Internet & Democracy Blog

Timothy Karr, a prominent net neutrality warrior-cum-blogger, has written a great piece for Huffington on what place broadband infrastructure spending should have in the current economic stimulus debate. Karr, I think rightly, sees investment in the information superhighway as analogous to real highway spending. Although the outlay to the government (and thus taxpayers) in the short-term is high, the increase in productivity, interconnectivity and new business models is worth the cost.

Corollary to this economic stimulus is the potential for greater information sharing, discussions and debates over the web. In short: the substance of civil society. The closer knit our fiber optics are, the argument goes, the more cacophonous, multi-perspectived and democratic our political discourse will become. While simply having access to information does not make an enlightened, reflective citizenry (witness the viral “Barack Obama is Muslim” conspiracy), I think, at the very least, connecting the last remaining segment of the American population without internet (mostly the urban poor and very rural areas) will bring new voices, concerns and constituencies into the national debate.

What makes this kind of internet investment such a pressing need is the United States’ now abysmal ranking (15th in the world) for broadband access. Due to sluggish competition and the sheer cost of large networks, the American market has been slipping in quality (speed and access) and rising in cost.

This outcome is equal parts low competition and market failure; with more concentrated resources, however, the government has the capacity to bridge the problem, just as universal road networks require public investment. As such, Obama should step up incentives for comprehensive build-out in broadband’s reach, while respecting that when it comes to actually delivering the internet, private companies will be more efficient.

Karr mentions this policy paper on Obama and internet stimulus spending by the advocacy group FreePress.net. One of the most interesting details in this paper has to do with a joint public/private program currently underway in Switzerland, where fiber optics were being wired with capacity for multiple competitors (pg. 10). The Swiss government subsidizes building the necessary physical network, and then sells off the connections to competing private providors.

That strikes me like just the kind of smart public internet investment the Obama team should be thinking about. Moreover, the FreePress folks estimate (conservatively) that 38.2 billion dollars of stimulus for internet infrastructure could radically change things. While 38.2 billion is no pocket change, it doesn’t seem that much in the grand scheme of the near 800 billion in stimulus that Obama has proposed.

Obama has the potential (amid the flurry of references to FDR) to inflect his stimulus proposals not just with economic and employment relief, but also with the kind of transformative modernization which the Tennessee Valley Authority heralded by bringing electricity to Appalachia. Let us hear Obama’s New Deal for the internet.

Andrew Keen has penned a provocative editorial criticizing Obama’s plans for the democratization of broadband internet access (for more on the plan itself, see my summary of Obama’s technology platform). Keen’s chief worry seems to be that universal technological empowerment, particularly of the internet, does not correlate to a more enlightened citizenry.

Even more than that, he suggests that under significant economic stress (a reality towards which, the economists murmur, we’re rapidly hurtling), the technologically literate but hopeless ranks of the unemployed could find themselves more attracted to dangerous mass movements like fascism. Social networking and mass media venues like YouTube could become the Hitler youth rallies of the past.

Superficially at least, the viral Obama/Muslim conspiracy theories may seem modest proof that free information does not a reflective citizenry make. The “Obama is a Muslim” myth was amplified with alarming speed by the conservative blogosphere and Obama’s Conservapedia page, eventually making its way into the mouth of that “He’s an Arab” women at the McCain rally. Keen is right to think that on a mass scale this could threaten representative democracy. The Framers (Hamilton comes to mind) were openly distrustful of the mob’s judgment; it was too often hasty and irrational.

On the other hand, part of the success of Obama’s PR camp was in reaching out to thinking voters with immediate corrections, frequently through information technology. The subsequent and obsessive media/internet conversation sparked by the controversy proved to be an open forum which Muslim-baiting bigots simply could not win. As far as I can tell, that is democracy in action.

(Along similar lines, James Glassman over at the State Department has suggested that engaging jihadists in online debates, instead of lecturing them from the West’s “city on the hill,” often wins public support for liberals in the Middle East by exposing Islamic fundamentalism to be precisely that.)

This doesn’t mean that the Internet is a democratic panacea. The new frontier of astro-turfing, propaganda tools and internet media censorship are troubling developments for a medium that has otherwise liberalized expression and encouraged revolutions, if not always successful ones. Robert Faris and Bruce Etling have written some great analysis for Berkman on the effects, both postive and negative, of digital networking on democracy. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in February Harvard adopted a mandate requiring its faculty member to make their research papers available within a year of publication. Stuart Shieber is a computer science professor at Harvard and responsible for proposing the policy. He has since been named director of Harvard’s new Office for Scholarly Communication.

On November 12 Shieber gave a talk entitled “The Future of Open Access — and How to Stop It” to give an update on where things stand after the adoption of the open access mandate. Open access isn’t just something that makes sense from an ethical standpoint, as Shieber points out that (for-profit) journal subscription costs have risen out of proportion with inflation costs and out of proportion with the costs of nonprofit journals. He notes that the cost per published page in a commercial journal is six times that of the nonprofits. With the current library budget cuts, open access — meaning both access to articles directly on the web and shifting subscriptions away from for-profit journals — is something that appears financially unavoidable.

Here’s the business model for an Open Access (OA) journal: authors pay a fee upfront in order for their paper to be published. Then the issue of the journal appears on the web (possibly also in print) without an access fee. Conversely, traditional for-profit publishing doesn’t charge the author to publish, but keeps the journal closed and charges subscription fees for access.

Shieber recaps Harvard’s policy:

1. The faculty member grants permission to the University to make the article available through an OA repository.

2. There is a waiver for articles: a faculty member can opt out of the OA mandate at his or her sole discretion. For example, if you have a prior agreement with a publisher you can abide by it.

3. The author themselves deposits the article in the repository.
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Craig Newmark was visiting the Berkman Center today and he explained how founding Craiglist brought him to his current role as community organizer. But these are really the same, he says.

In 1994, Craig was working at Charles Schwab where he evangelized the net – figuring that this is the future of business for these types of firms. He showed people usenet newsgroups and The Well and he noticed people helping each other in very generous ways. He wanted to give back so he started a cc list for events in early 1995. He credits part of his success to the timing of this launch – early dot com boom. People were alwyas influential and for example suggested new categories etc. He was using pine for this and in mid 1995 he had 240 email addresses and pine started to break. He was going to call it SFevents, but people around him suggested CraigsList because it was a brand, and the list was more than events.

So he wrote some code to turn these emails into html and became a web publisher. At the end of 1997 3 events happened: CraigsList had one million page views per month (a billion in August 2004, now heading toward 13 billion per month), Microsoft Sidewalk approached him to run banner ads and he said no because he didn’t need the money, and then he was approached with the idea of having some of the site run on a volunteer basis. He went for volunteer help but in 1998 it didn’t work well since he wasn’t providing strong leadership for them. At the end of 1998 people approached him to fix this and so in 1999 he incorporated and hired Jim Buckmaster who continued the traditions of incorporating volunteer suggestions for the site, and maintained the simple design. Also in 1999 he decided to charge for job ads and to charge real estate agents (only apt brokers in NYC, which they requested to eliminate the perceived need to post and repost).

He has generalized his approach to “nerd values:” take care of yourself enough to live comfortably then after that you can start to focus on changing things.
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Cass Sunstein, Professor at Harvard Law School, is speaking today on Extremism: Politics and Law. Related to this topic, he is the author of Nudge, Republic.com 2.0, and Infotopia. He discussed Republic 2.0 with Henry Farrell on this bloggingheads.tv diavlog, which touches on the theme of extremism in discourse and the web’s role is facilitating polarization of political views (notably, Farrell gives a good counterfactual to Sunstein’s claims, and Sunstein ends up agreeing with him).

Sunstein is in the midst of writing a new book on extremism and this talk is a teaser. He gives us a quote from Churchill: “Fanatics are people who can’t change their minds and will not change the subject.” Political scientist Hardin says he agrees with the first clause epistemologically but the second clause is wrong because they *cannot* change the subject. Sunstein says extremism in multiple domains (The Whitehouse, company boards, unions) results from group polarization.

He thinks the concept of group polization should replace the notion of group think in all fields. Group Polarization involves both information exchange and reputation. His thesis is that like-minded people talking with other like-minded people tend to move to more extreme positions upon disucssion – partly because of the new information and partly because of the pressure from peer viewpoints.

HIs empirical work on this because with his Colorado study. He and his coauthors recorded the private views on 3 issues (climate change, same sex marriage and race conscious affirmative action) for citizens in Boulder and for citizens in Colorado Springs. Boulder is liberal so they screened people to ensure liberalness: if they liked Cheney they were excused from the test. They asked the same Cheney question in Colorado Springs and if they didn’t like him they were excused. Then he interviewed them to determine their private view after deliberation, and well as having come to a group consensus.

Sunstein found that views they liked turned into views they loved and vice versa after discussion with the like-minded. This is a shift in *anonymous views*. And also, the internal diversity in the groups’ views that existed before discussion was squelched after they meet.

Sunstein extended this by examining voting patterns of 3 judge judicial panels. Do Democratic appointees vote differently if they are on panels with all dems or with mixed panels? And Republican appointees? Depending on the subject of the case it appears the same extremism appears when a judge is surrounded by other judges appointed by a president of the same party.
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Recently came across VoteForChange.com, a neat, aggressively simple little web app that registers users to vote and neatly organizes polling information.

The basic premise is great: take the clunky user-unfriendly format of bureaucratic voter registration forms and break it down into nice, neat, discrete steps that automatically piece together a filled out sheet that’s all ready to be quickly printed and mailed in a few minutes. The strategy here, is also pretty obvious: by lowering the usual time and effort costs of finding/filling out a form, the hope is to increase election participation from a pool of unregistered eligibles (by and large youth voters).

From a historical point of view, this is an interesting push. As Gasser and Palfrey point out in Born Digital, much of the political activity on the web, particularly by digital natives, historically hasn’t been about civic engagement on the level of voting. Instead, most have turned to public service activities like helping out at shelters, covering news stories, and coordinating fund raising drives.

Certainly the explosion of election stories that have been filtering to mainstream media via blogger coverage this year and the unprecedented shifts in the campaign contribution distributions seems to suggest that this year might be the year that online tools take a more central stage in political activity (at least within the United States). Though, no doubt, only time will tell how much tools like VoteForChange will actually encourage greater involvement on the critical level of the ballot box.

Can voter participation be a part of online life in the same way that contributing to political discourse via blogging, video sharing, and commenting has?

Also in the final A2K3 panel, The Global Public Sphere: Media and Communication Rights, Natasha Primo, National ICT policy advocacy coordinator for the Association for Progressive Communications, discusses three questions that happen to be related to my current research. 1) Where is the global in the global public sphere? 2) Who is the public in the global public sphere? and 3) How to we get closer to the promise of development and the practice of democratic values and freedom of expression?

She begins with the premise that we are in an increasingly interconnected world, in economic, political, and social spheres, and you will be excluded if you are not connected. She also asserts the premise that connection to the internet can lead to the opening of democratic spaces and – in time – a true global public sphere.

Primo, like Ó Siochrú in my blog post here, doesn’t see any global in global public sphere. She thinks this is just a matter of timing, and not a systematic problem. She notes that the GSM organization predicts 5 billion people on the GSM network by 2015, whereas we now have 1 of 6 billion connection to the internet> note that Primo believes internet access will come through the cell phone for many people who are not connected today. She refers us to Richard Heeks‘ proposal for a Blackberry-for-development. Heeks is professor and chair of the Development Informatics Department at the University of Manchester. But Primo sees the cost as the major barrier to connectivity among LCDs and thinks this will abate over time.

With regard to the cost of connectivity, she notes that Africa has a 10% internet subscription rate versus in Asia-Pacific and 72% in Europe. South Africa is planning an affordable broadband campaign: to have some facilities declared ‘essential’ to make them available to the public at cost to the service providers. This comes from the A2K idea of partnership for higher education in Africa – African universities are to have cheaper access. She also sees authoritarian behavior by states as another obstacle to connectivity. She cites research by our very own OpenNet Initiative that 24 of 40 countries studied are filtering the internet and using blocking tools to prevent freedom of expression. This is done via blocking blogging sites and YouTube. She is worried about how this behavior by governments impacts peoples’ behavior when they are online. She notes surveys that show two extreme reactions: people either practice substantial selfcensorship or put their lives on the line for the right to express an opinion.

Primo notes the cultural obstacles to the global public sphere. She relates a story that some groups are not accustomed to hearing opinions that diverge from their own and will, innocently, flag them as inappropriate content. Dissenting opinions come back online after a short amount of time, but with the delay dialogue can be lost.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

In the last A2K3 panel, entitled The Global Public Sphere: Media and Communication Rights, Seán Ó Siochrú made some striking statements based on his experience building local communication networks in undeveloped areas of LCDs. He states that the global public sphere is currently a myth, and what we have now is elites promoting their self-interest. He criticizes the very notion of the global public sphere – he wants a more dynamic and broader term that reflects the deeper issues involved in bringing about such a global public sphere. He prefers to frame this issue in terms of communication rights. By this he means the right to sek and receive ideas, generate ideas and opinions of one’s own, speaks these ideas, have a right to be heard, and a right to have others listen. These last two rights Ó Siochrú dismisses as trivial but I don’t see that they are. Each creates a demand on others’ time that I don’t see how to effectuate within the framework of respect for individual automony Belkin elucidated in his keynote address and discussed in my recent blog post and on the A2K blog.

Ó Siochrú also makes an interesting point that if we are really interested in facilitating communication and connection between and by people who have little connectivity today, we are best to concentrate on technologies such as the radio, email, mobile phones, the television, or whatever works at the local level. He eschews blogs, and the internet, as the least acessible, least affortable, and the least usable.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

Laura DeNardis, executive director of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, spoke during the A2K3 panel on Technologies for Access. She makes the point that many of our technological standards are being made behind closed doors and by private, largely unaccountable, parties such as ICANN, ISO, the ITU, and other standards bodies. She advocates the concept of Open Standards, which she defines in a three-fold way as open in development, open in implementation, and open in usage. DeNardis worries that without such protections in place stakeholders can be subject to a standard they were not a party to, and this can affect nations in ways that might not be beneficial to them, particularly in areas such as civil rights, especially less developed countries. In fact, an audience member comments that even when countries appears to be involved, their delegations are often comprised of private companies and are not qualified. For example, she says that there are only three countries in Africa that have people with the requisite techinical expertise in such state standards councils and that the involvment process is far from transparent. DeNardis also mentions the Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards designed to preserve the open architecture of the internet, with the Yale ISP is involved in advocacy at the Internet Governance Forum. DeNardis powerfully points out that standards are very much public policy, as much as the regulation we typically think of as public policy.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

Today, the new Ushahidi site launched, marking the era of the distributed human rights campaign. Just as Wikipedia allows for the wide-scale participation of collecting the world’s knowledge, Ushahidi now allows for anyone, anywhere, to participate in reporting violence, atrocities and human rights violations. Internet scholar Yochai Benkler calls this phenomenon ‘commons-based peer production’, but what does it really mean?

Until now, campaigns for northern Uganda or Darfur relied on tiny elites in those places to speak for those facing violence. Today, with simply a mobile phone, anyone can actively report incidents of violence to a truly global audience, making it harder for perpetrators to face impunity.

I’ve written and spoke about Ushahidi before. The project started in the chaotic and sad days following the 2007 Kenyan Presidential campaign, when violence escalated out of control in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Then, Ushahidi was an ad hoc tool to allow Kenyans to use mobiles to report incidents of violence, which would then be published on a Google maps based website.

Today, Ushahidi released a platform for use whenever and wherever the next human security disaster erupts. As one of the lead develops, Erik Hersman, recently told me, “Just like a blacksmith, we want to make the hammer, not tell people how to use it.” It is exciting to think that whatever the next emergency may be, decent people will be empowered to both spread the word globally and and keep the perpetrators accountable.

Cross-posted to In An African Minute.