• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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The internet, free speech and responsibility (5)

Nigeria’s internet user

Internet governance scholar Laura DeNardis devotes a chapter to the oxymoronic nature of “internet freedom” in her 2020 book “The Internet in Everything: Freedom and security in a world with no off switch.”

According to Prof. DeNardis, who is also the interim dean of the School of Communication at the American University in Washington, DC, “internet freedom usually pertains to content, especially freedom of expression, intellectual property rights, and freedom from government regulation of content”, but “rarely has it involved technical architecture itself.”

The core of the internet has never been free. And while the right of platform users to express themselves freely get most of the attention, the stakeholders with real power, the platforms, have largely had free rein.

Internet platforms might not have blossomed as much as they have without liberty. But the freedoms that supported their growth risk being usurped by the power their success now allows them to wield. This double-edged dilemma of “bigness” underpins antitrust thinking, the focus of Columbia University professor of law, science and technology Tim Wu’s 2018 book “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the new gilded age.”

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But as Prof. DeNardis points out in her book, this dilemma is not a novel one. What is scary about the current technological age, however, is that the power that Big Tech wields is unprecedented in history. Today, the internet is in everything, with unbelievable utopian possibilities and dystopian risks in tandem.

According to DeNardis (2020), “the internet is no longer merely a communication system connecting people and information”, but “a control system connecting vehicles, wearable devices, home appliances, drones, medical equipment, currency, and every conceivable industry sector.”

This level of power comes with huge public governance responsibilities for private entities that are principally designed for profit, an anomaly manifesting in myriad unfortunate ways, from “networked authoritarianism” in China to “digital bonapartism” in Russia (DeNardis, 2020; MacKinnon, 2012).

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Fundamentally, firms want to make money. Big Tech since realised knowing all about our lives, online at first, but increasingly also offline, is how to do so. And to ensure that gift horse keeps on giving, internet platforms have learnt over time to keep governments on side. But at a cost; albeit more to their users’ freedom than to their own purported libertarian conscience.

“Governments are rarely able to censor information and block access or monitor communication on their own but do so via private companies that own and operate the infrastructure and platforms over which information flows (DeNardis, 2020).”

If the internet is to remain free and open, such as it is, platforms must begin to be alive to their responsibilities of accountability, transparency and consistency. Whether they like it or not, they are no longer just private firms. They are the “new” governments.

Thus, it is in Big Tech’s enlightened self-interest to pre-empt the inevitable meddling in their affairs by “old” governments, as they themselves increasingly do without permission in the affairs of everyone else. But as they give in to the corruption of their libertarianism by governments, they increasingly lose the edge to do so.

For Big Tech, the evidence thus far suggests they are not likely to be any more responsible than governments when the source of their profits or power is threatened. If you are from the poor world, this surprising in distinction is quite disheartening.

In the developing world, almost anything that functions properly is almost certainly underpinned by private enterprise. And the most impactful tend to be technology-related. But as our exposition thus far shows, the hope for more efficient public governance at the hands of private actors owing to technology may prove to be naïve.

In her 2012 book “Consent of the Networked: The worldwide struggle for internet freedom,” New American Foundation senior fellow and former CNN Beijing bureau chief Rebecca MacKinnonasserts a debate about the utility of the internet as a force for freedom or repression is probably futile at this point, when governments and firms alike, have quite literally gone rogue with our online human rights. Instead, we should start seeing ourselves as citizens of the internet, and not just passive users of technology, Ms MacKinnon says. The internet is a place too.