t move the device to another location/network.

    The author posits regarding privacy (91): “Like most areas of Internet governance, it is a multistakeholder problem requiring multistakeholder solutions.” As already noted, the author has analyzed multistakeholder processes, their strengths and shortcoming, and the book explains clearly why the private sector has little interest in promoting privacy (as the author says (92): “In many ways, market incentives discourage privacy practices”), and given the visible failure of the Internet’s multistakeholder model to address fully the priorities set forth in the 2005 WGIG report: administration of the DNS root zone files and systems; Internet interconnection costs; security; and spam.

    A mention of ENISA (which is cited in elsewhere in the book) would have been welcome in the catalog of policy proposals for securing systems (110).

    The author notes (142): “ITU historically provides telecommunication specifications in areas such as Internet telephony.” Non specialists may not be aware of the fact that the key term here is “such as”: historically, the ITU did far more, and continues to do more, albeit not much in the specific area of Internet telephony.

    According to the author (148): “Similar to W3C specifications, IETF standards are freely published and historically unconstrained by intellectual property rights.” This is not quite correct. IETF has a RAND policy, whereas W3C does not.

    The author states that (153): “The original design of the Internet was itself a radical rethinking of existing architecture.” That is an overstatement: the Internet was an evolution of previous architectures.

    According to the author (156): “Blockchain already underlies a variety of mainstream financial and industrial service implementations.” She does not provide a reference for this statement, which I  (and others) find dubious, in particular with respect to the qualifier “mainstream”.

    The author states that IETF engineers (166): “created traditions of bottom-up technical design.” I believe that it would be more accurate to say that the IETF built on and reinforced such traditions, because, since the 19th century, most international standards were designed by bottom-up collaboration of engineers.

    The author posits that (166): “the goal of many standards is to extract royalties via underlying patents”. This may be true for de facto standards, but it is not true for international standards, since IEC, IETF, ISO, and ITU all have RAND policies.

    With respect to the WGIG (178), the non-specialist may not be aware that it was convened by consensus of the UN Member States, and that it addressed many issues other than the management and administration of Internet domain names and addresses, for example security and spam. Most of the issues are still open.

    Regarding the 2012 WCIT (182), what happened was considerably more complex than the short (US-centric) mention in the book.

    According to the author (201): “Data localization requirements, local DNS redirection, and associated calls for Internet sovereignty as an ideological competitor to the multistakeholder model of Internet governance do not match the way cross-border technology works in practice.” This appears to me to contradict the points well made elsewhere in the book to the effect that technology should not blindly drive policies. As already noted, the book (because of its focus) does not discuss the complex economic issues related to data. I don’t think that data localization, which merits a serious economic discussion, should be dismissed summarily as being incompatible with current technology, when in my view it is not. In this context, it is important to stress the counter-productive effects of e-commerce proposals being negotiated, in secret, in trade negotiations (see also here and here). The author does not mention them, no doubt because they are outside the main scope of the book, but perhaps also because they are sufficiently secret that she is not aware of them.

    The author refers to cryptocurrencies (206). It would have been nice if she had also referred to criticism of cryptocurrencies, see for example here.

    ***

    Again, these quibbles are not meant to detract in any way from the value of the book, which explains clearly, insightfully, and forcefully why things are changing and why we cannot continue to pretend that government interventions are not needed. In summary, I would highly recommend this book, in particular to policy-makers.

    _____

    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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  • Richard Hill — Multistakeholder Internet Governance Still Doesn’t Live Up to Its PR (Review of Palladino and Santaniello, Legitimacy, Power, and Inequalities in the Multistakeholder Internet Governance)

    Richard Hill — Multistakeholder Internet Governance Still Doesn’t Live Up to Its PR (Review of Palladino and Santaniello, Legitimacy, Power, and Inequalities in the Multistakeholder Internet Governance)

    a review of Nicola Palladino and Mauro Santaniello, Legitimacy, Power, and Inequalities in the Multistakeholder Internet Governance: Analyzing IANA Transition (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    While multistakeholder processes have long existed (see the Annex of this submission to an ITU group), they have recently been promoted as a better alternative to traditional governance mechanisms, in particular at the international level; and Internet governance has been put forward as an example of how multistakeholder processes work well, and better than traditional governmental processes. Thus it is very appropriate that a detailed analysis be made of a recent, highly visible, allegedly multistakeholder process: the process by which the US government relinquished its formal control over the administration of Internet names and address. That process was labelled the “IANA transition.”

    The authors are researchers at, respectively, the School of law and Governance, Dublin City University; and the Internet & Communication Policy Center, Department of Political and Social Studies, University of Salerno, Italy. They have taken part in several national and international research projects on Internet Governance, Internet Policy and Digital Constitutionalism processes. They have methodically examined various aspects of the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) transition, and collected and analysed an impressive body of data regarding who actually participated in, and influenced, the transition process. Their research confirms what others have stated, namely that the process was dominated by insiders with vested interests, that the outcome did not resolve long-standing political issues, and that the process cannot by any means be seen as an example of an ideal multistakeholder process, and this despite claims to the contrary by the architects of the IANA transition.

    As the authors put the matter: “For those who believe that the IANA is a business concerning exclusively or primarily ICANN [Internet Corporations for Assigned Names and Numbers], the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force], the NRO [Numbering Resource Organization], and their respective communities, the IANA transition process could be considered inclusive and fair enough, and its outcome effectively transferring the stewardship over IANA functions to the global stakeholder’s community of reference. For those who believe that the IANA stakeholders extend far beyond the organizations mentioned above, the assessment can only have a negative result” (146). Because “in the end, rather than transferring the stewardship of IANA functions to a new multistakeholder body that controls the IANA operator (ICANN), the transition process allowed the ICANN multistakeholder community to perform the oversight role that once belonged to the NTIA [the US government]” (146). Indeed “in the end, the novel governance arrangements strengthened the position of the registries and the technical community” (148). And the US government could still exercise ultimate control, because “ICANN, the PTI [Post-Transition IANA], and most of the root server organizations remain on US territory, and therefore under US jurisdiction” (149).

    That is, the transition failed to address the key political issue: “the IANA functions are at the heart of the DNS [Domain Name System] and the Internet as we know it. Thus, their governance and performance affect a vast range of actors [other than the technical and business communities involved in the operation of the DNS] that should be considered legitimate stakeholders” (147). Instead, it was one more example of “the rhetorical use of the multistakeholder discourse. In particular, … through a neoliberal discourse, the key organizations already involved in the DNS regime were able to use the ambiguity of the concept of a ‘global multistakeholder community’ as a strategic power resource.” Thus failing fully to ensure that discussions “take place through an open process with the participation of all stakeholders extending beyond the ICANN community.” While the call for participation in the process was formally open “its addressees were already identified as specific organizations. It is worth noting that these organizations did not involve external actors in the set-up phase. Rather, they only allowed other interested parties to take part in the discussion according to their rules and with minor participatory rights [speaking, but non-voting, observers]” (148).

    Thus, the authors’ “analysis suggests that the transition did not result in, nor did it lead to, a higher form of multistakeholderism filling the gap between reality and the ideal-type of what multistakeholderism ought to be, according to normative standards of legitimacy. Nor was it able to fix the well-known limitations in inclusiveness, fairness of the decision-making process, and accountability of the entire DNS regime. … Instead, the transition seems to have solidified previous dominant positions and ratified the ownership of an essential public function by a private corporation, led by interwoven economic and technical interests” (149). In particular, “the transition process showed the irrelevance of civil society, little and badly represented in the stakeholder structure before and after the transition” (150). And “multistakeholderism [in this case] seems to have resulted in misleading rhetoric legitimizing power asymmetries embedded within the institutional design of DNS management, rather than in a new governance model capable of ensuring the meaningful participation of all the interested parties.”

    In summary, the IANA transition is one more example of the failure of multistakeholder processes to achieve their desired goal. As the authors correctly note: “Initiatives supposed to be multistakeholder have often been criticized for not complying with their premises, resulting in ‘de-politicization mechanisms that limit political expression and struggle’” (153). Indeed, “While multistakeholderism is used as a rhetoric to solidify and legitimize power positions within some policy-making arena, without any mechanisms giving up power to weaker stakeholders and without making concrete efforts to include different discourses, it will continue to produce ambiguous compromises without decisions, or make decisions affected by a poor degree of pluralism” (153). As others have stated, “‘multistakeholderism reinforces existing power dynamics that have been ‘baked in’ to the model from the beginning. It privileges north-western governments, particularly the US, as well as the US private sector.’ Similarly, … multistakeholderism [can be defined] as a discursive tool employed to create consensus around the hegemony of a power élite” (12). As the authors starkly put the matter, “multistakeholder discourse could result in misleading rhetoric that solidifies power asymmetries and masks domination, manipulation, and hegemonic practices” (26). In particular because “election and engagement procedures often tend to favor an already like-minded set of collective and individual actors even if they belong to different stakeholder categories” (30).

    The above conclusions are supported by detailed, well referenced, descriptions and analyses. Chapters One and Two explain the basic context of the IANA transition, Internet governance and their relation to multistakeholder processes. Chapter One “points out how multistakeholderism is a fuzzy concept that has led to ambiguous practices and disappointing results. Further, it highlights the discursive and legitimizing nature of multistakeholderism, which can serve both as a performing narrative capable of democratizing the Internet governance domain, as well as a misleading rhetoric solidifying the dominant position of the most powerful actors in different Internet policy-making arenas” (1). It traces the history of multistakeholder governance in the Internet context, which started in 2003 (however, a broader historical context would have been useful, see the Annex of this submission to an ITU group). It discusses the conflict between developed and developing countries regarding the management and administration of domain names and addresses that dominated the discussions at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) (Mueller’s Networks and States gives a more detailed account, explaining how development issues – which were supposed to be the focus of the WSIS – got pushed aside, thus resulting in the focus on Internet governance). As the authors correctly state, “the outcomes of the WSIS left the tensions surrounding Internet governance unresolved, giving rise to contestation in subsequent years and to the cyclical recurrence of political conflicts challenging the consensus around the multistakeholder model” (5). The IANA transition was seen as a way of resolving these tensions, but it relied “on the conflation of the multistakeholder approach with the privatization of Internet governance” (8).

    As the authors posit (citing well-know scholar Hoffmann, “multistakeholderism is a narrative based on three main promises: the promise of achieving global representation on an issue putting together all the affected parties; the promise of overcoming the traditional democratic deficit at the transnational level, ‘establishing communities of interest as a digitally enabled equivalent to territorial constituencies’; and the promise of higher and enforced outcomes since incorporating global views on the matter through a consensual approach should ensure more complete solutions and their smooth implementation” (10).

    Chapter Three provides a thorough introduction to the management of Internet domain names and address and of the issues related to it and to the IANA function, in particular the role of the US government and of US academic and business organizations; the seminal work of the Internet Ad Hoc Group (IAHC); the creation and evolution of ICANN; and various criticism of ICANN, in particular regarding its accountability. (The chapter inexplicably fails to mention the key role of Mocakpetris in the creation of the DNS).

    Chapter Four describes the institutional setup of the IANA transition, and the constraints unilaterally imposed by the US government (see also 104) and the various parties that dominate discussions of the issues involved. As the authors note, the call for the creation of the key group went out “without having before voted on the proposed scheme [of the group], neither within the ICANN community nor outside through a further round of public comments” (67). The structure of that group heavily influenced the discussions and the outcome.

    Chapter Five evaluates the IANA transition in terms of one of three types of legitimacy: input legitimacy, that is whether all affected parties could meaningfully participate in the process (the other two types of legitimacy are discussed in subsequent chapters, see below). By analysing in detail the profiles and affiliations of the participants with decision-making power, the authors find that “a vast majority (56) of the people who have taken part in the drafting of the IANA transition proposal are bearers of technical and operative interests” (87); “Regarding nationality, Western countries appear to be over-represented within the drafting and decisional organism involved in the IANA transition process. In particular, US citizens constitute the most remarkable group, occupying 20 seats over 90 available” (89); and  “IANA transition voting members experienced multiple and trans-sectoral affiliations, blurring the boundaries among stakeholder categories” (151). In summary “the results of this stakeholder analysis seem to indicate that the adopted categorization and appointment procedures have reproduced within the IANA transition process well-known power relationships and imbalances already existing in the DNS management, overrepresenting Western, technical, and business interests while marginalizing developing countries and civil society participation” (90).

    Chapter Six evaluates the transition with respect to process legitimacy: whether all participants could meaningfully affect the outcome. As the authors correctly note, “Stakeholders not belonging to the organizations at the core of the operational communities were called to join the process according to rules and procedures that they had not contributed to creating, and with minor participatory rights” (107). The decision-making process was complex, and undermined the inputs from weaker parties – thus funded, dedicated participants were more influential. Further, key participants were concerned about how the US government would view the outcome, and whether it would approve it (116). And discussions appear to have been restricted to a neo-liberal framework and technical framework (120, 121). As the authors state: “Ultimately, this narrow technical frame prevented the acknowledgment of the public good nature of the IANA functions, and, even more, of their essence as public policy issues” (121). Further, “most members and participants at the CWG-Stewardship had been socialized to the ICANN system, belonging to one of its structures or attending its meetings” and “the long-standing neoliberal plan of the US government and the NTIA to ‘privatize’ the DNS placed the IANA transition within a precise system of definitions, concepts, references, and assumptions that constrained the development of alternative policy discourses and limited the political action of sovereignist and constitutional coalitions” (122).

    Thus, it is not surprising that the authors find that “a single discourse shaped the deliberation. These results contradict the assumptions at the basis of the multistakeholder model of governance, which is supposed to reach a higher and more complete understanding of a particular matter through deliberation among different categories of actors, with different backgrounds, views, and perspectives. Instead, the set of IANA transition voting members in many regards resembled what has been defined as a ‘club governance’ model, which refers to an ‘elite community where the members are motivated by peer recognition and a common goal in line with values, they consider honourable’” (151).

    Chapter Seven evaluates the transition with respect to output legitimacy: whether the result achieved its goals of transferring oversight of the IANA function to a global multistakeholder community. As the authors state “ the institutional effectiveness of the IANA transition cannot be evaluated as satisfying from a normative point of view in terms of inclusiveness, balanced representation, and accountability. As a consequence, the ICANN board remains the expression of interwoven business and technical interests and is unlikely to be truly constrained by an independent entity” (135). Further, as shown in detail, “the political problems connected to the IANA functions have been left unresolved, …  it did not take a long time before they re-emerged” (153).

    Indeed, “IANA was, first of all, a political matter. Indeed, the transition was settled as a consequence of a political fact – the widespread loss of trust in the USA as the caretaker of the Internet after the Snowden disclosures. Further, the IANA transition process aimed to achieve eminently political goals, such as establishing a novel governance setting and strengthening the DNS’s accountability and legitimacy” (152). However, as the authors explain in detail, the IANA transition was turned into a technical discussion, and “The problem here is that governance settings, such as those described as club governance, base their legitimacy form professional expertise and reputation. They are well-suited to performing some form of ‘technocratic’ governance, addressing an issue with a problem-solving approach based on an already given understanding of the nature of the problem and of the goals to be reached. Sharing a set of overlapping and compatible views is the cue that puts together these networks of experts. Nevertheless, they are ill-suited for tackling political problems, which, by definition, deal with pluralism” (152).

    Chapter Seven could have benefitted from a discussion of ICANN’s new Independent Review Process, and the length of time it has taken to put into place the process to name the panellists.

    Chapter Eight, already summarized above, presents overall conclusions.

    In summary, this is a timely and important book that provides objective data and analyses of a particular process that has been put forward as a model for multistakeholder governance, which itself has been put forth as a better alternative to conventional governance. While there is no doubt that ICANN, and the IANA function, are performing their intended functions, the book shows that the IANA transition was not a model multistakeholder process: on the contrary, it exhibited many of the well-known flaws of multistakeholder processes. Thus it should not be used as a model for future governance.

    _____

    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.

    Back to the essay

  • Richard Hill – Review of Bauer and Latzer, Handbook on the Economics of the Internet

    Richard Hill – Review of Bauer and Latzer, Handbook on the Economics of the Internet

    a review of Johannes M. Bauer and Michal Latzer, eds., Handbook on the Economics of the Internet (Edward Elgar, 2016)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    The editors of this book must be commended for having undertaken the task of producing it: it must surely have taken tremendous persistence and patience to assemble the broad range of chapters.  The result is a valuable book is valuable, even if at some parts are disappointing.  As is often the case for a compilation of articles written by different authors, the quality of the individual contributions is uneven: some are excellent, others not.  The book is valuable because it identifies many of the key issues regarding the economics of the Internet, but it is somewhat disappointing because some of the topics are not covered in sufficient depth and because some key topics are not covered at all.  For example, the digital divide is mentioned cursorily on pp. 6-7 of the hardback edition and there is no discussion of its historical origins, economic causes, future evolution, etc.

    Yet there is extensive literature on the digital divide, such as easily available overall ITU reports from 2016 and 2017, or more detailed ITU regional studies regarding international Internet interconnectivity for Africa and Latin America.  The historical impact of the abolition of the traditional telephony account settlement scheme is covered summarily in Chapter 2 of my book The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (2013).  One might have expected that a book dedicated to the economics of the Internet would have started from that event and explained its consequences, and analyse proposals regarding how to address the digital divide, for example the proposals made during the World Summit on the Information Society to create some kind of fund to bridge the gap (those proposals were not accepted).  I would have expected such a book to discuss the possibilities and the ramifications of an international version of the universal service funds that are used in many countries to minimize national digital divides between low-density rural areas and high-density cities.  But there is no discussion at all of these topics in the book.

    And there is little discussion of Artificial Intelligence (some of which is enabled by data obtained through the Internet) or of the disruption of labour markets that some believe is or will be caused by the Internet.  For a summary treatment of these topics, with extensive references, see sections 1 and 8 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.

    The Introduction of the book correctly notes that “Scale economies, interdependencies, and abundance are pervasive [in the Internet] and call for analytical concepts that augment the traditional approaches” (p. 3).  Yet, the book fails, on the whole, to deliver sufficient detail regarding such analytical concepts, an exception being the excellent discussion on pp. 297-308 of the Internet’s economic environment for innovation, in particular pp. 301-303.

    Of the 569 pages of text (in the hardcover edition), only 22 or so contain quantitative charts or tables (eight are in one chapter), and of those only 12 or so are original research.  Only one page has equations.  Of course the paucity of data in the book is due to the fact that data regarding the Internet is hard to obtain: in today’s privatized environment, companies strive to collect data, but not to publish it.  But economics is supposed to be a quantitative discipline, at least in part, so it would have been valuable if the book had included a chapter on the reasons for the relative paucity of reliable data (both micro and macro) concerning the Internet and the myriad of transactions that take place on the Internet.

    In a nutshell, the book gives good overall, comprehensive, and legible, descriptions of many trees, but in some cases without sufficient quantitative detail, whereas it mostly fails to provide an analysis of the forest comprised by the trees (except for the brilliant chapter by Eli Noam titled “From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment”).

    The book will be very valuable for people who know little or nothing about the Internet and its economics.  Those who know something will benefit from the extensive references given at the end of each chapter.  Those who know specific topics well will not learn much from this book.  A more appropriate title for the book would have been “A Comprehensive Introduction to the Economics of the Internet”.

    The rest of this review consists of brief reviews of each of the chapters of the book.  We start with the strongest chapter, followed by the weakest chapter, then review the other chapters in the order in which they appear in the book.

    1. From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment

    This chapter is truly excellent, as one would expect, given that it is written by Eli Noam.  It captures succinctly the key policy questions regarding the economics of the Internet.  We cite p. 564:

    • How to assure the financial viability of infrastructure?
    • Market power in the entertainment Internet?
    • Does vertical integration impede competition?
    • How to protect children, old people, and traditional morality?
    • How to protect privacy and security?
    • What is the impact on trade? What is the impact of globalization?
    • How to assure the interoperability of clouds?

    It is a pity that the book did not use those questions as key themes to be addressed in each chapter.  And it is a pity that the book did not address the industrial economics issues so well put forward.  We cite p. 565:

    Another economic research question is how to assure the financial viability of the infrastructure.  The financial balance between infrastructure, services, and users is a critical issue.  The infrastructure is expensive and wants to be paid.  Some of the media services are young and want to be left to grow.  Users want to be served generously with free content and low-priced, flat-rate data service.  Fundamental economics of competition push towards price deflation, but market power, and maybe regulation, pull in another direction.  Developing countries want to see money from communications as they did in the days of traditional telecom.

    Surely the other chapters of the book could have addressed these issues, which are being discussed publicly, see for example section 4 of the Summary of the 2017 ITU Open Consultation on so-called Over-the-Top (OTT) services.

    Noam’s discussion of the forces that are leading to fragmentation (pp. 558-560) is excellent.  He does not cite Mueller’s recent book on the topic, no doubt because this chapter of the book was written before Mueller’s book was published.  Muller’s book focuses on state actions, whereas Noam gives a convincing account of the economic drivers of fragmentation, and how such increased diversity may not actually be a negative development.

    Some minor quibbles: Noam does not discuss the economic impact of adult entertainment, yet it is no doubt significant.  The off-hand remark at the bottom of p. 557 to the effect that unleashing demand for entertainment might solve the digital divide is likely not well taken, and in any case would have to be justified by much more data.

    1. The Economics of Internet Standards

    I found this to be the weakest chapter in the book.  To begin with, it is mostly descriptive and contains hardly any real economic analysis.  The account of the Cisco/Huawei battle over MPLS-TP standards (pp. 219-222) is accurate, but it would have been nice to know what the economic drivers were of that battle, e.g. size of the market, respective market shares, values of the respective products based on the respective standards, who stood to gain/lose what (and not just the manufacturers, but also the network operators), etc.

    But the descriptive part is also weak.  For example, the Introduction gives the misleading impression that IETF standards are the dominant element in the growth of the Internet, whereas it was the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) HTML and successor standards that enabled the web and most of what we consider to be the Internet today.  The history on p. 213 omits contributions from other projects such as Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) and CYCLADES.

    Since the book is about economics, surely it should have mentioned on pp. 214 and 217 how the IETF has become increasingly influenced by dominant manufacturers, see pp. 148-152 of Powers, Shawn M., and Jablonski, Michael (2015) The Real Cyberwar: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom; as Noam puts the matter on p. 559 of the book: “The [Internet] technical specifications are set by the Steering Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a small group of 15 engineers, almost all employees of big companies around the world.”

    And surely it should have discussed in section 10.4 (p. 214) the economic reasons that lead to greater adoption of TCP/IP over the competing OSI protocol, such as the lower implementation costs due to the lack of security of TCP/IP, the lack of non-ASCII support in the early IETF protocols, and the heavy subsidies provided by the US Defence Projects Research Agency (DARPA) and by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which are well known facts recounted on pp. 533-541 of the book.  In addition to not dealing with economic issues, section 10.4 is an overly simplified account of what really happened.

    Section 10.7 (p. 222) is again, surprisingly devoid of any semblance of economic analysis.  Further, it perpetuates a self-serving, one-sided account of the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), without once citing scholarly writings on the issue, such as my book The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (2013).  The authors go so far as to cite the absurd US House proposition to the effect that the Internet should be “free of government control” without noting that what the US politicians meant is that it should be “free of foreign government control”, because of course the US has never had any intent of not subjecting the Internet to US laws and regulations.

    Indeed, at present, hardly anybody seriously questions the principle that offline law applies equally online.  One would expect a scholarly work to do better than to cite inane political slogans meant for domestic political purposes.  In particular when the citations are not used to underpin any semblance of economic analysis.

    1. The Economics of the Internet: An Overview

    This chapter provides a solid and thorough introduction to the basics of the economics of the Internet.

    1. The Industrial Organization of the Internet

    This chapter well presents the industrial organization of the Internet, that is, how the industry is structured economically, how its components interact economically, and how that is different from other economic sectors.  As the authors correctly state (p. 24): “ … the tight combination of high fixed and low incremental cost, the pervasive presence of increasing returns, the rapidity and frequency of entry and exit, high rates of innovation, and economies of scale in consumption (positive network externalities) have created unique economic conditions …”.  The chapter explains well key features such as multi-sided markets (p. 31).  And it correctly points out (p. 25) that “while there is considerable evidence that technologically dynamic industries flourish in the absence of government intervention, there is also evidence of the complementarity of public policy and the performance of high-tech markets.”  That is explored in pp. 45 ff. and in subsequent chapters, albeit not always in great detail.

    1. The Internet as a Complex Layered System

    This is an excellent chapter, one of the best in the book.  It explains how, because of the layered nature of the Internet, simple economic theories fail to capture its complexities.  As the chapter says (p. 68), the Internet is best viewed as a general purpose infrastructure.

    1. A Network Science Approach to the Internet

    This chapter provides a sound and comprehensive description of the Internet as a network, but it does not go beyond the description to provide analyses, for example regarding regulatory issues.  However, the numerous citations in the chapter do provide such analyses.

    1. Peer Production and Cooperation

    This chapter is also one of the best chapters in the book.  It provides an excellent description of how value is produced on the Internet, through decentralization, diverse motivations, and separation of governance and management.  It covers, and explains the differences between, peer production, crowd-sourcing, collaborative innovation, etc.  On p. 87 it provides an excellent quantitative description and analysis of specific key industry segments.  The key governance patterns in peer production are very well summarized on pp. 108-109 and 112-113.

    1. The Internet and Productivity

    This chapter actually contains a significant amount of quantitative data (which is not the case for most of the other chapters) and provides what I would consider to be an economic analysis of the issue, namely whether, and if so how, the Internet has contributed to productivity.  As the chapter points out, we lack sufficient data to analyse fully the impacts of the development of information and communication technologies since 2000, but this chapter does make an excellent contribution to that analysis.

    1. Cultural Economics and the Internet

    This is a good introduction to supply, demand, and markets for creative goods and services produced and/or distributed via the Internet.  The discussion of two-sided markets on p. 155 is excellent.  Unfortunately, however, the chapter is mostly a theoretical description: it does not refer to any actual data or provide any quantitative analysis of what is actually happening.

    1. A Political Economy Approach to the Internet

    This is another excellent chapters, one of the best in the book.  I noted one missing citation to a previous analysis of key issues from the political economics point of view: Powers, Shawn M., and Jablonski, Michael (2015) The Real Cyberwar: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom.  But the key issues are well discussed in the chapter:

    • The general trend towards monopolies and oligopolies of corporate ownership and control affecting the full range of Internet use and development (p. 164).
    • The specific role of Western countries and their militaries in supporting and directing specific trajectories (p. 165).
    • How the general trend towards privatization made it difficult to develop the Internet as a public information utility (p. 169).
    • The impact on labour, in particular shifting work to users (p. 170).
    • The rise and dominance of the surveillance economy (where users become the product because their data is valuable) (p. 175).
    1. Competition and Anti-Trust in Internet Markets

    This chapter provides a very good overview of the competition and anti-trust issues related to the Internet, but it would have been improved if it had referred to the excellent discussion in Noam’s chapter “From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment.”  It would have been improved by referring to recent academic literature on the topic.  Nevertheless, the description of key online market characteristics, including that they are often two-sided, (p. 184) is excellent.  The description of the actual situation (including litigation) regarding search engines on p. 189 ff. is masterful: a superb example of the sort of real economic analysis that I would have liked to see in other chapters.

    The good discussion of network neutrality (p. 201) could have been improved by taking the next step and analysing the economic implications of considering whether the Internet infrastructure should be regulated as a public infrastructure and/or, for example, be subject to functional separation.

    1. The Economics of Copyright and the Internet

    This is an excellent introduction to the issues relating to copyright in the digital age.  It provides little data but that is because, as noted on pp. 238-241, there is a paucity of data for copyright, whereas there is more for patents.

    1. The Economics of Privacy, Data Protection and Surveillance

    As one would expect from its author, Ian Brown, this is an excellent discussion of the issues and, again, one of the best chapters in the book.  In particular, the chapter explains well and clearly (pp. 250 ff.) why market failures (e.g externalities, information asymmetries and anti-competitive market structures) might justify regulation (such as the European data privacy rules).

    1. Economics of Cybersecurity

    This chapter provides a very good overview of the economic issues related to cybersecurity, but, like most of the other chapters, it provides very little data and thus no detailed economic analysis.  It would have benefited from referring to the Internet Society’s 2016 Global Internet Report, which does provide data, and stresses the key market failures that result in the current lack of security of the Internet: information asymmetries (section 13.7.2 of the book) and externalities (section 13.7.3).

    However, the section on externalities fails to mention certain possible solutions, such as minimum security standards.  Minimum safety standards are imposed on many products, such as electrical appliances, automobiles, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, etc.  Thus it would have been appropriate for the book to discuss the economic implications of minimum security standards.  And also the economic implications of Microsoft’s recent call for a so-called Geneva Digital Convention.

    1. Internet Architecture and Innovation in Applications

    This chapter provides a very good description, but it suffers from considering the Internet in isolation, without comparing it to other networks, in particular the fixed and mobile telephone networks.  It would have been good to see a discussion and comparison of the economic drivers of innovation or lack of innovation in the two networks.  And also a discussion of the economic role of the telephony signalling network, Signalling System Seven (SS7) which enabled implementation of the widely used, and economically important, Short Messaging Service (SMS).

    In that context, it is important to note that SS7 is, as is the Internet, a connectionless packet-switched system.  So what distinguishes the two networks is more than technology: indeed, economic factors (such as how services are priced for end-users, interconnection regimes, etc.) surely play a role, and it would have been good if those had been explored.  In this context, see my paper “The Internet, its governance, and the multi-Stakeholder model”, Info, vol. 16. no. 2, March 2014.

    1. Organizational Innovations, ICTs and Knowledge Governance: The Case of Platforms

    As this excellent chapter, one of the best in the books, correctly notes, “platforms constitute a major organizational innovation” which has been “made possible by technological innovation”.

    As explained on pp. 338-339, platforms are one of the key components of the Internet economy, and this has recently been recognized by governments.  For example, the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament adopted an Opinion in May 2017 that, among other provisions:

    Calls for an appropriate and proportionate regulatory framework that would guarantee responsibility, fairness, trust and transparency in platforms’ processes in order to avoid discrimination and arbitrariness towards business partners, consumers, users and workers in relation to, inter alia, access to the service, appropriate and fair referencing, search results, or the functioning of relevant application programming interfaces, on the basis of interoperability and compliance principles applicable to platforms.

    The topic is covered to some extent a European Parliament Committee Report on online platforms and the digital single market, (2016/2276(INI).  And by some provisions in French law.  Detailed references to the cited documents, and to other material relevant to platforms, are found in section 9 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.

    1. Interconnection in the Internet: Peering, Interoperability and Content Delivery

    This chapter provides a very good description of Internet interconnection, including a good discussion of the basic economic issues.  As do the other chapters, it suffers from a paucity of data, and does not discuss whether the current interconnection regime is working well, or whether it is facing economic issues.  The chapter does point out (p. 357) that “information about actual interconnection agreements … may help to understand how interconnection markets are changing …”, but fails to discuss how the unique barter structure of Internet interconnections, most of which are informal, zero-cost traffic sharing agreements, impedes the collection and publication of such information.

    The discussion on p. 346 would have benefited from an economic analysis of the advantages/disadvantages of considering the basic Internet infrastructure to be a basic public infrastructure (such as roads, water and electrical power distribution systems, etc.) and the economic tradeoffs of regulating its interconnection.

    Section 16.5.1 would have benefited from a discussion of the economic drivers behind the discussions in ITU that lead to the adoption of ITU-T Recommendation D.50 and its Supplements, and the economic issues arguing for and against implementation of the provisions of that Recommendation.

    1. Internet Business Strategies

    As this very good chapter explains, the Internet has had a dramatic impact on all types of businesses, and has given rise to “platformization”, that is the use of platforms (see chapter 15 above) to conduct business.  Platforms benefit from network externalities and enable two-sided markets.  The chapter includes a detailed analysis (pp. 370-372) of the strategic properties of the Internet that can be used to facilitate and transform business, such as scalability, ubiquity, externalities, etc.  It also notes that the Internet has changed the role of customers and both reduced and increased information asymmetries.  The chapter provides a very good taxonomy of Internet business models (pp. 372 ff.).

    1. The Economics of Internet Search

    The chapter contains a good history of search engines, and an excellent analysis of advertising linked to searches.  It provides theoretical models and explains the important of two-sided markets in this context.  As the chapter correctly notes, additional research will require access to more data than are currently available.

    1. The Economics of Algorithmic Selection on the Internet

    As this chapter correctly notes (p. 395), “algorithms have come to shape our daily lives and realities.”  They have significant economic implication and raise “significant social risks such as manipulation and data bias, threats to privacy and violations of intellectual property rights”.  A good description of different types of algorithms and how they are used is given on p. 399.  Scale effects and concentration are discussed (p. 408) and the social risks are explained in detail on pp. 411 ff.:

    • Threats to basic rights and liberties.
    • Impacts on the mediation of reality.
    • Challenges to the future development of the human species.

    More specifically:

    • Manipulation
    • Diminishing variety
    • Constraints on freedom of expression
    • Threats to data protection and privacy
    • Social discrimination
    • Violation of intellectual property rights
    • Possible adaptations of the human brain
    • Uncertain effects on humans

    In this context, see also the numerous references in section 1 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.

    The chapter includes a good discussion of different governance models and their advantages/disadvantages, namely:

    • Laissez-fair markets
    • Self-organization by business
    • Self-regulation by industry
    • State regulation
    1. Online Advertising Economics

    This chapter provides a good history of what some have referred to as the Internet’s original sin, namely the advent of online advertising as the main revenue source for many Internet businesses.  It explains how the Internet can, and does, improve the efficiency of advertising by targeting (pp. 430 ff.) and it includes a detailed analysis of advertising in relation to search engines (pp. 435 ff.).

    1. Online News

    As the chapter correctly notes, this is an evolving area, so the chapter mostly consists of a narrative history.  The chapter’s conclusion starts by saying that “the Internet has brought growth and dynamism to the news industry”, but goes on to note, correctly, that “the financial outlook for news providers, old or new, is bleak” and that, thus far, nobody has found a viable business model to fund the online news business.  It is a pity that this chapter does not cite McChesney’s detailed analysis of this issue and discuss his suggestions for addressing it.

    1. The Economics of Online Video Entertainment

    This chapter provides the history of that segment of the Internet industry and includes a valuable comparison and analysis of the differences between online and offline entertainment media (pp. 462-464).

    1. Business Strategies and Revenue Models for Converged Video Services

    This chapter provides a clear and comprehensive description of how an effect of convergence “is the blurring of lines between formerly separated media platforms such as over-the-air broadcasting, cable TV, and streamed media.”  The chapter describes ten strategies and six revenue models that have been used to cope with these changes.

    1. The Economics of Virtual Worlds

    This chapter provides a good historical account of the evolution of the internal reward system of games, which went from virtual objects that players could obtain by solving puzzles (or whatever) to virtual money that could be acquired only within the game, to virtual money that could be acquired with real-world money, to large professional factories that produce and sell objects to World of Wonders players in exchange for real-world money.  The chapter explores the legal and economic issues arising out of these situations (pp. 503-504) and gives a good overview of the research in virtual economies.

    1. Economics of Big Data

    This chapter correctly notes (p. 512) that big data is “a field with more questions than answers”.  Thus, logically, the chapter is mostly descriptive.  It includes a good account of two-sided markets (p. 519), and correctly notes (p. 521) that “data governance should not be construed merely as an economic matter but that it should also encompass a social perspective”, a position with which I wholeheartedly agree.  As the chapter says (p. 522), “there are some areas affected by big data where public policies and regulations do exist”, in particular regarding:

    • Privacy
    • Data ownership
    • Open data

    As the chapter says (p. 522), most evidence available today suggests that markets are not “responding rapidly to concerns of users about the (mis)use of their personal information”.  For additional discussion, with extensive references, see section 1 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.

    1. The Evolution of the Internet: A Socioeconomic Account

    This is a very weak chapter.  Its opening paragraph fails to consider the historical context of the development of the Internet, or its consequences.  Its second paragraph fails to consider the overt influence of the US government on the evolution of the Internet.  Section 26.3 fails to cite one of the most comprehensive works on the topic (the relation between AT&T and the development of the internet), namely Schiller, Dan (2014) Digital Depression: Information Technology and Information Crisis, University of Illinois Press.  The discussion on p. 536 fails to even mention the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) initiative, yet that initiative undoubtedly affected the development of the Internet, not just by providing a model for how not to do things (too complex, too slow), but also by providing some basic technology that is still used to this day, such as X.509 certificates.

    Section 26.6, on how market forces affect the Internet, seems oblivious to the rising evidence that dominant market power, not competition, is shaping the future of the Internet, which appears surprising in light of the good chapter in the book on that very topic: “Competition and anti-trust in Internet markets.”  Page 547 appears to ignore the rising vertical integration of many Internet services, even though that trend is well discussed in Noam’s excellent chapter “From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment.”

    The discussion of the role of government on p. 548 is surprisingly lacunary, given the rich literature on the topic in general, and specific government actions or proposed actions regarding topics such as freedom of speech, privacy, data protection, encryption, security, etc. (see for example my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation).

    This chapter should have started with the observation that the Internet was not conceived as a public network (p. 558) and build on that observation, explaining the socioeconomic factors that shaped its transformation from a closed military/academic network into a public network and into a basic infrastructure that now underpins most economic activities.

    _____

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

    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.

    _____

    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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  • Richard Hill — States, Governance, and Internet Fragmentation (Review of Mueller, Will the Internet Fragment?)

    Richard Hill — States, Governance, and Internet Fragmentation (Review of Mueller, Will the Internet Fragment?)

    a review of Milton Mueller, Will the Internet Fragment? Sovereignty, Globalization and Cyberspace (Polity, 2017)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    Like other books by Milton Mueller, Will the Internet Fragment? is a must-read for anybody who is seriously interested in the development of Internet governance and its likely effects on other walks of life.  This is true because, and not despite, the fact that it is a tract that does not present an unbiased view. On the contrary, it advocates a certain approach, namely a utopian form of governance which Mueller refers to as “popular sovereignty in cyberspace”.

    Mueller, Professor of Information Security and Privacy at Georgia Tech, is an internationally prominent scholar specializing in the political economy of information and communication.  The author of seven books and scores of journal articles, his work informs not only public policy but also science and technology studies, law, economics, communications, and international studies.  His books Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance (MIT Press, 2010) and Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2002) are acclaimed scholarly accounts of the global governance regime emerging around the Internet.

    Most of Will the Internet Fragment? consists of a rigorous analysis of what has been commonly referred to as “fragmentation,” showing that very different technological and legal phenomena have been conflated in ways that do not favour productive discussions.  That so-called “fragmentation” is usually defined as the contrary of the desired situation in which “every device on the Internet should be able to exchange data packets with any other device that is was willing to receive them” (p. 6 of the book, citing Vint Cerf).  But. as Mueller correctly points out, not all end-points of the Internet can reach all other end-points at all times, and there may be very good reasons for that (e.g. corporate firewalls, temporary network outages, etc.).  Mueller then shows how network effects (the fact that the usefulness of a network increases as it becomes larger) will tend to prevent or counter fragmentation: a subset of the network is less useful than is the whole.  He also shows how network effects can prevent the creation of alternative networks: once everybody is using a given network, why switch to an alternative that few are using?  As Mueller aptly points out (pp. 63-66), the slowness of the transition to IPv6 is due to this type of network effect.

    The key contribution of this book is that it clearly identifies the real question of interest to whose who are concerned about the governance of the Internet and its impact on much of our lives.  That question (which might have been a better subtitle) is: “to what extent, if any, should Internet policies be aligned with national borders?”  (See in particular pp. 71, 73, 107, 126 and 145).  Mueller’s answer is basically “as little as possible, because supra-national governance by the Internet community is preferable”.  This answer is presumably motivated by Mueller’s view that “ institutions shift power from states to society” (p. 116), which implies that “society” has little power in modern states.  But (at least ideally) states should be the expression of a society (as Mueller acknowledges on pp. 124 and 136), so it would have been helpful if Mueller had elaborated on the ways (and there are many) in which he believes states do not reflect society and in the ways in which so-called multi-stakeholder models would not be worse and would not result in a denial of democracy.

    Before commenting on Mueller’s proposal for supra-national governance, it is worth commenting on some areas where a more extensive discussion would have been warranted.  We note, however, that the book the book is part of a series that is deliberately intended to be short and accessible to a lay public.  So Mueller had a 30,000 word limit and tried to keep things written in a way that non-specialists and non-scholars could access.  This no doubt largely explains why he didn’t cover certain topics in more depth.

    Be that as it may, the discussion would have been improved by being placed in the long-term context of the steady decrease in national sovereignty that started in 1648, when sovereigns agreed in the Treaty of Westphalia to refrain from interfering in the religious affairs of foreign states, , and that accelerated in the 20th century.  And by being placed in the short-term context of the dominance by the USA as a state (which Mueller acknowledges in passing on p. 12), and US companies, of key aspects of the Internet and its governance.  Mueller is deeply aware of the issues and has discussed them in his other books, in particular Ruling the Root and Networks and States, so it would have been nice to see the topic treated here, with references to the end of the Cold War and what appears to be re-emergence of some sort of equivalent international tension (albeit not for the same reasons and with different effects at least for what concerns cyberspace).  It would also have been preferable to include at least some mention of the literature on the negative economic and social effects of current Internet governance arrangements.

    Will the Internet Fragment? Sovereignty, Globalization and Cyberspace (Polity, 2017)It is telling that, in Will the Internet Fragment?, Mueller starts his account with the 2014 NetMundial event, without mentioning that it took place in the context of the outcomes of the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS, whose genesis, dynamics, and outcomes Mueller well analyzed in Networks and States), and without mentioning that the outcome document of the 2015 UN WSIS+10 Review reaffirmed the WSIS outcomes and merely noted that Brazil had organized NetMundial, which was, in context, an explicit refusal to note (much less to endorse) the NetMundial outcome document.

    The UN’s reaffirmation of the WSIS outcomes is significant because, as Mueller correctly notes, the real question that underpins all current discussions of Internet governance is “what is the role of states?,” and the Tunis Agenda states: “Policy authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of States. They have rights and responsibilities for international Internet-related public policy issues.”

    Mueller correctly identifies and discusses the positive externalities created by the Internet (pp. 44-48).  It would have been better if he had noted that there are also negative externalities, in particular regarding security (see section 2.8 of my June 2017 submission to ITU’s CWG-Internet), and that the role of states includes internalizing such externalities, as well as preventing anti-competitive behavior.

    It is also telling the Mueller never explicitly mentions a principle that is no longer seriously disputed, and that was explicitly enunciated in the formal outcome of the WSIS+10 Review, namely that offline law applies equally online.  Mueller does mention some issues related to jurisdiction, but he does not place those in the context of the fundamental principle that cyberspace is subject to the same laws as the rest of the world: as Mueller himself acknowledges (p. 145), allegations of cybercrime are judged by regular courts, not cyber-courts, and if you are convicted you will pay a real fine or be sent to a real prison, not to a cyber-prison.  But national jurisdiction is not just about security (p. 74 ff.), it is also about legal certainty for commercial dealings, such as enforcement of contracts.  There are an increasing number of activities that depend on the Internet, but that also depend on the existence of known legal regimes that can be enforced in national courts.

    And what about the tension between globalization and other values such as solidarity and cultural diversity?  As Mueller correctly notes (p. 10), the Internet is globalization on steroids.  Yet cultural values differ around the world (p. 125).  How can we get the benefits of both an unfragmented Internet and local cultural diversity (as opposed to the current trend to impose US values on the rest of the world)?

    While dealing with these issues in more depth would have complicated the discussion, it also would have made it more valuable, because the call for direct rule of the Internet by and for Internet users must either be reconciled with the principle that offline law applies equally online, or be combined with a reasoned argument for the abandonment of that principle.  As Mueller so aptly puts it (p. 11): “Internet governance is hard … also because of the mismatch between its global scope and the political and legal institutions for responding to societal problems.”

    Since most laws, and almost all enforcement mechanisms are national, the influence of states on the Internet is inevitable.  Recall that the idea of enforceable rules (laws) dates back to at least 1700 BC and has formed an essential part of all civilizations in history.  Mueller correctly posits on p. 125 that a justification for territorial sovereignty is to restrict violence (only the state can legitimately exercise it), and wonders why, in that case, the entire world does not have a single government.  But he fails to note that, historically, at times much of the world was subject to a single government (think of the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the British Empire), and he does not explore the possibility of expanding the existing international order (treaties, UN agencies, etc.) to become a legitimate democratic world governance (which of course it is not, in part because the US does not want it to become one).  For example, a concrete step in the direction of using existing governance systems has recently been proposed by Microsoft: a Digital Geneva Convention.

    Mueller explains why national borders interfere with certain aspects of certain Internet activities (pp. 104, 106), but national borders interfere with many activities.  Yet we accept them because there doesn’t appear to be any “least worst” alternative.  Mueller does acknowledge that states have power, and rightly calls for states to limit their exercise of power to their own jurisdiction (p. 148).  But he posits that such power “carries much less weight than one would think” (p. 150), without justifying that far-reaching statement.  Indeed, Mueller admits that “it is difficult to conceive of an alternative” (p. 73), but does not delve into the details sufficiently to show convincingly how the solution that he sketches would not result in greater power by dominant private companies (and even corpotocracy or corporatism), increasing income inequality, and a denial of democracy.  For example, without the power of state in the form of consumer protection measures, how can one ensure that private intermediaries would “moderate content based on user preferences and reports” (p. 147) as opposed to moderating content so as to maximize their profits?  Mueller assumes that there would be a sufficient level of competition, resulting in self-correcting forces and accountability (p. 129); but current trends are just the opposite: we see increasing concentration and domination in many aspects of the Internet (see section 2.11 of my June 2017 submission to ITU’s CWG-Internet) and some competition law authorities have found that some abuse of dominance has taken place.

    It seems to me that Mueller too easily concludes that “a state-centric approach to global governance cannot easily co-exist with a multistakeholder regime” (p. 117), without first exploring the nuances of multi-stakeholder regimes and the ways that they could interface with existing institutions, which include intergovernmental bodies as well as states.  As I have stated elsewhere: “The current arrangement for global governance is arguably similar to that of feudal Europe, whereby multiple arrangements of decision-making, including the Church, cities ruled by merchant-citizens, kingdoms, empires and guilds co-existed with little agreement as to which actor was actually in charge over a given territory or subject matter.  It was in this tangled system that the nation-state system gained legitimacy precisely because it offered a clear hierarchy of authority for addressing issues of the commons and provision of public goods.”

    Which brings us to another key point that Mueller does not consider in any depth: if the Internet is a global public good, then its governance must take into account the views and needs of all the world’s citizens, not just those that are privileged enough to have access at present.  But Mueller’s solution would restrict policy-making to those who are willing and able to participate in various so-called multi-stakeholder forums (apparently Mueller does not envisage a vast increase in participation and representation in these; p. 120).  Apart from the fact that that group is not a community in any real sense (a point acknowledged on p. 139), it comprises, at present, only about half of humanity, and even much of that half would not be able to participate because discussions take place primarily in English, and require significant technical knowledge and significant time commitments.

    Mueller’s path for the future appears to me to be a modern version of the International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC), but Mueller would probably disagree, since he is of the view that the IAHC was driven by intergovernmental organizations.  In any case, the IAHC work failed to be seminal because of the unilateral intervention of the US government, well described in Ruling the Root, which resulted in the creation of ICANN, thus sparking discussions of Internet governance in WSIS and elsewhere.  While Mueller is surely correct when he states that new governance methods are needed (p. 127), it seems a bit facile to conclude that “the nation-state is the wrong unit” and that it would be better to rely largely on “global Internet governance institutions rooted in non-state actors” (p. 129), without explaining how such institutions would be democratic and representative of all of the word’s citizens.

    Mueller correctly notes (p. 150) that, historically, there have major changes in sovereignty: emergence and falls of empires, creation of new nations, changes in national borders, etc.  But he fails to note that most of those changes were the result of significant violence and use of force.  If, as he hopes, the “Internet community” is to assert sovereignty and displace the existing sovereignty of states, how will it do so?  Through real violence?  Through cyber-violence?  Through civil disobedience (e.g. migrating to bitcoin, or implementing strong encryption no matter what governments think)?  By resisting efforts to move discussions into the World Trade Organization? Or by persuading states to relinquish power willingly?  It would have been good if Mueller had addressed, at least summarily, such questions.

    Before concluding, I note a number of more-or-less minor errors that might lead readers to imprecise understandings of important events and issues.  For example, p. 37 states that “the US and the Internet technical community created a global institution, ICANN”: in reality, the leaders of the Internet technical community obeyed the unilateral diktat of the US government (at first somewhat reluctantly and later willingly) and created a California non-profit company, ICANN.  And ICANN is not insulated from jurisdictional differences; it is fully subject to US laws and US courts.  The discussion on pp. 37-41 fails to take into account the fact that a significant portion of the DNS, the ccTLDs, is already aligned with national borders, and that there are non-national telephone numbers; the real differences between the DNS and telephone numbers are that most URLs are non-national, whereas few telephone numbers are non-national; that national telephone numbers are given only to residents of the corresponding country; and that there is an international real-time mechanism for resolving URLs that everybody uses, whereas each telephone operator has to set up its own resolving mechanism for telephone numbers.  Page 47 states that OSI was “developed by Europe-centered international organizations”, whereas actually it was developed by private companies from both the USA (including AT&T, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, etc.) and Europe working within global standards organizations (IEC, ISO, and ITU), who all happen to have secretariats in Geneva, Switzerland; whereas the Internet was initially developed and funded by an arm of the US Department of Defence and the foundation of the WWW was initially developed in a European intergovernmental organization.  Page 100 states that “The ITU has been trying to displace or replace ICANN since its inception in 1998”; whereas a correct statement would be “While some states have called for the ITU to displace or replace ICANN since its inception in 1998, such proposals have never gained significant support and appear to have faded away recently.”  Not everybody thinks that the IANA transition was a success (p. 117), nor that it is an appropriate model for the future (pp. 132-135; 136-137), and it is worth noting that ICANN successfully withstood many challenges (p. 100) while it had a formal link to the US government; it remains to be seen how ICANN will fare now that it is independent of the US government.  ICANN and the RIR’s do not have a “‘transnational’ jurisdiction created through private contracts” (p. 117); they are private entities subject to national law and the private contracts in question are also subject to national law (and enforced by national authorities, even if disputes are resolved by international arbitration).  I doubt that it is a “small step from community to nation” (p. 142), and it is not obvious why anti-capitalist movements (which tend to be internationalist) would “end up empowering territorial states and reinforcing alignment” (p. 147), when it is capitalist movements that rely on the power of territorial states to enforce national laws, for example regarding intellectual property rights.

    Despite these minor quibbles, this book, and its references (albeit not as extensive as one would have hoped), will be a valuable starting point for future discussions of internet alignment and/or “fragmentation.” Surely there will be much future discussion, and many more analyses and calls for action, regarding what may well be one of the most important issues that humanity now faces: the transition from the industrial era to the information era and the disruptions arising from that transition.

    _____

    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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  • Richard Hill — The Root Causes of Internet Fragmentation

    Richard Hill — The Root Causes of Internet Fragmentation


    a review of Scott Malcomson, Splinternet: How Geopolitics and Commerce Are Fragmenting the World Wide Web      (OR Books, 2016)
    by Richard Hill
    ~

    The implicit premise of this valuable book is that “we study the past to understand the present; we understand the present to guide the future.” In that light, the book makes a valuable contribution by offering a sound and detailed historical survey of aspects of the Internet which are not well-known nor easily accessible outside the realms of dedicated internet research. However, as explained below, the author has not covered some important aspects of the past and thus the work is incomplete as a guide to the future. This should not be taken as criticism, but as a call for the author, or other scholars, to complete the work.

    The book starts by describing how modern computers and computer networks evolved from the industrialization of war and in particular due to the advantages that could be gained by automating the complex mathematical calculations required for ballistics on the one hand (computers) and by speeding up communications between elements of armed forces on the other hand (networks). Given the effectiveness of ICTs for war, belligerents before, during, and after World War II heavily funded research and development of those technologies in the military context, even if much of the research was outsourced to the private sector.

    Malcomson documents how the early founders of what we now call computer science were based in the USA and were closely associated with US military efforts: “the development of digital computing was principally an unintended byproduct of efforts to improve the accuracy of gunfire against moving targets” (49).

    Chapter 1 ends with an account of how Cold War military concerns (especially so-called mutual assured destruction by nuclear weapons) led to the development of packet switched networks in order to interconnect powerful computers: ARPANET, which evolved to become the Internet.

    Chapter 2 explores a different, but equally important, facet of Internet history: the influence of the anti-authoritarian hacker culture, which started with early computer enthusiasts, and fully developed in the 1970s and 1980s, in particular in the West Coast (most famously documented in Steven Levy’s 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution). The book explains the origins of the venture capitalism that largely drove the development of ICTs (including the Internet) as private risk capital replaced state funding for research and development in ICTs.

    The book documents the development of the geek culture’s view that computers and networks should be “an instrument of personal liberation and create a frictionless, alternative world free from the oppressing state” (101). Malcomson explains how this led to the belief that the Internet should not be subject to normal laws, culminating in Barlow’s well known utopian “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” and explains how such ideas could not, and did not survive. The chapter concludes: “The subculture had lost the battle. Governments and large corporations would now shape the Internet” (137). But, as the book notes later (171), it was in fact primarily one government, the US government, that shaped the Internet. And, as Shawn Powers and Michael Jablonski explain in The Real Cyberwar, the US used its influence to further its own geopolitical and global economic goals.

    Chapter 3 explores the effects of globalization, the weakening of American power, the rise of competing powers, and the resulting tensions regarding US dominance of ICTs in general and the Internet in particular. It also covers the rise of policing of the Internet induced by fear of “terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers” (153).

    We have come full circle: a technology initially designed for war is now once again used by the military to achieve its aims, the so-called “war on terror.” So there is a tension between three different forces, all of which were fundamental to the development of ICTs (including the Internet): the government, military, and security apparatus; more-or-less anarchic technologists; and dominant for-profit companies (which may have started small, but can quickly become very large and dominant – at least for a few years until they are displaced by newcomers).

    As the subtitle indicates, the book is mostly about the World Wide Web, so some of the other aspects of the history of the Internet are not covered. For example, there is no mention of the very significant commercial and political battles that took place between proponents of the Internet and proponents of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) suite of standards; this is a pity, because the residual effects of those battles are still being felt today. Nor does the book explore the reasons for and effects of the transition of the management of the Internet from the US Department of Defense to the US Department of Commerce (even if it correctly notes that the chief interest of the Clinton administration “was in a thriving Internet that would lead to new industries and economic growth” [133]).

    Malcomson explains well how there were four groups competing for influence in the late 1990s: technologists, the private sector, the US government, and other governments, and notes how the US government was in an impossible situation, since it could not credibly argue simultaneously that other governments (or intergovernmental organizations such as the ITU) should not influence the Internet while it itself formally supervised the management and administration of the domain name system (DNS). However, he does not explain how the origins of the DNS, its subsequent development, or how its management and administration were unilaterally hijacked by the US, leading to much of the international tension that has bedeviled discussions on Internet governance since 1998.

    Regarding the World Wide Web, the book does not discuss how the end-to-end principle and its premise of secure end devices resulted in unforeseen consequences (such as spam, cybercrime, and cyberattacks) when unsecure personal computers became the dominant device connected via the Internet. Nor does it discuss how the lack of billing mechanisms in the Internet protocol suite has led to the rise of advertising as the sole revenue generation mechanism and the consequences of that development.

    The book analyses the splintering (elsewhere called fragmentation) brought about by the widespread adoption of proprietary systems operating system and their associated “apps”, and by mass surveillance. As Malcomson puts the matter, mass surveillance “was fatal to the universality of the web, because major web companies were and are global but cannot be both global and subject to the intricate agendas of US intelligence and defense institutions, whose purpose is to defend national interests, not universal interests” (160).

    However, the book does not discuss in any depth other sources of splintering, such as calls by some governments for national control over some portions of the Internet, or violations of network neutrality, or zero rating. Yet the book notes that the topic of network neutrality had been raised by Vice President Gore as early as 1993: “Without provisions for open access, the companies that own the networks could use their control of the networks to ensure that their customers only have access to their programming. We have already seen cases where cable company owners have used their monopoly control of their networks to exclude programming that competes with their own. Our legislation will contain strong safeguards against such behavior” (124). As we know, the laws called for in the last sentence were never implemented, and it was only in 2015 that the Federal Communication Commission imposed network neutrality. Malcomson could have used his deep knowledge of the history of the Internet to explain why Gore’s vision was not realized, no doubt because of the tensions mentioned above between the groups competing for influence.

    The book concludes that the Internet will increasingly cease to be “an entirely cross border enterprise”(190), but that the benefits of interoperability will result in a global infrastructure being preserved, so that “a fragmented Internet will retain aspects of universality” (197).

    As mentioned above, the book provides an excellent account of much of the historical origins of the World Wide Web and the disparate forces involved in its creation. The book would be even more valuable if it built on that account to analyze more deeply and put into context trends (which it does mention) other than splintering, such as the growing conflict between Apple, Google et al. who want no restrictions on data collection and encryption (so that they can continue to collect and monetize data), governments who want no encryption so they can censor and/or surveil, and governments who recognize that privacy is a human right, that privacy rules should be strengthened, and that end-users should have full ownership and control of their data.

    Readers keen to understand the negative economic impacts of the Internet should read Dan Schiller’s Digital Depression, and readers keen to understand the negative impacts of the Internet on democracy should read Robert McChesney’s Digital Disconnect. This might lead some to believe that we have would up exactly where we didn’t want to be: “government-driven, corporate-interest driven, profit-driven, monopoly-driven.” The citation (from Lyman Chapin, one of the founders of the Internet Society), found on p. 132 of Malcomson’s book, dates back to 1991, and it reflects what the technologists of the time wanted to avoid.

    To conclude, it is worth noting the quotation on page 57 from Norbert Wiener: “Just as the skilled carpenter, the skilled mechanic, the skilled dressmaker have in some degree survived the first industrial revolution, so the skilled scientist and the skilled administrator might survive the second [the cybernetic revolution]. However, taking the second revolution as accomplished, the average human of mediocre attainments has nothing to sell that is worth anyone’s money to buy. The answer, of course, is to have a society based on human values other than buying and selling.”

    Wiener thus foresaw the current fundamental trends and dilemmas that have been well documented and analyzed by Robert McChesney and John Nichols in their new book People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy (Nation Books, 2016).

    There can be no doubt that the current trends are largely conditioned by the early history of ICTs (and in particular of the Internet) and its roots in military applications. Thus Splinternet is a valuable source of material that should be carefully considered by all who are involved in Internet policy matters.
    _____

    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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  • Dissecting the “Internet Freedom” Agenda

    Dissecting the “Internet Freedom” Agenda

    Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski, The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedoma 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
    ~
    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.
    _____

    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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  • The Internet vs. Democracy

    The Internet vs. Democracy

    Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracya review of Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy  (The New Press, 2014)
    by Richard Hill
    ~
    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.

    _____

    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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  • "Internet Freedom": Digital Empire?

    "Internet Freedom": Digital Empire?

    Dan Schiller, Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisisa review of Dan Schiller, Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis  (University of Illinois Press, 2014)
    by Richard Hill
    ~
    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).

    2013 Berlin PRISM Demonstrations
    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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