b2o: boundary 2 online

  • 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.

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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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  • "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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