Medium

[Commentary] In late October, I attended the sixth annual Freedom Online Conference (FOC) in San José, Costa Rica. It was my third FOC, including Tallinn in 2014 and Ulaanbaatar in 2015. Every year, I am thrilled to see the growing number of governments joining the Coalition to promote and protect human rights online through multilateral diplomacy and multi-stakeholder engagement. This year, more than 200 participants representing government, civil society, business, and academia from 47 countries came together to discuss the role of the Coalition in advancing Internet freedom.

A worrying trend at the top of the conference agenda was the global rise in intentional shutdowns of the Internet and mobile networks. According to modest estimates, some 25 governments on almost every continent have intentionally prevented or disrupted access to such networks more than 50 times since the beginning of 2016, a rate of at least once every six days. Earlier in 2016, we joined consensus at the UN Human Rights Council in passing a resolution condemning intentional disruptions of access to or dissemination of information online, in violation of human rights law. This Internet freedom resolution, which calls on States to refrain from and cease network disruptions, echoes a FOC joint statement from 2011 that labeled “mandatory blocking” of social networking technologies and platforms to be “an extreme measure” strictly subject to human rights law.

[Tom Malinowski is the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor]

[Commentary] On March 14, 2014, Turkey shut down Twitter. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced, “We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.” He also said Turkey would “rip out the roots” of Twitter. Yes, and when I was in Istanbul last week, Twitter worked fine. That’s because Twitter’s roots are in the Internet.

Even if Turkey rips the roots out of the phone and cable systems that provide access to the Net, they can’t rip out the Net itself, because the Net is not centralized. It is distributed: a heterarchy rather than a hierarchy. At the most basic level, the Net’s existence relies on protocols rather than on how any .com, .org, .edu or .gov puts those protocols to use. The Internet is a world of ends rather than a world of governments, companies and .whatevers: a giant zero between everybody and everything on it. It cannot be reduced to any of those things, any more than time can be reduced to a clock. The Net is as oblivious to usage as are language and mathematics — and just as supportive of every use to which it is put. And, because of this oblivity, The Net supports all without favor to any.

[Doc Searls is a Fellow at the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barabara and alumnus Fellow of the Berkman Center at Harvard.]

[Commentary] Regardless of how much states want to assert a monopoly on cyber violence, any future conflict — and most conflicts are simultaneously becoming cyber conflicts — will be as much in the private sector as in the public. Could this constant low-grade conflict, made possible by cyberspace, inure decision makers to the danger of real war, making the “real thing” all the more likely? Certainly the lubricating language of “win-win cooperation” has long since given way to what seems to be a chronic irritability and tetchiness among world leaders.

Cyber is part of that, this new period of anxious vulnerability and a lack of endings; cyber undermines the state without replacing it. As one person concludes, in a rather anguished passage on cyber deterrence, “The fact was, no one in a position of power or high-level influence had thought this through.”

[Malcomson is a visiting media fellow with Carnegie Corporation of New York.]

[Commentary] The lesson was clear: think tanks could reach their audiences using a tactic borrowed from modern politicians — speak directly to your preferred constituencies, going over the heads of the news media middlemen who once offered the sole route to a mass audience. Today, going straight to your audience is standard practice. Indeed, many think tanks draw a million or more visitors a month, and they feature not only classics of the milieu (e.g., 150-page research papers), but also a range of new content, everything from blog posts, videos, and audio podcasts, to complex multimedia productions. The Nieman Foundation, itself something of a media think tank, featured the Brookings Institution’s website on its own pages recently, noting the think tank was publishing 20 pieces a day and netting 1.5 million unique users monthly. “Go back 20 years: for a piece written by a Brookings scholar to be perceived as impactful and topical, it would have to be published in the New York Times or the Washington Post,” Brookings Vice President of Communications David Nassar told NiemanLab.org. “Now we have the capacity to publish this content ourselves. Obviously, the New York Times is still important, but we have the capacity to deliver our own message as well.”

[Michael Moran is a visiting media fellow with Carnegie Corporation of New York.]

[Commentary] Once Facebook got into the business of curating the newsfeed rather than simply treating it as a timeline, they put themselves in the position of mediating what people are going to see. They became a gatekeeper and a guide. This is not an impossible position. It’s their job. So they’d better make a priority of being good at it. But those who argue strongly for Facebook’s responsibility to weed out the good from the bad also get it wrong.

For the better part of two decades, Google has worked tirelessly to thread the needle between curating an algorithmic feed of a firehose of content that can be created by anyone and simply picking winners and losers. And here’s the key point: they do this without actually making judgments about the actual content of the page. The “truth signal” is in the metadata, not the data.

[Tim O'Reilly is the Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media.]

[Commentary] Josh Silver is the president of Represent.US. I’ve been an advisor and supporter of Represent.US, but I’ve not been engaged in the campaign they waged in this election cycle. That campaign—plus what happened in Maine—may be the only good news from November 8th. For in South Dakota, voters supported a referendum that will give candidates for state office vouchers to run their campaigns. Read that again: In a state that voted 62% for Donald Trump, 52% voted to publicly fund state campaigns.

Washington state was another victory, but not as surprising. Voters there overwhelmingly (63%) supported an initiative attacking Citizens United. That had happened in many states before—including in the Red State of Montana. But it confirmed the continued frustration that Americans have with a system in which a tiny tiny few can spend unlimited amounts to influence an election. (And yes, I’m thinking specifically about the $7 million spent in the final weeks in Zephyr’s district, reversing a lead into a defeat.) (The other real victory was in Maine. Maine voters have passed a ranked choice vote initiative—giving voters the ability to vote for more than one candidate, by ranking their choices. This will be a key part of fixing Congress—as will what South Dakota did yesterday, (and which Maine had done more than 20 years ago). But more on the importance of this in a different post.) Silver, and Represent.US, of course, didn’t win this campaign on their own. An incredible team of activists in South Dakota did the work on the ground to turn out voters for this crucial and obvious reform. But Silver deserves real credit, for placing the resources of our movement on a long-term but sensible bet: That we can win the people state by state—even Red State by Red State—even if we can’t yet win the nation.

[Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School]

[Commentary] Insights from the subfield of media sociology highlight the intersecting dynamics (and institutions) which perpetuate racial inequalities within the media landscape. These inequalities stem from issues regarding ownership and the power relations embedded within the ability to control both media access and content. Overlaps between the economic and political realms also shape our media environment.

Just recently, the Justice Department filed suit against AT&T for collusion in blocking a competing cable channel. Part and parcel of the “protecting consumers” debate are issues surrounding racially underrepresented communities and inclusion in BOTH the media and technology industries. Learning from the Comcast/NBC Universal merger in 2011, advocacy groups and federal authorities should not rely on Memorandum of Understandings to advance inclusion goals. Such “gentlemen’s agreements” are largely voluntary and establish false promises for communities of color. As a diverse nation struggling with ongoing racial injustices, leaving underrepresented communities out of media merger debates is a disservice not only to those communities, but to us all.

[Jason A. Smith is a PhD candidate in the Public Sociology program at George Mason University.]

[Commentary] There’s a huge opportunity for far more technologists to improve the way government serves Americans everywhere. To make vital services like healthcare and benefits more accessible for millions. To add our voice to policy debates on issues of national or local importance. To accelerate our progress and remain the world’s leader in innovative thinking. But this won’t happen on its own. The first and most important step is for techies to get engaged. This can take a lot of different forms. It can include getting involved in our local communities. Or it could mean applying your rarefied skills as an engineer, designer, UX researcher, product manager (you get the idea) in collaboration with other experts to make the country work better. Our involvement in the future of our country is crucial.

[Megan Smith is the U.S. Chief Technology Officer with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America]

[Commentary] There is zero reason for the Department of Justice or the Federal Communications Commission — who will pool their resources to examine this deal — to approve the AT&T-Time Warner transaction. And there are more reasons to say no than there are channels on DirectTV.

The high-speed Internet access market in America is entirely stuck on a expensive plateau of uncompetitive mediocrity, with only city fiber networks providing a public option or, indeed, any alternative at all. The AT&T/TWX deal will not prompt a drop of additional competition in that market. Nor will it mean that the entertainment industry will see more competition or new entrants — just that one player will get an unfair distribution advantage. It’s hard to think of a single positive thing this merger will accomplish, other than shining a bright light on just how awful the picture is for data transmission in this nation. This deal should be dead on arrival. In fact, AT&T should spare us by dropping the idea now. This merger must not happen.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center.]

[Commentary] I believe the Technology Transformation Service has an unprecedented chance to dramatically improve the way we all interact with our government.

Our citizens deserve a government that uses technology to make their lives easier and government more approachable and efficient. That’s particularly true in America, because digital technology was mostly invented here in the United States and exemplifies deeply American values such as empowerment of the individual, freedom of communication and association, and a vibrant spirit of optimism. So it seems only right that our government should be wholeheartedly embracing the best of the digital age. TTS is built on the principles cutting-edge companies across the world thrive on, principles like agile development and user-centric design. But creating an outstanding digital-age government will take more than those principles; it will take partnerships with people who know government as well as we know technology.

[Cook is Commissioner of the Technology Transformation Service]