Platforms and Policy
Robert Faris and Rebekah Heacock Jones
This essay first appeared in the Internet Monitor project’s second annual report, Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World. The report, published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, is a collection of roughly three dozen short contributions that highlight and discuss some of the most compelling events and trends in the digitally networked environment over the past year.
Digitally mediated communication and activity continue to collide with existing political, social, economic, and cultural structures in complex and fascinating ways. More and more of people’s lives are moving into the digital realm. For some, there is little of their existence that is not either directly mediated through digital means or recorded by digital devices: sleep cycles; work history; health information; financial records; social networks; shopping culture; tastes in music, literature, and movies; home heating schedules; and preferences in romantic partners. Many years after the well-chronicled struggles of the music and media businesses, which continue today, the rapid success of ‘sharing’ economy platforms such as Uber and Airbnb are testament to the ongoing potential of digital platforms to invade markets long dominated by entrenched capital-intensive industries in unexpected ways. The reach of e-commerce giants, such as Alibaba and Amazon, continues to expand, while other sectors — energy, health, and education, for example — seem poised for dramatic changes enabled by digital platforms in the coming years.
The profusion of new services and apps available for consumers progresses unabated; the number of apps available for download in Google Play is approaching 1.5 million with iTunes close behind. Internet users continue to adopt newer services to communicate online, such as Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, or Yik Yak. Upset with Facebook’s real name policy, instituted in September 2014, a vocal set of users moved to a newer social networking platform, Ello. None of this appears to threaten the ongoing dominance of a small number of large platforms, led by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, which are helped along by a combination of network effects and economies of scale and scope. The Indie Web movement and other attempts to re-decentralize the Internet face an uphill battle.
Meanwhile, large swathes of the world are completely unconnected. While the number of people connected to the Internet approaches 3 billion, well over 4 billion are not connected. According to the ITU, 78 percent of households in developed countries have Internet access compared to 32 percent in developing countries, and just 5 percent in the least developed countries. A major portion of the world is connected through low-bandwidth mobile devices with small keyboards and screens. The differences in experience, salience, opportunity, and impact of the Internet between highly connected and sparsely connected societies are enormous, in terms of access to locally relevant information, economic linkages, and social networks online.
Penetration rates and connectivity speeds continue to rise around the world, and in some regions, connectivity costs are falling. There is still a huge disparity in the affordability of the Internet, and much of the difference in penetration rates might be explained by this factor alone. For much of the developed world, access costs are less than 5 percent of household disposable income, even for lower income earners. In other countries, the cost of access can greatly exceed the 5 percent threshold and for lower income earners, the cost of access can be greater than household income.
Several billion people now have the ability to find their way into our field of view and enthrall us, offend us, invade our privacy, steal our secrets, or make us fear for our lives. The potential for the digitally connected to impact one another’s lives, for better or worse, has expanded.
In last year’s report, we highlighted a number of unsettled and contentious issues that are shaping the Internet. At the top of the list is the inherent perpetual difficulty in regulating online spaces. This continues to frustrate every government around the world, regardless of where their Internet policies and practices fall on the spectrum of open versus closed. Over the past decade or so, the core regulatory challenges have changed in degree but not in kind; issues of scale, jurisdiction, and attribution, which are tied to the ability to conduct surveillance, complicate any efforts to regulate online activity. The ability to identify individuals associated with online activity facilitates regulation whether in China or Canada, and mechanisms that allow individuals to cloak their identity or to take refuge outside of their government’s jurisdiction reduce regulatory effectiveness. There is an awkward symmetry to this issue of regulatory efficacy: a central point of concern among those advocating for Internet freedom is over the ability of governments to inappropriately prevent content and ideas from circulating. On the other side of the coin, there are real concerns over the inability of regulators to prevent illicit or damaging content from circulating. The state of technology strongly influences these regulatory challenges, and determines in part how far governments and private companies can go to do good and bad. However, it is not true that technology always wins. And code alone does not set the boundaries for online behavior. Policy and law play an important role, and social norms and ethics do continue to influence online behavior. The battle for control of the Internet in the area of law, policy, and community standards is being fought atop the shifting sands of technology advances, some in favor of greater privacy and openness, while others more easily enable restrictions and surveillance.
The past year has not been good for Internet freedom in repressive regimes. Authoritarian governments continue to suppress Internet activity with the collection of tools at their disposal; they use content filters, cyberattacks, and surveillance systems to identify dissidents in conjunction with an array of legal and extralegal mechanisms to intimidate, discourage, and punish. Freedom House reported that the past year witnessed more arrests associated with Internet activity than in any other year. This is deplorable and unsurprising, and likely reflects more political and social activism online in addition to the ongoing suppression of dissident voices. The arrest of six Zone9 bloggers in Ethiopia marked another ignoble milestone there. In China, a large number of microbloggers were detained, evidently as a result of their popularity. Political bloggers and online activists continue to be arrested in Vietnam, Gambia, Venezuela, Turkey, and the list goes on.
Internet filtering of political, religious, and social content continues to be most prevalent in the Middle East and parts of Asia. The number of countries with pervasive filtering systems has changed little in recent years, having reached an equilibrium point several years ago in which those that have the power to implement such a system have already done so. Pakistan introduced commercial mass filtering software to implement political, religious and social filtering in 2013. Even Somalia, declared by some to be a failed state, has started using mass Internet filtering technology. Filtering within countries varies over time to coincide with key political and social events such as elections and unrest. For example, the Russian parliament passed new legislation allowing for filtering just weeks before the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi; Venezuela’s government responded to political protests by blocking Internet users from sharing photos via Twitter and, reportedly, completely shutting down Internet service in some parts of the country.
China and Iran continue to stand out for their willingness to apply every available tool to suppress the spread of ideas and the formation of online communities. The hopes for a gradual opening of the Internet in Iran since Rouhani took office in 2013 have not come to fruition. The greatest change over the past year has been in Russia, which has assembled an array of legislation that would enable it to break off from the rest of the Internet in a manner similar to the Chinese. A question for the coming year is whether Russia takes that next step, and if so, what the repercussions will be. Legislation passed in July and expected to take effect in September 2016 will require all online companies operating in Russia, whether domestic or international, to store data on local servers. Websites that fail to follow the new rules will be blocked.
The government of Turkey continues to struggle with the social and political activities of a digitally connected citizenry, punctuated by the Gezi Park protests of 2013. Both Twitter and YouTube were blocked during February and March 2014 before court orders overturned the blocking orders. The passage of amendments to the country’s Internet Law 5651 in February expanded the grounds for blocking websites to include infringements on privacy. Many interpreted this move to have been a response to information leaks related to government corruption.
Journalists and Internet users living in areas controlled by militants in Syria and Iraq face serious challenges. Islamic State militants have killed journalists and activist Internet users who dare to post content perceived un-Islamic or not conforming to the militants’ ideology.
The incidence of cyberattacks continues to grow, combining a constantly evolving set of malware combined with attacks targeting individual users based on resource-intensive research and social engineering. In November 2014, DDoS attacks against pro-democracy websites in Hong Kong reached more than 500 gigabytes per second, the largest volume in history. Doxing — the practice of compiling (through a mix of Internet research and hacking) and broadcasting personal information about someone — has affected a wide range of individuals, from female game developers and journalists targeted for their comments on the Gamergate controversy (most of whom also received rape and death threats) to Ku Klux Klan members, whose identities and credit card information were published as part of an Anonymous campaign in response to the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Governments have employed crowdsourcing to go after political opponents. These ‘electronic armies’ advance state interests by taking down the online presence of political opponents and dissidents and by running defamation campaigns. The use of electronic armies is a new tactic that serves these regimes well by making the aggression against the political opponents look like popular movements; establishing attribution is often difficult, which helps governments to distance themselves from these activities. Amnesty International quoted a Saudi activist as saying that among the ways Saudi Arabia is silencing people online is the deployment of cyber armies that “give a false impression of the situation in Saudi Arabia to deceive people overseas” and depict activists as “atheists, infidels and agents who promote disobedience of the Ruler” and at the same time “praise the state and its efforts.”
While filters are put in place to limit the flow of information, authorities well understand that squashing ideas and arguments is both difficult and of secondary importance. It is the formation of networks that facilitate social mobilization that concerns them the most, and explains the focus on individual leaders and increased attention in times of potential instability. A lesson of the color revolutions, the Arab spring, and a growing number of digitally mediated social movements is that politically motivated and highly connected netizens can be rapidly transformed into street protesters. The hopes that liberation technologies might decisively turn the tide on authoritarian governments and undo the power of authoritarian regimes to quell popular uprisings have diminished over time. The dictator’s dilemma — whether and how to allow the diffusion of communication technologies knowing that they are key to economic and social progress yet also empower civil society — is still relevant today, but may not be as sharp-edged as many had predicted.
In many countries, particularly those with stringent controls on traditional media, the ability to find and express alternative views on political and social issues is unquestionably enhanced by digital communication. The Internet can be a haven for those banned from openly participating in political activity. This greater autonomy also extends to participating in communities that promote ideas and lifestyles that are severely curtailed in offline spaces, such as non-traditional religious persuasions and sexual orientation, and the fight for women’s rights. The willingness of authoritarian regimes to ignore or tolerate online behaviors that would be suppressed offline is being tested daily in many countries around the world.
The inclination and ability to control online intermediaries — including ISPs, telecommunications companies, mobile carriers, social media and social networking platforms, content hosts, app providers, and the like — continues to be the principal functional difference between those countries that infringe on digital human rights and those with a better record of protecting civil liberties online. Forcing intermediaries to cooperate with the government in removing and blocking content has been the foundation for Internet filtering regimes for almost two decades. The other key instrument — requiring intermediaries to surrender data on users — is employed by law enforcement everywhere. In some countries, communication infrastructure is directly controlled by the government, making access to data that much easier.
Private companies control a vast majority of the Internet’s physical infrastructure and much of the software that rests on it, and hence play a profoundly influential role in defining online spaces. They serve as enthusiastic or reluctant agents of law enforcement mandates and at times as advocates for protecting users and a line of defense against governmental overreach. In repressive regimes, governments play the principal role in deciding what type of content is allowed to flourish online, for example by dictating which topics are used to populate filtering lists and takedown requests. Mass Internet filtering software made in Western countries continues to be implicated in state-mandated political, social, and religious filtering in the Middle East and most recently in Pakistan and Somalia.
In more open societies, governments are appropriately less involved in policing content. In its place, private ordering — the voluntary arrangements worked out by non-governmental actors — is the principal mechanism for shaping and constraining Internet activity. Terms of use govern the limits for user behavior on the most prominent platforms, for example, keeping pornography and violence off of YouTube and Facebook. Enforcing such standards on private platforms — although not subject to the same procedural standard and accountability as one might expect in the legal system — is still subject to problems of scale and attribution. In the end, someone or something has to decide what comes down and what stays. The practical solution commonly adopted is a mix of crowdsourcing that allows users to flag offensive material, automated filters, and human review, which introduces mistakes in both overreach and underreach and results in the removal of innocuous material while leaving toxic content untouched. Accuracy and fairness do not scale well.
In open societies, the quest for balance between reining in damaging speech and protecting openness, civic rights, and freedom of expression continues to be hotly debated. The open recruiting of fighters in the West by militants in Syria and Iraq, most notably ISIS, has renewed calls by some for battling extremism online with tighter content restrictions. The United Kingdom has taken a particularly aggressive approach to fighting online extremism, removing over 15,000 of pieces of content in the first half of 2014. In June, UK government representatives met with the heads of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft to discuss the removal of extremist content that is not technically illegal and the disclosure of user data related to those who post such content. In cases where these companies have refused to disclose such data, the UK government has expressed outrage, criticizing them for “providing a safe haven for terrorists.” In early December, China passed new laws to combat religious extremism in the Xinjiang region, instituting fines for those who use the Internet or mobile phones to incite hatred.
The incidence of hate speech, racism, misogyny, harassment, and threats of physical violence on the Internet has gained more attention in the press and policy discussions in the past year. It is difficult to ascertain whether the amount and severity of toxic speech online has increased over the past year. It does seem apparent that the calls for measures to rein in damaging speech have increased, leading many to reconsider whether a redrawing of the lines that protect free expression online are warranted. The coverage of incidents of revenge porn and leaking of private intimate photos of celebrities, which also draw in questions of online privacy and security, has raised similar calls for regulatory action to tighten regulations on online behavior and enforcement capacity. These questions fall at the intersection of political (what is the right balance between protecting freedom of expression online and protecting victims of malicious attacks online?), technical, and practical (what measures are best suited to addressing this issue and what are the collateral costs associated with them?).
Perhaps the most consequential decision on Internet content in recent years took place in May 2014, when the European Court of Justice issued a “right to be forgotten” ruling that forces search engines to remove links to material deemed to be “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes of the processing at issue carried out by the operator of the search engine.” The stakes for individuals online are high if the first page of online search results represents “the ten things that define you.” This ruling offers a new foray into the application of notice and takedown regimes, similar to that used for the DMCA, which governs the removal of content based on the infringement of copyright. This system is scalable and problematic in many ways.
A bright spot for many in the past year was the passage of the Marco Civil da Internet in Brazil in the spring of 2014. Negotiated over several years with the involvement of civil society, government, and industry, the bill offers a broad codification of Internet rights including provisions to safeguard user rights to privacy, access to information, and free expression; safe harbor provisions that limit liability for intermediaries; and guidelines for net neutrality. The bill is remarkable not only for its novel articulation of Internet rights but also for the open public process that facilitated the creation of the law, which ultimately helped to overcome opposition to the bill and assure its passage. This precedent could set in motion other similar efforts to codify Internet rights as a counterbalance to measures to restrict activity, which are often crafted for noble reasons but can infringe upon and inhibit legitimate speech online.
The past year has also been eventful for net neutrality debates around the globe. In the addition to the passage of the Marco Civil in Brazil, the European Parliament passed strong net neutrality legislation in April 2014. In the United States, while the FCC decided how to respond to the deep divide between open Internet proponents and telecommunications companies over possible non-discrimination guidelines, President Obama came down decisively on the side of strong net neutrality provisions, calling on the FCC to “implement the strongest possible rules” to preserve an open Internet. Angela Merkel has taken a stance more closely aligned with industry in suggesting that a two-tiered system will better enable innovation: one “lane” for high priority traffic and one that resembles current conditions.
The world continues to come to terms with the revelations of pervasive state surveillance. The reverberations are being felt in policy debates around the world: in proposed legislation, in company policies, in civil society mobilization efforts, and in a renewed focus on the development of better technology and tools. In some countries — Brazil and Russia, most notably — the response to these revelations has been to draft legislative proposals calling for the localization of data storage, raising fears over further balkanization of the Internet. Brazil ultimately bowed to pressure from technology companies and removed the data storage provision from Marco Civil, while Russia, as noted above, continues to push on. In November, the United Nations passed a non-binding resolution, spearheaded by Brazil and Germany, calling on states to review their mass surveillance practices and protect the right to privacy.
Public outcry against surveillance among civil society and Internet rights groups around the world continues. In the United States, the anti-surveillance campaigns organized in February around the banner The Day We Fight Back brought considerable attention to the issue. Organizers reported that 550,000 emails and 89,000 phone calls expressing opposition to broad-scale surveillance policies were delivered to US legislators. Others noted that that the size and reach of the protests was smaller than the social mobilizations against SOPA and in favor of net neutrality legislation. The legislation in the US to impose greater restrictions on dragnet surveillance has so far been unsuccessful.
The technological responses to surveillance over the past year have been remarkable, adding to the many long-standing efforts by industry, non-profit organizations, and individuals to secure communication and privacy on the Internet and through mobile communications to protect against snooping governments, private sector data collection, and malicious hackers. Apple announced that data held on iPhones would be encrypted by default. The popular messaging app, WhatsApp, introduced end-to-end encryption on communications using the app, such that the company would be unable to turn over the content of these messages to law enforcement requests. Mozilla, in conjunction with the Tor Project and the Center for Democracy and Technology, launched the Polaris Privacy Initiative, which will offer new privacy features to the Firefox browser. EFF, Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, and researchers at the University of Michigan announced Let’s Encrypt, a new certificate authority to help transition more web traffic to HTTPS. While security concerns on the Internet still remain high, the response from law enforcement agencies to the recent moves by companies and non-profit organizations has ranged from negative to hyperbolic, with the director of British electronic intelligence agency GCHQ accusing American technology companies of being the “command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals.”
Governments have not in general supported overall security measures that would make it more difficult for government surveillance but also better protect users from other incursions into personal privacy and data security at the hands malicious hackers and corporate data breaches. As companies and civil society groups continue to develop and improve tools to protect user privacy and security, these technologies will be exported, adapted, and applied by users around the world. If they are successful, the next question is what political moves will be set into motion to respond.
Read more in the Berkman Center’s Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World.
