Fragments from the Wired Polis

Tocqueville on democracy going astray

« Si le despotisme venait à s’établir chez les nations démocratiques de nos jours, écrit Tocqueville, il serait plus étendu et plus doux, et il dégraderait les hommes sans les tourmenter. » Dès lors, il imagine cette « chose nouvelle » que serait ce despotisme inconnu, né d’une société dont chacun des membres serait « comme étranger à la destinée de tous les autres », n’existant « qu’en lui-même et pour lui seul », perdu dans « une foule innombrable d’hommes semblables et égaux qui tournent sans repos sur eux-mêmes pour se procurer de petits et vulgaires plaisirs, dont ils remplissent leur âme  ».
 
Cette dépossession démocratique à l’abri d’un vernis démocratique verrait l’ascension, au-dessus de ceux qu’il gouverne, d’« un pouvoir immense et tutélaire qui se charge seul d’assurer leur jouissance et de veiller sur leur sort ». Ce pouvoir-là « ne brise pas les volontés, mais il les amollit, les plie et les dirige ; il force rarement d’agir, mais il s’oppose sans cesse à ce qu’on agisse ; il ne détruit point, il empêche de naître ; il ne tyrannise point, il gêne, il comprime, il énerve, il éteint, il hébète, et il réduit enfin chaque nation à n’être plus qu’un troupeau d’animaux timides et industrieux, dont le gouvernement est le berger ».
 
« J’ai toujours cru, conclut Tocqueville, que cette sorte de servitude, réglée, douce et paisible, dont je viens de faire le tableau, pourrait se combiner mieux qu’on ne l’imagine avec quelques-unes des formes extérieures de la liberté, et qu’il ne lui serait pas impossible de s’établir à l’ombre même de la souveraineté du peuple. » Et de laisser tomber cette sentence définitive qui rejoint nos inquiétudes contemporaines : « Dans ce système, les citoyens sortent un moment de la dépendance pour indiquer leur maître, et y rentrent. »

Sampling is quoting is speech

Kembrew McLeod on his documentary Copyright Criminals in The Atlantic :

I fully understand that creative people want to make a living from their work so they can spend time creating more art. But I also recognize that the current copyright licensing system is unsustainable. As our culture continues to be fenced off, it’s more important than ever to comment on the images, sounds, and words that saturate us on a daily basis without worrying about a costly lawsuit.

What we need is a more democratic system of checks and balances developed by real people who are directly affected by these copyright problems. One important safeguard is fair use, but we also need to design a copyright system that makes sense in a decentralized world—a landscape populated by millions of independent creators. Otherwise, the much-heralded age of media democracy will merely be a hollow promise.

Law vs.Technology, social practices, common sense. McLeod says it very clearly, it seems so common sense, and yet even this kind of copyright reform seems hard to achieve in the short term. This documentary nonetheless makes a very useful contribution…

http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/03/how-to-make-a-documentary-about-sampling-legally/38189/

Laws for cooperation in the network society

Away from market, contract law and hierarchical organizations, Yochai Benkler, Professor at Harvard Law School, is currently exploring how law can better accodomodate the cooperative social interactions that flourish on the network:

The rise of cooperation as an alternative approach to markets and hierarchies has placed the most direct and politically-mobilized pressure on law and policy in the areas of copyrights and patents, particularly, but not solely, as they relate to software and Internet-based cultural production and communication.  The rise of peer production, first as free or open source software and then more generally throughout the digitally networked environment, has offered not only strong existence proof of enormously creative and innovative alternative models of production, but also widespread practices that are negatively affected by excessively strong exclusivity regimes.

(…)

The case of the commons, and peer production, as the basis for resisting regulation of information production through expanded patents or copyrights offers one example of a broader implication of the study of cooperation.  It suggests the possibility that, to some extent, the provisioning of public goods can be achieved through voluntary cooperation, rather than through regulation or markets. In this regard, it points in similar directions as does the study of social norms.

(…)

Design for cooperation begins with a different model of human beings than the selfish rational actor model.  It emphasizes the diversity of human motivational profiles, and the importance of the interaction to determining actual behavior.  To the extent that the literature probing cooperation better predicts human behavior under differently designed systems, it holds the promise of improvement in the design of systems for human action.  Just as theorists and policy-makers applied the selfish rational actor model in very different contexts, so too can scholars and officials apply cooperation to very different systems.  Technical systems, such as online collaboration forums; business processes and organizational strategies; legal and regulatory regimes; and constructed social contexts are all systems of affordance and constraint for human action.  They can all utilize cooperation-based design approaches.

(…)

The inputs into scientific policy making—theoretical, experimental, and observational—are increasingly pushing against holding on to universal selfishness as a core design assumption, and towards learning how to improve the cooperative social dynamics of human beings who will interact through the system under contemplation.  We need to develop a field of cooperative human systems design to fill that need.

In Law, Policy, and Cooperation, in Balleisen, Edward, and David Moss, eds. Government and Markets: Toward a New Theory of Regulation, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming

Public service of access to knowledge?

How is the Internet to serve the common good, and what sort of regulation could foster the educational and democratic possibilities offer by this new communications network?

That is the subject of a very interesting interview of journalist Heather Chaplin by new media scholar Henry Jenkins.

I FEAR no part of the Internet will be devoted to the public interest in any sort of “official” capacity. I HOPE, however, that we are able to build an infrastructure that would, at first, connect public media to the schools, for educational purposes, and then build out from there to people’s houses, libraries, museums etc.

(…)

[The National Public Lightpath I’m advocating for] proposes creating a publicly-owned piece of the Internet that links together important institutions devoted to the public good, such as public media, the public schools systems, and, eventually, museums and libraries. Ideally, it would eventually spread so that people could plug into NPL at home as well, to , say, complete a homework assignment given at school.

She’s very skeptical of the libertrain philosophy that typifies the Internet, doubting that it can by itslef allow the network to support a vibrant and inclusive public sphere.

More in her recently published white paper, National Public Lightpath: Documentation and Recommendations, which points to future directions for how the internet might serve the public good.

The paper proposes to:

Create a publicly owned high-speed network that links public media and public
education as a means to empower, engage, and enlighten our citizenry.
• Empower an agency to oversee these efforts and become the steward of the
Internet in the public interest.
• Set up laboratories for creating new teaching tools that foster emergent and
diverse literacy and achievement for all students.
• Develop ongoing training for teachers and public media producers.

ACTA Vampire Blues

Since Spring 2008, the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia as well as a few other countries have been secretly negotiating a trade agreement aimed at enforcing copyright and tackling counterfeited goods (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).

ACTA goes way beyond traditional trade agreements by imposing civil and criinal penalties for both commercial and non-commercial infringements of “Intellectual Property Rights” (IPR), such as online file-sharing and cross border shipping of generic drugs.

Foreign policy - Free Access to the Net is new US Doctrine

Yesterday, bad Supreme Court ruling, but great announcement by the Secretary of State recognizing the potential of the Internet for global progress..

WASHINGTON — Coupling a salute to Internet freedom with a carefully worded caution to countries like China and Iran, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that countries that engaged in cyberattacks should face consequences and international condemnation.

(…)

“In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation’s networks can be an attack on all,” she said in a speech in Washington. “By reinforcing that message, we can create norms of behavior among states and encourage respect for the global networked commons.”

“Given the magnitude of the challenges we’re facing, we need people around the world to pool their knowledge and creativity to help rebuild the global economy, protect our environment, defeat violent extremism and build a future in which every human being can realize their God-given potential,” she said, according to the advance text of a speech at the Newseum in Washington.

(…)

Mrs. Clinton paid tribute to the power of the Internet both for opening new forums for the exchange of ideas and for fostering social and economic development. “In this context,” she said, “the Internet can serve as a great equalizer. By providing people with access to knowledge and potential markets, networks can create opportunity where none exists.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/world/asia/22diplo.html?hp

Goverments & Data: the way to go

I wonder how come such common-sense use of the Internet is just now making its way through national administrations…

Web founder Tim Berners-Lee has unveiled his latest venture for the UK government, which offers the public better access to official data.

A new website, data.gov.uk, will offer reams of public sector data, ranging from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use.

The target is to kickstart a new wave of services that find novel ways to make use of the information.

Sir Tim was hired by PM Gordon Brown in June 2009 to oversee the project.

“Government data is something we have already spent the money on… and when it is sitting there on a disk in somebody’s office it is wasted.”

(…)

“A lot of this is about changing assumptions,” said Professor Nigel Shadbolt of Southampton University, who helped develop the website.

“If [the data] can be published under an FOI (Freedom of Information) request why not publish it online?”

(…)

Prof Shadbolt is also trying to extend the project to cover local government information.

The site is part of a growing trend amongst governments to be more transparent with their data.

In the US, the Obama administration launched data.gov, which offers feeds from various departments including the US defence department and Nasa.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8470797.stm

Mexican senators to inquire ACTA

Opposition to ACTA’s Internet provisions mounts up across the world:

El presidente del Senado y coordinador del PRD, Carlos Navarrete, confirmó que ya pidió un informe detallado de los alcances del acuerdo comercial antipiratería (ACTA, por sus siglas en inglés) que negocia el gobierno mexicano con otros países, y que próximamente tendrán que ratificar los senadores para el combate a la piratería.

Los senadores temen que dicho acuerdo restrinja la libertad de enviar información por internet, además de que no han tenido información suficiente por parte del gobierno mexicano.

(…)

Aseguró que una vez que tengan la información harán un análisis a fondo para proceder a su ratificación, como lo manda la ley, pero sobre todo para cancelar la posibilidad de que se afecten los derechos de la comunidad que utiliza los servicios de internet, con el pretexto de combatir la piratería.

http://www.elporvenir.com.mx/notas.asp?nota_id=366877

China’s web censorship and the WTO

Interesting take by Fredrik Erixon and Hosuk Lee-Makiyama from the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels:

While human-rights activists continue pushing Beijing to ease its restrictions on free-speech rights, foreign governments also need to recognize the protectionist aspects of Chinese Web censorship and respond accordingly. China’s online protectionism goes against its obligations under the WTO. When China acceded to the trade body in 2001, it agreed to give unlimited access and equal treatment to foreign-based or foreign-owned businesses in many categories of services, including online services. These services count as imports to which China is supposed to be opening itself, even if they are delivered over a wire instead of in a shipping crate.

While the WTO agreements allow countries to set their own standard for public morals and order, disguised protectionist measures are forbidden. Nor can China argue that it is using the measures that restrict trade the least, one standard for acceptability under the WTO.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704842604574641620942668590.html#

And this article predates the Google case…

US considers Public research is an information Common!

Obama administration makes another move in the good direction to further access to knowledge, EFF reports: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/putting-public-publicly-funded-research

A few years ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had an idea like that. Why not create a free, public, online archive of findings from research studies that were funded by Americans’ tax dollars? That way, members of the public could keep up to date on the latest health findings by reading about discoveries that they paid for and would otherwise be unable to access. To ensure academic publishers could recoup any investment made by publishing research in traditional print journals, scientists could wait 12 months before making the research available to the public, but no more. The policy was voluntary at first, then made mandatory — much to the consternation of commercial science publishers. (Make no mistake — scholarly publishing is a significant profit center, for publishers if not authors. For example, a subscription to Brain Research, the leading neuroscience journal, can cost a library over $23,000. Much of that is pure profit, as authors provide the content free of charge.) When Rep. John Conyers introduced legislation to end the policy earlier this year, public criticism and a wave of protest helped stop the bill in its tracks.

Now the Obama Administration (specifically, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP) is considering extending the policy to other federal agencies that fund academic research. For example, the National Science Foundation spends $6 billion a year supporting basic research in America’s colleges and universities. If the fruits of that research were publicly accessible online, the taxpayers who actually paid for it could read and use it in new and interesting ways, just as patients and their families have used the newly accessible NIH-sponsored medical studies to help make informed medical decisions. Scholars and entrepreneurs could also access the research, promoting innovation in science and technology. Moreover, creating a publicly available research archive is simply fair. Your tax dollars paid for this research; you should have a chance to actually see those dollars at work.

Tackling online extremism… through Communicative action

Politicians keen on implementing net filtering often hint at the idea that the Internet is a boon for extremist groups, who can use the network to communicate and organize. But Bruce Etling, from the Internet and Democracy blog, afiiliated to Harvard Berkamn’s center, explains that they need to look at the bigger picture:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/idblog/2009/12/16/www-jihad-com/

(…) extremist sites exist and extremists use the Internet just like a lot of other groups. But those sites are small in number and states, combined with civil society, have been pretty effective at getting many of them shut down or forced into the more hidden areas of the Web. The Internet is also a place where, increasingly, the type of reasoned, informed and interactive religious debate that Friedman argues for are actually taking place.

He goes on to quote Tim Stevens, from the ICSR blog:

You’d have to be a fool to argue that the internet plays no role in many of the cases that come to light in the press and in the courts. It almost always does. So do cars, telephones and cheap hotels. The internet is so deeply embedded in the lives of most people residing in the West that it would be unusual were this not so. It is too easy to argue that government consistently fails to spot extremist use of the internet, and that more powers are needed to combat it. If, as liberal societies, we determine that total surveillance of interpersonal communication is undesirable, we should also understand that it is utterly impractical. It also won’t stop people turning to violence as a solution to their particular problems.

The answer is not to monitor us all to combat the actions of a few. Total security, in cyberspace or otherwise, is impossible, and attempts to create it are subject strongly to the law of diminishing returns. The only way to combat violent extremism is to tackle its causes, a banal statement in itself perhaps. Like it or not, states will decide what types of material are deemed inappropriate to view and share online, but treating all internet use as de facto potentially problematic and appropriate for regulation does no-one any favours.

Etling also outlines that the Internet is also a place where important conversation take place within the Muslim community, rebuking the idea that online, extremist groups enjoy a growing support. He goes on to quote Gary Bunt, a scholar who has studied Muslims’ use of the Internet and author of iMuslims:

Participation in militaristic jihad is a minority issue, on- and offline. Muslim individuals and organizations have expended considerable energies – on the Internet and elsewhere – distancing themselves from such acts.

Etling concludes that:

Just as it is wrong to conflate everything good with the Internet, it’s also wrong to associate it with everything pernicious. As we wrote in our paper on the Arabic blogosphere, “The Internet lays a good foundation for a battle of ideas, but it does not necessarily favor a winner.”

This description depicts how the Internet can be used to establish a global forum in which people, through technologically-formed social spaces, engage in important conversations on some of the most important global issues. Both theory and empirical observations tend to show that even though the Internet might render some old problems (like terrorism) more visible, it also provides curative tools, through debate and conversation.

It could be the advent of communicative action, a notion associated with Habermas and which he sees as a mean for social emancipation and progress.

But participating to this networked public sphere and engaging in communicative action has some prerequisites in terms of socio -economic developement that is not met in Muslim regions of the world where extremism flourishes. But here again, as Yochai Benkler shows in chapter 9 on Justice and Development of The Wealth of Networks, the networked society (and therefore the Internet) can provide solutions…

Google, King of White Spaces?

Google is positioning itself a prime actor is the development of “white-space” broadband. As, Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, reports:

“(…) today we took another step towards making “Wi-Fi on steroids” a reality for consumers. In a submission to the FCC, we’re asking the Commission to designate Google as one of potentially several administrators of a white spaces geolocation database.

When the FCC voted to open the white spaces to unlicensed use in November 2008, it required that such a database be deployed before consumer electronics companies could start selling PCs, smartphones, e-book readers or other devices that used this spectrum. Before sending or receiving data, these devices will be required to connect to the database to determine what frequencies can and can’t be used in a particular location. Licensed television and wireless microphone signals will be fully protected from harmful interference.

Why are we offering to do this? We continue to be big believers in the potential for this spectrum to revolutionize wireless broadband, and we think it’s important for us to step forward and offer our assistance to make that vision a reality.”

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/01/our-proposal-to-build-and-operate-white.html

I find surprising that a private company be entitled to manage such a database (why not the FCC itslef?), but in its proposal, Google is actually asking the FCC to require transparency and open access requirements so as to maximize innovation.

Meanwhile, in Europe, most policy-makers have never heard of white spaces, and their potential for the development of a common-based broadband wireless infrastructure is still very much unexplored.