Allocating Power and Assigning Responsibility in the Internet Society

-- By CeliaDiederichs - 11 Oct 2019

Introduction

The original purpose of the Internet was to empower the individual by giving decentralized groups an immense ability of self-education through obtaining and sharing information.

A reference would be helpful. So far as I know the sources, to attribute to the "original" efforts to build a network of network, individual users were less the focus of design than organizations, like the US military and the research community, that needed to interconnect large numbers of computers (long before personal computers were a technological reality) regardless of their hardware and software architectures in a design that didn't create critical points of failure in hierarchically-privileged nodes.

Today the source of power in the digital era is data that is produced by us. Yet we claim to be powerless in regaining freedom in the digital era.

Who are the "we" here who are "claiming" to be powerless?

This paper analyzes how effective power in the Internet is allocated between the people, the private sector and governmental institutions and how this power may be measured and utilized.

Empowering and Exploiting the People

There is no evidence to believe the people are no longer empowered but exploited by the Internet. Convinced of end-user responsibility, Eyal argues that users owe themselves protection by changing their Internet habits.

What makes Nir Ayal an authority whose name gives weight to an opinion? If it is something about who he is or what he does, you should convey that.

With this I agree, acknowledging that there is an unhealthy sense of carelessness in how we allow the Internet dictate our lives. We cannot allow ourselves to dwell in the illusion that infringements upon our individual privacy rights are without consequence or outweighed by the convenience of technological tools. Cambridge Analytica proves that this is pure pretense.

The explanation for our passivity may lie within our fondness of the precise tools that threaten our dignity. Our readiness to surrender privacy rights in exchange for comfort is discomforting to say the least. Whilst the Bystander Effect may offer an explanation, it does not exculpate us from enslaving ourselves to technology by accepting default configuration, arbitrary terms of service or unknown backdoors. Most citizens will reason their innocence with a lack of the necessary tools to lead change within the Internet Society. Abstinence is supposedly the only but socially unacceptable mean of self-protection. In light of the many ways in which the Internet has empowered citizens, this reasoning seems circular. However leveraging the power of technology requires IT expertise that most do not have and in battling for our data we face resourceful monopolies.

Who is "us" and "our"? If we are reading an analysis of "how effective power in the Internet is allocated between the people, the private sector and governmental institutions and how this power may be measured and utilized," which is the commitment you've given, shouldn't the sociology be precise?

The Rise of Big Tech

The dominant players of Big Tech have created a net that is not designed to be unraveled by its ordinary user.

But they don't create the Net: they use the underlying architecture and therefore they have changed effective power, your ostensible subject, but they have not altered the consensus-based structure of governance over design, which you haven't mentioned yet, and which is the distinguishing political characteristic of the system.

The business model of capitalizing our data would crumble if we and not the private sector actually remain in control of our data. Measured by the volume of data within the private sector and the value of human resource within Big Tech, this area beholds the most power over the Internet society.

This assumes that the valuable data is "ours," in the sense that someone possessed it before the platform company did. But that's not true about aggregations and inferences. Those they created, and a simple approach to data ownership will have the reverse result from the one you assert here. This complexity in the analysis cannot be ignored.

The rise of power of the private sector is also demonstrated by the various ways in which private companies begin to resemble sovereign nations or how they are addressed by national sovereigns on eye-level. Zuckerberg has become the creator of his own version of what he names a "Supreme Court" for content moderation on Facebook. Just one month before that, Germany saw national sovereignty over monetary policy threatened by the release of Facebook's digital currency libra. The appointment of a unique ambassador to the technology industry by Denmark welcomes Big Tech on the stage of global diplomacy.

Which part of this is actually different from the existing role of the fossil fuel companies in the geopolitical environment, and how? The political analysis needs to be conducted on a factual rather than rhetorical basis. That means comparison between the political facts and arrangements under discussion and other similar arrangements or states of fact, so that both similarities and differences can focus our thinking.

No matter how closely private institutions mirror governmental bodies in name or function, one essential difference remains: private bodies are not bound but protected by the constitution. Whilst profiting from certain laws, private organs will circumvent regulatory burden by tactically maneuvering through the cyber-sphere. Nor are they bound by any ethical code.

Which of these points actually differentiates private from state power? Or is it the similarity rather than the difference that is being asserted, despite the grammar?

Despite their immense power and capability to cause change they are not equals in global politics.

Governmental Institutions and Surveillance

Traditionally a fundamental tool for an increase of power through technology attributed pre-dominantly to the government is mass surveillance.

What does "traditionally" mean? Where is the "tradition" of mass surveillance?

In Western democratic societies surveillance is commonly regarded as the biggest threat to individual freedom. However, the idea that we shall limit surveillance to regain power from the government is not shared universally. A glance at more authoritarian regimes enjoying wide-spread and unquestioned support proves that power obtained through surveillance, even if as far-reaching as China's social credit system, is power not everyone wants to take from the government.

The words above are not a sentence. The idea communicated by the paragraph is not clear. It seems to be that authoritarian societies are more enthusiastic about surveillance than democratic ones, which is truism rather than analysis. Rewriting is needed.

Whilst governments may strongly compete for power with the private sector, they have more consequential means to exercise their power due to their police power. However, governmental action is often hindered by bureaucracy, regulations, rigorous procedure and is exposed to scrutiny. This inflexible framework and the slow pace of institutional power might be most detrimental to its utilization. The disruptive character of technology allocates most power to those who have the highest adoption rate to technological development. Although the Internet was intended to liberate us from authoritarian regimes, we have no serious advantage over the government through the Internet. This is because Internet tools accessible to the vast majority of the citizens are also instruments of the government. Instead of using airborne leaflet propaganda, the Chinese 50c army now uses social media to fabricate approximately 448 million propaganda posts every year.

Interaction and Isolation

There is an unequal access to sources of power in and over the Internet society and an imbalanced array of means to employ power amongst the people, private entities and the government.

That's a definition of the existence of politics. What else is the paragraph meant to contribute?

The most powerful figure is one arising from interactive pairing of cross-sectoral tools. So far we observe the potential of such partnership between the private and public sector for instance in Xinjiang, where the government employs face-recognition algorithms from A.I. companies to suppress minority groups. We also but less frequently encounter an immense power of disruption where two sectors unite in one person such as Snowden, who utilized governmental knowledge to act in his capacity as a member of a democratic society.

The above examples show that two-party collaboration will leave the third in dangerous isolation. We need alliances. Our biggest bargaining power in finding one will come from the threat, if serious, of abandoning precisely those machines through which we empower the other sectors.

This draft sets out an ambition it does not achieve, to explain "how effective power in the Internet is allocated between the people, the private sector and governmental institutions and how this power may be measured and utilized." That would involve explaining how the Internet is governed. But the draft says nothing about the institutions of network governance. As I mentioned at the beginning of the course, a network made of pipes and switches is "made" of the behavior of the piping entities, which we generally call "telecommunications services providers." Effective power in the Net is thereby allocated in substantial part by the politics of telecommunications, which the draft does not discuss either. The behavior of switches, the other primary component of the Net, is determined by software; the draft says nothing about the politics of the software structures in the Net, though that has been a large element in the course.

So it seems to me that the primary route to improvement is to decide whether the draft's ambition or its current contents should be kept, while the other is removed. To write about the declared subject is to reduce most of the existing discussion and add other elements that are more germane to the topic. To retain the current discussion is to pursue a different goal, which should be clearly stated at the outset. My interlinear comments were directed at the gap between what was promised and what was delivered, which means they may not be particularly useful if the next draft is fundamentally redesigned. But whichever direction you choose, it will be important to look closely at sentences in the first person plural: "we" and "our" will almost always need careful definition on the occasions when there are useful at all in political analysis.

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