Differenze per "SPWCN/Section1"

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1. A short history of the Internet access market

Since its early days, the Internet has followed a trend of emancipation. As early as the immediate post-World War II years, key American scientists envisioned how computers, originally built for military and technocratic command-and-control applications, could be used by individuals as communications devices (Licklider & Taylor 1968). In the 1960s and 70s, the use of computers as a tool for emancipation went a step further when the counter-cultural youth began using these machines against the ruling technocracy to decentralize power, bring it down to the local level, and allow for the emergence of autonomous communities (Kirk 2002; Turner 2006).

Already during the 1970s and 80s, engineers and early hackers were experimenting with and exploring the potential of these new machines. But it is only in the following years, as personal computing boomed and the computer networks spread, that efforts from civil society to democratize the use of these revolutionary technologies went viral. Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and activist groups started developing their own computer networks to coordinate and share information (Willetts 2010), the first online communities settled on cyberspace, and the creation of the World Wide Web in 1989 finally opened the door to widespread Internet use.

The time was ripe for the launch of countless initiatives bringing social movements, activists and general citizens into this new world of global, seamless and instantaneous communications. Stefania Milan, a social researcher working on media activism, describes the mid 1990s as an era of ‘renaissance’ for what she calls ‘emancipatory communication practices’. Echoing the pirate radio movement of the late 1970s and 80s, the Internet sparked a political movement of tech activists whose aim was ‘to bypass the politics of enclosure and control enacted by states and corporations’ on the public sphere. They wanted to achieve a ‘structural reform at the grassroots level through the creation of autonomous spaces of communication’. They saw the Internet as an un-owned space and, as many early Internet users, shared the ‘assumption that commercialism and an honest, democratic public sphere do not mix’ (McChesney 2013, p.102). By building technologies emancipated ‘from commercial communication services, they aimed to empower civil society groups to articulate, voice and convey their own messages without filters’ (Milan 2013, p.10). To do so, these ‘radical techies’ implemented secure emailing and free hosting services, as well as innovative web-publishing tools. They sought to promote unhindered information flows as a guarantee for political autonomy—a philosophy that has been described as ‘informational liberalism’ (Loveluck 2012)—and to subvert communications law (e.g. press law, copyright) to challenge the hegemony of political, media and business elites, engaging in practices of ‘insurgent citizenship’ in the public sphere (Tréguer 2013). Finally, they assimilated the Internet’s original ethos and governance model: a network of equal peers communicating freely on a decentralized, end-to-end architecture, exerting bottom-up control on the tools used for communicating, in particular through free software (Coleman 2005).

At the infrastructure level, this bottom-up governance was achieved through the deployment of the first grassroots Internet access providers, as tech activists organized to make use of the incumbent telephone carriers’ network in order to provide access to the Internet. In France, a small group of Internet hobbyists set up the French Data Network (FDN) as early as 1992. Though it was among the most active groups, this grassroots community network was only one of several small companies or nonprofit entities working to grant access to the Internet to a specific community. FDN members paid a fee of about 120 francs (around €18) a month plus the cost of telephony to call into the FDN modem, which in turn connected them to the global Internet. To carry its traffic to the global network, FDN contracted one of France Telecom’s business offerings that had been developed to provide bandwidth to a variety of closed computer networks, such as Minitel for instance. FDN was thus able to acquire large batches of IP addresses and to obtain an uplink to the Internet at the speed of 32 kilobits per seconds with one of the few ‘transit operators (transit operators manage backbones networks in the business-to-business market to provide Internet upstream connections to other organizations). As opposed to many mainstream ISPs that operated ‘walled-gardens’ (such as AOL or CompuServe, for instance), FDN provided users with their own IP addresses and configurable email services. It also ran a file-sharing server from which members could download free software to manage their modem and configure their connection. The FDN community contributed to that software by writing bits of code, and translated English technical documentation and tutorials to make them more accessible to a French audience. In other European countries, similar endeavors were developed, although most of them vanished when the commercial ISP market boomed in the late 1990s (unlike FDN).

In spite of its influence on the evolution of the Internet, this founding spirit of emancipation has since been heavily contested. By the early 2000s, not only had it become clear that states have indeed the means to enforce social control online, it also became obvious that rather than crushing down multinational corporations, the Internet could actually become their new battlefield. Along with the growing concentration and increasingly oligopolistic outlook of the online service sector—with giants such as Apple, Microsoft or Google, which all rank among the five largest global corporations in terms of market valuation—, the telecoms market has also gone through a rapid process of expansion and concentration, as regulatory failures resulted in the corporate capture of telecom infrastructures.

This growing centralization explains why EU policy targets for broadband penetration and quality of service remain a distant reality: more than a third of European households still have no broadband access (39%) and, in a country such as Greece, broadband penetration is as low a 56% (EU Commission 2013). A fifth of EU citizens with no Internet access say they are deterred by the sheer cost of it (EU Commission 2013): the cheapest available broadband offer can be as high as €46.20 in Cyprus, €38.70 in Spain or €31.40 in Ireland (EU Commission 2014). Meanwhile, users are not provided with the service they paid for: on average, they only get 75% of the broadband speed they signed up for; 63% when they get it through ADSL rather than cable or fiber lines (SamKnows 2013) – and the numbers are even worse in rural areas.

More importantly perhaps, concentration has led to a loss of political autonomy for Internet users, where autonomy refers to the ability for an individual to make choices and determine the course of her life, free of external manipulative forces (Christman 2011). As Yochai Benkler (2006) explains in his seminal book, The Wealth of Networks, autonomy is adversely affected by concentration and increased top-down control over communications resources:

All of the components of decision making prior to action, and those actions that are themselves communicative moves or require communication as a precondition to efficacy, are constituted by the information and communications environment we, as agents, occupy. Conditions that cause failures at any of these junctures, which place bottlenecks, failures of communication, or provide opportunities for manipulation by a gatekeeper in the information environment, create threats to the democratic autonomy of individuals in that environment. The shape of the information environment, and the distribution of power within it to control information flows to and from individuals, are, as we have seen, the contingent product of a combination of technology, economic behavior, social patterns, and institutional structure or law (2006, p. 159).

Centralisation in Internet architectures has given a few Internet actors immense power over the governance of Internet communication, thereby undermining the very democratic values that the Internet was to foster. For online services—a.k.a. the ‘cloud’—as well as the devices we use to access these services, many scholars have warned against the fast-paced process of centralization currently taking place under the influence of profit-seeking corporations (Zittrain 2008; Zhang et al. 2010; McChesney 2013). Devices and applications are becoming less and less generative as the ecosystem shifts away from general-purpose personal computers to laptops, tablets, smart-phones and other ‘tethered’ terminals whose sole function is to access preselected cloud applications provided by a handful of service providers. As a result of this trend, one of the founding principles of the Internet—the end-to-end principle —is gradually jeopardized as most of the network intelligence is moving away from the end-points towards dominant manufacturers and service providers.

A similar trend is happening at the infrastructure level as well, in a context where much of the network infrastructure is now owned and controlled by a few centralized ISPs. Historically, Internet networks have been regarded as neutral pipes or ‘mere conduits’. In line with the end-to-end principle, the role of network operators was merely to provide efficient data delivery in accordance with the ‘network neutrality’ principle (i.e. the homogeneous delivery of all data packet, without altering or discriminating one type of traffic over others). Today, however, network neutrality (sometimes summed up by the motto inspired by constitutional law that ‘all bits are created equal’) is being progressively undermined by incumbent ISPs. This is due not only to these actors’ economic incentives (Asghari, et al. 2013; Belli & De Filippi 2014; Musiani et al. 2013), but also to regulatory incentives to filter online content under the pressure of public officials (Mueller 2010). The latter have led to a culture of ‘privatised enforcement’, with private actors arbitrarily determining the limits to freedom of expression and implementing them as they see fit (by blocking, for example, pornographic but nonetheless legal content). While there is generally little transparency regarding the websites and content blocked by ISPs, the risk of accidentally filtering or censoring legitimate material is technically inevitable and, in practice, fairly common (Bradwell et al. 2012).

Another example of how dominant telecom operators might undermine users autonomy is through their collaboration with intelligence agencies for surveillance purposes—privacy being a core component of autonomy (Bernal 2014). In the post-2001 geopolitical context, and as evidenced by the ongoing revelations on the practices of the NSA in the US, states are now engaging in massive and sometimes illegal surveillance of Internet communications by establishing private-public partnerships with telecom operators (Deibert 2013; Ball et al, 2013).