Julia Powles

[Commentary] Google and Facebook have conveyed nearly all of us to this page, and just about every other idea or expression we’ll encounter today. Yet we don’t know how to talk about these companies, nor digest their sheer power. We call them platforms, networks or gatekeepers. But these labels hardly fit. The appropriate metaphor eludes us; even if we describe them as vast empires, they are unlike any we’ve ever known. Far from being discrete points of departure, merely supporting the action or minding the gates, they have become something much more significant. They have become the medium through which we experience and understand the world.

Facebook is not merely a “network” for connection, like the old phone network or electrical grid, as if it had no agency, and did not take a piece of every last interaction (or false start) between friends. When and how much we interact, we rely on Facebook to say. These are not mere “edge providers”, peripheral to infrastructure, or mere “applications” that we can select or refuse. The metaphors that we use – empire, medium, undertow – allude to the power of the all-knowing digital companies. Speaking clearly about this power and its effects is critical. Ultimately, the public needs more voice, more choice, more power. In the near term, we should pursue algorithmic accountability, independent auditing and consumer protection scrutiny, before we lose our agency as a public that is something other than their “user base.”

[Ellen P. Goodman is a professor of law at Rutgers University and co-directs the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law, RIIPL. Julia Powles is a legal academic working on technology law and policy at the University of Cambridge]

[Commentary] The US government announced, in a smart front-footed move, that it intends to release oversight of its long-treasured Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) contract under which the US Commerce Department contracts Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private US company, to perform key Internet administration tasks.

This prescriptive, carefully-limited announcement is the long-awaited fulfilment of a promise made 16 years ago when ICANN first came into being, and it would be the first time since the net's inception that the US government would abandon formal oversight. Of course, US vested interests in ICANN as a US-based company, subject to US law, and partial to US industry, remain, as does the almighty US technical and economic leverage over the digital ecosystem.

Contrary to reactions by US conservatives, this recent move barely diminishes that control, at least not immediately. Instead, it marks an early strategic play by the US to control future discussions of net governance. What it changes, to uncertain ends, is the balance of power between US public and private interests. We are moving inexorably towards a situation where enormous amounts of control are centered in private hands, often beyond the scope of effective regulation. This should be a matter of great concern.

[Powles researches and writes on law, science and technology at the University of Cambridge]