Internet Studies

I started searching for resources for my second essay for NET12 unit yesterday. It was the first time I didn’t even touch Google for my search. Instead I used the following:

• National Library of Australia
• Wiley InterScience
• Technorealism
• Internet Public Library
• Communication, Cultural and Media Studies
• CorpWatch
• Project Muse
• ProQuest

A couple of the above websites, asked me to purchase my selected articles, which I can understand but I didn’t plan on paying this time. The last two, Project Muse and ProQuest asked me to login before I could use their services. I logged in with my Curtin student login details. I appreciated this ability to allow me to use these resources. I also loved the abundance of academic articles I was able to search. There are some advantages of being a part of an academic institute, even if I’m only their student.

I had a very hard time trying to read Marcuse’s essay and even struggled with Feenberg’s. Here are some sentences I underlined while reading:

“Value neutral technology turns out to contain a value in itself after all, and that value is pure domination.

“How can merely neutral means favour domination over liberation? Isn’t the neutrality of the means a guarantee of its indifference with respect to end?

“The modern approach, since Machiavelli, focuses exclusively on the machinery of coercion and consent without regard for the purpose of the whole… ambition is now taken no less seriously than true public purpose since both are regarded as merely subjective.

“Marcuse concludes that science and technology need to be reformed at the most fundamental level, the level of technological rationality itself.

“The new technical logos must include a grasp of essences, and technology must be oriented towards realizing inherent potentialities.

“Like Heidegger he [Marcuse] sees technology as more than technical, as more even than political; it is the form of modern experience itself, the principal way in which the world is revealed.

“All this hangs together at the level of pure theory, but concretely, what would a modern techne be like? Marcuse argues that it would incorporate values in its very structure, that it would be essentially oriented towards the good.

“Who is going to invent those principles, and what will they be like?… Marcuse did not believe it possible to replace technology with some sort of mystical unity of man and nature.

“Perhaps Marcuse had more modest ambitions and merely hoped that technology as we know it would be used to enhance rather than destroy life.

“From that standpoint, his [Marcuse] concept of technological rationality cannot be identical with the formal concepts of efficiency and control, but must have a social content as a socially specific pattern of goal orientation.”

I am aware I’m not doing justice to the essay by selecting just these few sentences but these are the ones I was thinking about as I was reading through. I read Machiavelli a few years ago and it is a good example of today’s western essence. Our view of the world and how we choose to live our lives is very subjective, self-centred, oriented about the self. It is an individualistic view where I’m the most important object and I will use whatever I can for self-actualization and advancement. But I digress. Marcuse’s aspiration to have some rationality in technology might be as feenberg says “merely hoped”. How can you reconstruct an already existing concept?

In Langdon Winner’s “Who will be in Space?” we see some similar concepts but also many others. Winner talks about the “end of work” and “end of career”. It is not a new concept. Ten years ago I learnt that there is a good chance the common person will change jobs at least four times during his working life. The concept of one job for life doesn’t exist anymore. People get bored with what they do and go looking for a new endeavour but mostly, we need to keep up-to-date with current technologies. We keep learning new skills all the time.

“People’s orderly role in production was to be rewarded with an equally orderly role in consumption”.

Isn’t the equivalent phrase is “keeping up with the Jones’s”? One of the causes of current society’s many problems is material gain. Because we want stuff, we have to work to be able to get it.

“The ultimate promise of modern society was held to be individual, material satisfaction. Missing from this picture was any attention to collective good and problems.” [emphasis is mine]

Sounds like a concept raised in the previous essay. Western society is built on individualism. Looking after me. What’s in it for me? How high can I climb so everyone could see me? me me me.

“How can people recreate selfhood when everyone is expandable, could become a more serious issue then even the decline of real wages”.

I disagree. Everyone is expendable—now and before. The opposite can create much bigger problems when people think they are indispensable.

Winner also talks about the inevitability of technology and the campaign announcements on decisions that were made for the consumers without asking their opinion. I think it would be great if many of these choices when optional to be decided by the consumer and I think society will benefit from such a thing. But I also think that in some (not many) cases, the consumers help shape what technology becomes dominant.

And for a closing line, here is a sarcastic sentence from Winner I liked:

“How reassuring; evidently the right design is headed our way and again we have not had to lift a finger”.

References:
Andrew Feenberg, Can Technology Incorporate Values? Marcuse’s Answer to the Question of the Age (1998)
A re-assessment of Marcuse’s theory of technology, which might help you put his work in context.

Langdon Winner, ‘Who Will We Be in Cyberspace?’, from The Network Observer 1995

References

Bell D., (2001), Storying Cyberspace 1: Material and Symbolic Stories in An Introduction to Cybercultures, London, Ruthledge

Dery M., (1996), Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, Hodder & Stoughton

Thomas S., (2006), The End of Cyberspace and Other Surprises, The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

According to Wikipedia:
Cyberpunk is a science fiction genre noted for its focus on “high tech and low life”. Its name was originally developed as a marketing term and coined by Bruce Bethke in his short story “Cyberpunk” written in 1980, so that his novel would have more appeal to readers…Cyberpunk plots often center on a conflict among hackers, artificial intelligences, and mega corporations. They tend to be set in a near-future Earth, rather than the far future settings or galactic vistas found in novels like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation or Frank Herbert’s Dune. The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias, but tend to be marked by extraordinary cultural ferment, and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its creators…

According to CybrPunk:
Cyberpunk is a genre that could be attached to alternatively the Science Fiction side of fiction or the horror side of fiction. Additionally, many people consider cyberpunk culture to merely represent the culture that is attached to the Internet and computers. In essence, there is a difference between the cyberpunks of today and the cyberpunks of the future.

Cyberpunk, essentially, is a form of speculative fiction that deals with a high-technology future. Cyberpunk is almost never happy, and usually leaves the reader in a ‘life sucks’ mood. The reader should not want to enter the little world that you create. Cyberpunk is a warning as to what might happen in the future.

Required reading material for people who want to know more about cyberpunk is:

• Neuromancer, by William Gibson
• Count Zero, by William Gibson
• Snow Crash, by Neil Stephenson
• Mirrorshades, a cyberpunk anthology, edited by Bruce Sterling

According to CyberPunk Review:
Brief Definition of Cyberpunk: created by Illusivemind, here is a single sentence definition of cyberpunk:

Cyberpunk is about expressing (often dark) ideas about human nature, technology and their respective combination in the near future.

While some see cyberpunk to be a long-since dead relic of the 80s, I consider it to be alive and well. There are many aspects of “cyberpunk-ness” but these are what I consider the most important cyberpunk themes:

• Negative Impact of technology on humanity
• Fusion of man and machine
• Corporate control over society
• Story focuses on the underground
• Ubiquitous Access to Information
• Cyberpunk visuals and style

Here is what I submitted for this assignment:

From its inception, the Internet was designed and created as a network that could not be centrally controlled. Since then, its astonishing growth rate made it even harder to control. The Internet cannot be governed from physical, logical and social standpoints.

Firstly, what is Internet governance? Law professor Yochai Benkler (2000) proposed to divide information architecture such as the Internet into three layers: infrastructure, logical and content layers. In other words, the physical, logical and social aspects that should be addressed when governing the Internet.

With regards to the infrastructure layer, the inability to govern the Internet lies in its past and its architecture. The Internet was developed by academics as a network of separate networks in order to withstand a nuclear attack. These scholars developed a decentralised peer-to-peer network with no hierarchy structure. All the network’s nodes are equal to access and contribute to the network without precedence. That is, there is no one single network, but decentralised network of networks with no central server. Thus, there is no one central authority to control and exert its rules over the Internet (Maslen, 1996).

The Internet protocols suite uses a packet based data transfer protocol. This protocol divides the content into individual packets of data and sends them to their destination through the shortest available route without any regards to their actual content. There is no gatekeeper along the way to verify legibility of the content. Therefore, within the infrastructure layer, at the moment, there is no means of exercising control.

Many of the Internet administration duties in the logical layer are currently being overseen by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and do not represent the shift to internationalisation of the Internet. ICANN responsibilities include management of Domain Names registrations, IP address space allocations and management of generic and country code Top-Level Domains to name a few. Even though ICANN roles are mainly technical, they still have political, economic and social ramifications. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is registered as non-profit public benefit corporation acting under US law and not a global one (King, 2004).

The problem is the difficulty in creating international cooperation and a balanced representation. Even though the Internet is primarily an American invention, it continues to spread world-wide. It is important that all the countries involved receive adequate representation. Many wish that the Internet Governance will be passed to the UN, or any other apolitical body without hidden motives of political or capital gain. Despite this, the reality is that developed countries are represented far more than developing countries and that intergovernmental cooperation may still be a utopian dream (Kapur, 2005).

One of the more comprehensive aspects of the three is the content layer where the actual Internet users interact. This layer involves issues of content access manipulation as well as legislation boundaries and jurisdiction. There are a few suggested models for governance such as the benevolent dictator, centralised democracy, peer production or community node-based user governance (Goldmann, 2006), none of which deals effectively with the most prevalent nature of the Internet; a decentralised network of networks encompassing the globe.

Content regulation and censorship need to be integrated into the Internet infrastructure in order to be utilised. One of the Internet qualities that aided its remarkable growth was its liberating ability to broadcast from every node. Conventional broadcasting mediums must abide by censorship regulations, as opposed to the Internet where every individual user can express their views openly and freely. Various governments would like to exert some level of content regulation and some countries practice it more than others. China’s scheme of Internet censorship and surveillance is the most advanced in the world. The Chinese government built its censorship technology into the Internet infrastructure in order to be able to block user access to politically sensitive and objectionable content (Human Right Watch, 2006). Nevertheless, China is not a democracy and therefore should not be considered as a model for Internet governance. Increased governmental oversight and regulation of content on the web could hinder its openness and endanger its prospect development. However, at the present time—unless the technology has been developed intentionally, as in the case of China—there aren’t any technical mechanisms to practice censorship on the Internet.

Continuing with the content layer, traditional legal doctrines and national jurisdictions cannot be applied to the Internet due to its international nature. The Internet has developed as an open, free, possibly democratic medium but which comes with a price—Internet pollution and Cybercrime. These encompass such troubles as spam emails, spyware, viruses, identity theft and frauds as well as copyright and intellectual property rights infringements. Legal laws are linked to physical locality whereas the Internet is not limited by geographical or physical boundaries. This creates a problem with “off-shore” legislation. When the offender remains out of existing real-life legal boundaries, which local law will be implemented? (Johnson, Crawford & Palfrey, Jr., 2004)

A centralised government is not a possibility because of diversity in values in different countries. Different regulations and legal issues make it impossible to create one set of rules to fit all on a global scale. It also raises questions about what physical powers will this suggested body have to enforce its laws across the cyber space? Or how could it implement its regulations on a local basis? In “The Accountable Internet” (Johnson, Crawford & Palfrey, Jr., 2004), it was suggested that just like our real world, in our virtual world, we should exercise relevant and necessary practices of self-governance. Still, to go beyond this suggestion and assume that one set of laws will fit all is not a reality.

When we talk about governing the Internet we actually talk about control. Who and how can control the Internet? The medium in itself does not allow for its suppression. A centralised body with complete international cooperation to exert its rules on every country that connects to the network might be a utopian dream. Existing legal regimes are not suitable across the cyberspace. The inevitable answer to this question is the Internet cannot be governed.

References:

Benkler Y. (2000). From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access, New York University School of Law. Retrieved March 30, 2007.

Goldmann A. (2006). Community Node-Based User Governance (CNBUG): Applying Craigslist’s Techniques to Decentralized Internet Governance, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Retrieved March 30, 2007.

Human Right Watch, (2006). “Race to the Bottom” Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship. Retrieved March 30, 2007.

Johnson D., Crawford S. & Palfrey, Jr., J. (2004). The Accountable Internet: Peer Production of Internet Governance, Virginia Journal of Law & Technology, University of Virginia, vol. 9, no. 9. Retrieved March 30, 2007 .

King I. (2004). Internet Governance: An Analysis of the Need for Change School of Law, Languages & Social Sciences.

Kapur A.( 2005). Internet Governance - A Primer, United Nations Development Programme–Asia-Pacific Development. Retrieved March 30, 2007.

Maslen P. (1996). Control, Change and the Internet. Retrieved March 30, 2007.

Well, I just submitted my first uni essay for this course. The assignment was to write a 1000 words essay about: The Internet Cannot Be Governed - Discuss. It was a good exercise in writing, grammar and proper referencing. I am actually a bit afraid and hopeful at the same time of the outcome.
Keep my fingers crossed.

Benevolent Dictatorship Model

Centralised non-democratic governance where the users consent to terms and conditions of the service provider/dictator. The perfect example is AOL.com online community.

Democracy Model

The users elect a body of representative that is entrusted to govern the Internet for a limited time. One of the biggest problems with this model is differing global values, customs and attitudes. Also, all the countries need to agree to accept the body’s decision. This can cause a problem with non-democratic countries such as China, Cuba and Iran that currently limit their citizen’s Internet access.
Moreover, it would be unlikely that Internet-based government would have the authority and police power to enforce its rulings.

Peer Production Model

In this model, there isn’t a centralised body but a decentralised and self-governed by the user. As a perfect example, could be eBay or many other communities’ web sites. Problems with this model include difficulties in ability to keep anonymous, misuse of trust and as usual vast geographic boundaries and locations with different laws and regulations.

Community Node-Based User Governance

This is the model that is suggested in this article. This model is decentralised and democratic as well as self-governed. In this model, there are real-life localities named community nodes where each user can help govern the community without the need to rely on a central body. Each community member decides independently what content (and not user) should or should not be removed from the community.

Here are things that came to my mind while reading about proposed model:

1. What if a few users decided together to flag or eliminate postings? They may not be able to remove a member but they might have interior motives to affect their actions and decisions.
   Quote: …angry online mob that could collectively fulfil the flagging threshold requirements of posts they disagreed with… sophisticated technological safeguards that limit the amount individual user can flag in a day… (page 24)
   These actions does not have to happen within a day or be done by one person but it can be done against someone.
2. Quote: Hence, proactive and interested users can reliably act on behalf of and in the best interests of their community. (page 15). Maybe I am biased because I like to decide for myself what is for my best interests but to have others decide that? And in the best interest of whom?
3. This model is better suited for geographically-based communities (physical locality) but one of the best features of the Internet is its universally access to any resource anywhere. I believe this models rellies too heavily on real world communities that cannot be implemented to the web.
4. How would those community nodes get initiated? Also, who will be in charge of removing the bad content? What if one community finds it offensive but another community doesn’t? This model really divides a medium that by definition is open and accessible to all. What if the accused didn’t agree with the flagging and wanted to protect himself? Who will he turn to for arbitration purposes?
5. This model is taken from Craigslist web site, which works well for one site but how can you imply from it to the entire of the Internet a s a global model.
6. The US First Amendment discusses freedom of speech. Even though it is not a universal law, I believe it is a good one to abide by. This model does not support freedom of speech.
7. I also a flagging system that is automated without the need for human interference and review a bit scary especially when involving actual living persons. Also, who will decide the flagging threshold? And will it be decided by click streams? These can be manipulated (as suggested in point 1).
8. Quote: …local representatives elected to oversee a node… (page 23)
   What local representatives? How can you define a local body when many community web sites on the web spread further than geographic locality?

In summary, I think that all the above models have their disadvantages but I strongly believe that the Community Node-Based User Governance is not the solution for governing the Internet.

Link: Alice Goldman, Community Node-Based User Governance (CNBUG): Applying Craigslist’s Techniques to Decentralized Internet Governance, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (last viewed on March 26, 2007)

No comments

Here is a summary and my thought on Internet Governance - A Primer by Akash Kapur.

What is “Internet Governance”?

There is a conceptual confusion as to what Internet Governance means. Should it be approached in a pure technical way or also include the social, legal and economic consequences. Secondly, how can you have one government to rule the Internet in all the countries in the world? And thirdly, would existing organisations suffice or will we need a new system?

Internet Governance Issues by Layers

The Internet can be broken into three layers with each having different matters that need to be addressed:

• Infrastructure Layer—the technical architecture of the network.
• Logical Layer—administration of IP allocations and the Domain Name System as well as the software programs and protocols.
• Content Layer—what the web suers contribute and on this level, we would like to resolve issues concerning cybercrime. Intellectual properties rights and pollution control (for example spam emails)

The Internet is so difficult to govern due to its infrastructure that there isn’t one central server and that every node has equal rights to be able to contribute to the Internet content.

My thoughts on these issues so far are:
The Internet purpose when it started was to enable information sharing between scholars; which is what I believe is the biggest advantage to its success. When you think of it, it is a contradiction to military concept of control of information and knowledge from the top on a need to know bases. But it didn’t take DARPA long to disconnect their network from the Internet one once it expanded into public domain.

These ideas are important to acknowledge because the internet’s success does, to a significant extent depend on its free and open culture…. (Page 7)

Back to the Primer…

The Infrastructure Layer

In this context we need to look at three levels of Internet access providers: international, national and local (regional) service providers. There are no international regulations and developing countries suffer due to high costs and no financial gain to small business in developing the infrastructure in regional areas. Also, lack of content stored on local servers increases the costs of international connectivity. By having a governing body in place, we can ensure better development of the network infrastructure in undeserved areas to provide universal access to all.

The Logical Layer

Without standards specifications, the Internet can be developed by private organisations using proprietary specifications that will restrict the openness and interoperability of the Internet and its components. A good example is the browser standards wars a few years ago when some web sites worked (and some still are) only on Internet Explorer browser.

Furthermore, the management of the Domain name System is entrusted in the hands of ICANN, which functions under the US government and apparently favours some industries over others. This management should be done by a neutral apolitical organisation.

The Content Layer

Internet pollution is a general term that refers to illegal and harmful actions such as spam emails, viruses, spyware and more. These reduce the level of trust of the average user in the network even more.
Other issues in this layer involve identity theft, cybercrime, financial fraud, security attacks, copyright issues and more. Another issue is the criminal liability of service providers.

Link: Akash Kapur (2005), Internet Governance: A Primer, UNDP-APDIP

Ian Peter is trying to find an answer to who really invented the Internet but all he does is prove that the US didn’t invent the Internet. I think that he might have had a problem with his definition of what he was looking for; was it concepts and ideas of an Internet, the actual transmission of the first packets, the protocols that control the transmission, the hardware and infrastructure or the GUI applications?

One of the arguments in the article I truly agree with is its ending paragraph:

Multiple events, multiple players, and multiple points of origin need to be mentioned in any sensible understanding of the emergence of the Internet. Any claim by a nation, project, person, or team of individuals, or participants in any single event to “the beginnings of the Internet” is rubbish. Further, any claim that the validity or legitimacy of any structure or arrangement can be justified as Internet governance purely because it arose from one of these events is false.

How could we really define the start of the Internet? It is a process that multiple events contributed to its creation. Another example could be the creation of the first form of colour photographic reproduction. The Lumiere brothers developed the first properly viable colour photographic process in 1907 and it used on ideas a James Clark Maxwell had demonstrated more than 40 years earlier (1). Besides how does anything start? If you ask me it starts with an idea but an idea is not enough to turn into a reality.

Further more, the decision on what events were the most significant can be a relative opinion. One of the exercises in NET11 is to select what are the five most important steps in the history of the Internet. There was not one student that selected the same five events.

Another thing that seems sounds like sour grapes is the position taken against the US:
Quoting Kim Veltman (emphaisis is mine):

It seems false to claim that America invented the Internet and is simply misleading to argue that because America invented the Internet, it is their right to control its governance through organizations such as the Internet Assigned Names Authority (IANA) and more recently the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

I am not trying to argue against this claim but the reality is that the Internet has developed firstly in the USA before spreading to the rest of the world. How else will you explain the concentration of services available in the states? Or how come the international TLD, which every new business desires is the .com and not .com.us? On the other, why isn’t the governance authorities located in Switzerland, home of CERN?

In the end, though, it was another way to learn about the history of the Internet, by sharing some of the gossip with us, the readers.

1. Tom Fraser and Adam Banks, 2004, Designer’s Color Manual, Part 2 Chapter 4 Page 84

Link: Peter Ian (May 2005), So, who really did invent the Internet?
and a summary at Circle ID

In his article “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Langdon Winner discusses a claim that technical things have political qualities. Winner starts by stating an obvious belief that people and nots things have politics but also says that technological advances have been described as democratising, liberating forces. These are political terms.

Winner illustrates two ways in which things may contain political properties:

1. Arrangement of a technological system can be a convenient means of establishing patterns of power and authority.
2. Certain technologies are inherently political and require certain types of political relationship.

Here are a few selected excerpts from the article:

What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded.

Robert Moses’ bridges, after all were used to carry automobiles from one point to another; McCormick’s machines were used to make metal castings; both technologies, however, encompasses purposed beyond their immediate use…

This concept as been discussed in the course before: you review the Internet without considering its social, political and economical perspectives.

What we have here instead of an ongoing social processes in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns, patterns that bear the unmistakeable stamp of political and economic power.

To see the matter solely in terms of cost cutting, efficiency, or the modernization of equipment is to miss a decisive element in the story… The things we call “Technologies” are ways of building order in our world… In the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are situated differently and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness.

That “democracy stops at the factory gate” was taken as a fact of life that had nothing to do with the practice of political freedom. But can the internal politics of technology and the politics of the whole community be so separated?

But as society adapts to the more dangerous and apparently indelible features of nuclear power, what will be the long-range toll in human freedom?

This is a good question. Winner says that company’s structure cannot be a democratic one if it aims to profit. I can give an example to support that from the opposite direction. In Israel, the kibbutz’s structure was built on a concept of equality. All for one and one for all. One of the reasons that structure has failed was because the kibbutzes were not profitable and many bankrupted and had to be dismantled to become private properties.

One of the last points Winner raises in the article is the prospect of sacrificing civil liberties. This point can be easily transferred to the Internet medium. Governments use “Protecting us, our freedom and our way of life” as a reason to monitor our activities on the web.

Reference: Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1986) pp. 19-39