Who's in Control? 1

Having completed the second part of Who Controls the Internet, section title “The Government Strikes Back,” whoops, “Government Strikes Back” (the third section is unfortunately not titled “Return of the Free Network”), I am ready to begin talking about it.

There is a recurring theme, in this section at least, which is emphasized by the two authors and which looks like a good place to begin threading in current net neutrality questions: “a government’s failure to crack down on certain types of Internet communication ultimately reflects a failure of interest or will, not of power.”1

    They set the Internet in a larger timeline of advances in communication technology which at first encounter seemed above the law’s national borders but were eventually placed into each nation-state’s legal system, accordingly.

    “When a revolutionary technology first enters the public realm, it emboldens outlaws and seems immune from government control... eventually, the commercialization of the new technology needed to make it available to the masses fuels demand for property rights and government-enforced rules. After an initial period of uncertainty, the government responds to business and consumer demand to assert the control over the new technology needed to make it widely available.”2

This is raised as an important point because it causes us to consider why it is that the Internet in the United States does not function like the Internet in China. What does Who Controls the Internet? have to say about this? I’ll give you a hint: they say it’s not because we don’t have the technology, or time, or money to do so. It’s because our government negotiates the legality of new technologies in the light of the ideological importance of free speech, artistic expression, and entrepreneurial innovation in the United States.
    Let me move to another point in order to elaborate.

Perhaps the other most important point Who Controls the Internet makes is that many of us still conceptualize the Internet as a borderless communication medium, but that ideology has been debunked this past decade, through a series of court rulings and structural adjustments. Authors like Thomas Friedman have continued to push the idea that the web will erase national boundaries--citizens cannot be sheltered from complete accessibility to the ideas, laws, and cultures of other countries (oh, and the west will rule!). The only way to prevent this is to refuse to develop an Internet system and fall behind technologically.   Friedman, as quoted by Goldsmith & Wu: “What makes the Internet so dangerous for police states is that they can’t afford not to have it, because they will fall behind economically if they do. But if they have it, it means they simply cannot control information the way they once did.”3    

    The reality, counter Goldsmith and Wu, is that the Internet is not a magical place divorced from the reality of the physical world, but is composed of a network of hardware (i.e. cables, PCs, etc.) and relay points (e.g. ISPs) which make up a horde of intermediaries between the sources of information, goods, etc., and their individual targets. If an activity taking place on the Internet is brought to the government’s attention and deemed illegal, people at these intermediary points can be held responsible. This is largely effective, even when the source material is located offshore, out of the reach of a State, or when the individual targets are too numerous or difficult to find.

Who Controls the Internet? addresses China’s Internet policies, exclusively for a chapter,

and here the Internet as an unstoppable-force-above-the-State! is disproven. China, we learn, has both effective control over their net and a more advanced network than the US. They accomplish this with a combination of methods: security firewalls that filter access, according to a list of banned sites garnered by the Internet Police, at router checkpoints or information “gateways” into China4 (“John Gilmore’s idea... that ‘the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it’ is thus reversed: the router itself has become the censor”5); internal control via compliant companies (Yahoo China employs human & software filters on words like “democracy” in their chatrooms); identification and arrest of individuals creating or accessing illegal content (and they countered the anonymity of Wi-Fi with WAPI, which I will get into at a later date).
   

This isn’t the most complete list, but it’s a good start for conveying the effectiveness of their system. This is the nasty side of government control, and probably the kind people think of when phrases like “American voters want the government to keep its hands off their Internet”6 pop up in blogs and news articles. It is also likely to be alluded to by telecommunications providers like Verizon when they claim that the FCC is over-regulating or overstepping boundaries of control: “We believe this assertion of authority goes well beyond any authority provided by Congress, and creates uncertainty for the communications industry, innovators, investors and consumers.”7

    Don’t be fooled. Verizon is the one that has been trying to filter sites like BitTorrent. Do you believe that BitTorrent runs on an illegal business model, because it encourages illegal filesharing of copywrited material? Well, if you do, to whom do you want to give the ability to make and enforce that decision?  Do we believe the bit about our government’s responsibility to the ideological importance of free speech, artistic expression, and entrepreneurial innovation?  Our government is supposed to act on our behalf and has systems in place (I know, supposedly) to do so. What about a corporation? If we limit their legal obligations to our government via the FCC, whom are they responsible to other than--yes, I’m going to say it--their own bottom line?  





i Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) 89.
2 124.
3 101.
4 93.
5 94.
6 “Go Figure: 21 Percent of Americans Oppose FCC Internet Regulation.” By Stuart Fox,             TechNewDaily, 30 December 2010.  
<http://www.technewsdaily.com/most-americans-oppose-fcc-internet-regulation-1890>
7 “Verizon Sues F.C.C. to Overturn Order on Blocking Web Sites.” By Edward Wyatt, January 20,         2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/business/media/21fcc.html>

Reading List

For the purpose of understanding my scope and perspective, here is the book list I am working with:

You Are Not A Gadget, A Manifesto  by Jaron Lanier 

Born Digital: Understanding The First Generation of Digital Natives  by John Palfrey 

The Master Switch: The Rise And Fall of Information Empires  by Tim Wu  

Who Controls The Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World  by Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu 

Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age  by Dawn Nunziato

 I will post other sources (and more books!) as they come up, including FCC documents, news sources, blogs, etc.

Not a Gadget, 1

You Are Not A Gadget considers tech-culture, and “2.0” digital mindsets more than it deals with politics of the Internet. Jaron Lanier did consider the cultural implications of an Internet that is “hogged” by a few (or even a single) hive-fed data dumping grounds (which in my mind leads almost directly to the central battle of net neutrality). He uses Wikipedia as his primary example, and caused me to reflect on my own methods of searching with questions like:

How close are most of the websites I search to Wikipedia itself? In other words, how many iterations of the same content do I bounce between, hosted on aggregators or news-streamers or bloggers? Who is actually generating content? How many unique voices to I come across, and is the number of individually created and operated websites shrinking as people opt for platforms like Facebook or Blogspot?

I haven’t yet digested Lanier’s book fully, and I certainly am skeptical of some of it. However, I am glad I began with You Are Not a Gadget because it lays a socially critical foundation that is familiar to me as an artist, with which I can approach the politics and history of the Internet. Here are some pieces I pulled from the end of the book, which was more engaging than the beginning half in my experience (perhaps I had to settle into it):

Jaron Lanier illustrates the merit of individual websites over an encyclopedia like Wikipedia by comparing what ThinkQuest began to accomplish with mathematics before Wikipedia derailed such ventures. ThinkQuest was

“a contest run by internet pioneers... in which teams of high school students competed for scholarships by designing websites that explained ideas from a variety of academic disciplines, including math... The contestants had to learn how to present ideas as wholes... their work included simulations, interactive games, and other elements that were pretty new to the world.”1

He makes the point that Wikipedia is easier, but rarely offers a unique or inspired encounter with information or ideas.  

“Even in a case where there is an objective truth that is already known, such as a mathematical proof,  Wikipedia distracts the potential for learning how to bring it into the conversation in new ways. Individual voice--the opposite of wikiness--might not matter to mathematical truth, but it is the core of mathematical communication."2

So the question that might connect this to the internet “pipeline” debate today is: will companies like Verizon channel searches through sites like Wikipedia if they begin divvying up bandwidth? Would that, in theory, be easier for them than serving all websites equally? Or will they limit what kinds of search engines are used? In both cases, our access to information will be reduced, and I imagine that people’s desire to publish their own, unique content might dwindle, knowing it wouldn’t be as accessible. 


1 Jaron Lanier You Are Not A Gadget, A Manifesto (New York: Borzoi Books, 2010)146.
2 147