Christopher T. Marsden, Communications Law Prof, University of Essex, UK Network Neutrality: European Law?
Common carriage is fair reasonable and non-discriminatory treatment of content whatever its nature. Eli M. Noam predicted in 1994 the end of common carriage, though the debate is much older. Every time there has been a debate on monopolies on the “carrying” nature of some specific infrastructures, the debate on common carriage has rised: inns and boats, railways, telegraphs, then modern networks, etc.
Network neutrality debate began as we know it in 1999 due to mergers of cable TV and broadband companies, and sparkled by Lessig and Lemley FCC submission The end of End-to-End.
Internet, as an open network, was regulated by common carriage, and some general rights were granted to it to avoid discrimination:
Interoperability
Interconnection
Privacy
Interception
There actually are a number of actual and considered practices that are about to — or already have — cross the red line of net neutrality, like different tariffs according to usage, different speeds, etc.
So far we have a Net Neutrality ‘lite’, with some decisions in Canada, the US or Europe, with ‘non-discrimination’ presumption subject to national security, law enforcement, public safety, etc. and a ‘reasonable network management’. And we will negotiate Net Neutrality ‘heavy’ about different speed rates, special and managed services, etc.
The problem with the many backdoors that the exceptions add to ISP regulation imply, in practical terms, that there are many possibilities for ISPs not to be neutral at all.
Presently, Chile (2010), Finland (2010) and the Netherlands (2011) have issued Net Neutrality specific laws, while Canada and Norway are on their way to it.
In Europe, we had a declaration to protect Net Neutrality and no will to implement nothing but just delaying it forever (despite officially being a debate and a formal proposal for a directive).
Discussion
Q: What can policy-makers do? A: The ECOSOC is actually doing research on Net Neutrality. Civil society is also working hard, as it did at the OECD high-level meeting on net neutrality. There has to be a serious negotiation, especially in matters as censorship and what is the acceptable level of censorship that we want.
The aim of this book is to analyze four dimensions of innovating government and the use of new technologies: legal, ethical, policy and technological dimensions. By joining authors from a diversity of backgrounds (law, ethics, public administration, political science, sociology, communications science, information science, and computer science) in one book, readers (academics, policy makers, legislators and others) are confronted with a variety of disciplinary perspectives on persistent themes, like privacy, biometrics, surveillance, e-democracy, electronic government, and identity management, that are central to today’s evolution of new modes of modern government.
I took part in this book with a chapter called Striving behind the shadow: the dawn of Spanish Politics 2.0 on the wake of Spain to Politics 2.0. Though the chapter was initially drafted in 2009 and then corrected and slightly updated in 2010, I am sad to acknowledge that things have not changed that much in Spain since then. Indeed, despite the recent upheavals in Spain around the so called “15M movement” (aka #spanishrevolution), online politics in general have evolved but very slightly, most of the times only in the field of political marketing rather than towards e-participation or e-democracy.
Following you can download a preprint version of the chapter and also scan through the bibliography I used. I am most grateful and definitely in debt with Simone van der Hof and Marga M. Groothuis for their patient endurance through the whole writing and editing progress. If you can read this lines they undoubtedly deserve much credit for it.
Arnstein, S. R. (1969). “A Ladder of Citizen Participation”. In Journal of the American Institute of Planners, Vol. 35, No. 4, July 1969, pp. 216-224. Boston: American Institute of Planners.
Jacobson, D. (1999). “Impression Formation in Cyberspace”. In Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 5 (1). Washington, DC: International Communication Association.
Peña-López, I. (2008). Ciudadanos Digitales vs. Insituciones Analógicas. Conference imparted in Candelaria, May 9th, 2008 at the iCities Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation. Candelaria: ICTlogy.
Peña-López, I. (2010). “Goverati: e-Aristocrats or the delusion of e-Democracy”. In Parycek, P. & Prosser, A. (Eds.), EDem2010. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on E-Democracy, 23-39. Keynote speech. Wien: Österreichische Computer Gesellschaft.
Peytibí, F. X., Rodríguez, J. A. & Gutiérrez-Rubí, A. (2008). “La experiencia de las elecciones generales del 2008”. In IDP. Revista de Internet, Derecho y Ciencia Política, (7). Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.
What we are presenting is the educational methodology that we apply in the Master in e-Administration and which has been evolving (for good, we guess) along the five years of existence of these postgraduate studies.
The communication begins with a presentation of the master, its eminently professional-aimed approach, its multidisciplinary approach (partly due to the multidisciplinary origin of our students: hi-level public servants, lawyers and computer scientists) and its stress in digital competence.
We explain how we are using the following tools to get to our goals:
Blogs (actually a blog which acts as an RSS aggregator);
slides or presentations (made by the students, not the teachers);
wikis + online debates; and
nanoblogging.
My speech goes from 2:35 to 12:50
The full text of the communication is in Spanish but the slides can be both downloaded in English and Spanish:
Within the framework of the workshop Participation and new technologies: challenges and opportunities organized by the Diputació de Barcelona, I have imparted the two first sessions (29 april and 5 may 2011):
Introduction to the Web 2.0, a really elementary approach to what is the Web 2.0, including a small choice of tools that are more commonly used in e-Participation;
The Web 2.0 in the public agora, which includes a categorization of Web 2.0 tools and applications and a long showcase of these tools and applications in practice.
The materials are in Catalan (though they are, I guess, easy to follow without much understanding of the language) and, as I said, they are really introductory to the topics. Here they are:
When disaffection on political parties and politicians is pervasive, most argue whether it could be possible, thanks to the Internet – and Information and Communication Technologies in general – forget the mainstream political system and let the citizenry express their own opinion, debate in virtual agorae and vote their representatives and policy choices directly. In other words, the claim is whether the actual intermediaries can be replaced by citizen networks or, in the limit, just be overridden.
Our aim in the following lines is to (1) explain that some dire (socioeconomic) changes are actually taking place,(2) why these socioeconomic changes are taking place and (3) infer, from this, what conditions shall take place in the future for (4) another wave of changes to happen that could eventually a much acclaimed new (e-)democracy. In a last section, we will discuss that despite lack of data, the trend seems to be just in the direction of the impoverishment of democracy, partly due to the weakening of political institutions.
Last 3-5 February 2011 I attended the conference Democracy and the Power of the Individual, organized by the Ditchley Foundation.
John Holmes, the Director of the Foundation, has published his traditional note on the conference. The note is not only worth reading as an approximate summary of what was discussed during the sessions, but especially as a good state-of-the-question list of the most relevant topics concerning democracy, politics, governance and citizenry. I honestly think that the paper definitely is a good starting point or a faithful snapshot of what is going on in the intersection of the Information Society and Politics in a very broad sense.
The Chatham House Rule wouldn’t allow me to liveblog the event as usual. Besides, that was one those events where you’re not a mere spectator but an active contributor, which puts taking notes down on your priorities pushing up thorough reflection and participation. There are, notwithstanding, some notes worth putting in order. As the Director has already published what can be regarded as the proceedings, I’d stick to my own ideas and reflections, acknowledging that many of them were triggered by the discussion and, thus, I should not be granted full ownership.
Power: empowerment vs. governance
As I explained in my position paper, I think that Information and Communication Technologies are both empowering individuals to be more active citizens and act freely within the system and, at the same time, are impoverishing democracy as we knew it. Cause and consequence at the same time, the reason behind this apparently inconsistent dichotomy is that democratic institutions have become weaker in recent years: the power to manage and change the system has shifted upwards, from national governments to supranational organizations and institutions thus depriving the former from power, while the individuals are circumventing those governments with their newly accessed digital technologies, thus strengthening their weakness.
(Political) disaffection is but a lack of hope to get to the strings that rule or can change the system, out of reach of their democratic representatives. From time to time, a quantum leap of power, a revolution, is set free and the man in the street can actually make contact with the actual decision makers.
In Tunisia or Egypt, social media fed mainstream media (mainly Al Jazeera) with grassroots-generated multimedia content and thus caught the attention of, amongst others, the US Secretary of State that was pressured by their own citizens to take sides and do not look away from the conflict.
When such things happen, is it easy to see social media as new ways of self-determination and the right to information a most valuable right.
Cause-led activism vs. policy-led politics
The problem with this self-determination that empowering ICTs provide might be that politician action becomes so atomized that once the quantum leap is over, leadership might be difficult to determine and policy making, planning, just too difficult to assemble.
The citizenry is, in this scenario, triggered by the very short term and is aware — or simply does not care — neither of the consequences in the long run nor on the possibilities of political negotiation and bargain.
In this sense, if decisions/negotiations take place just once in time, the negotiating parties have an incentive not to move and to bring discussion to stalemate situations. If, on the contrary, there is the possibility of continuous/sequential negotiation, along time, in the long run, with several rounds, negotiation becomes a game (in the sense of Game Theory) where there is a possibility to plan, to deal, to develop agreements, etc.
A short-sighted-politics scenario plus an hourglass-like distribution of power render information worthless. The abundance of information provided by openness, transparency, crowdsourcing… is useless, a placebo, if it is not aimed at bridging a democratic gap both in time (short-term vs. long-run) and space (national government vs. supranational elites).
From political institutions to democratic processes
This shift from the monolithic institution to the liquid political engagement has some causes in social media and the raise of the Web 2.0.
On the one hand, social media turns “tough politics” into “swallowable politics”, as they make complex discourses more granular, highly visual, and definitely straightforward. Once again, if social media had any kind of prominent role in the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, spread of the message through virality has been one of them.
On the other hand, social media has linked content with people, so that people are bound to their own opinions, images, sounds, videos… and personal relationships 24×7, in their presence or in their absence, as their social networking sites profiles speak for them all of the time. Indeed, this deep interlinking between people and constructs provides a much needed context in politics, in citizen action.
Last, but not least, social media enables emergent behaviours, that is, complex systems that perform collective activities after simple actions. Emergent systems usually create patterns that a wise observer should be able to recognize. While we focus on how governments and political parties should use social media as individual users do, it is highly probable that they would rather leverage the power of networks by effectively identifying the patterns that the addition of individual action creates.
Indeed, transparency has changed. It now comes with the possibility of feedback attached, and most of the times feedback is generated automatically: when one link is created, it becomes part of the existing mesh of content, people and the construct that they both make up. The possibility of emergency is enabled and, with it, the generation of patterns and mass (sometimes mob) trends.
Situated politics
What to do in such a scenario?
The world of education and training is in its way to reinvent itself and is already taking about situated learning: the need to learn happens everywhere and everywhen; we should thus be able to situate learning where and when it is needed.
Situated politics is about providing tools for participation when and where the citizen needs them to carry on a civic action. In this sense, we should also enable, encourage and foster participation or engagement that is tacit or informal. And social media can play an important role in linking both sides (tacit/explicit, informal/formal) of political participation.
One of the most thrilling issues in today’s politics is that we are facing a chicken and egg dilemma in democracy:
We want, first of all, to change our weakened democratic institutions, leaving for later the decision whether and how social media can contribute or impact on those institutions.
But social media are already questioning many fundamentals, assumptions and procedures of traditional democratic institutions, thus we need to know how and what are they doing to democracy.
And maybe, one of the first topics we should address is how political action has changed of shape. On the one hand, we have communities originated offline; on the other hand, we have networks originated or powered online. These are two social organizations that have different structures, power distributions, needs, degrees of commitment. How do we try and put to work together communities and networks?
