Dr. Robert Gehl Talks About The Future Of Anonymity, Net Neutrality And Web 2.0
by admin
Can you tell my readers about your background and your current role at U of Utah? I understand that you did your doctoral work on Web 2.0. Can you tell me a bit about this?
At Utah, I am a professor of new media in the Department of Communication, and I work in two areas.
First, I was hired because I study social media from political economic and science and technology studies perspectives. That basically means I study power on the Internet, and how power is manifested in social organizations, culture, and technology.
I look at the production of value on the Web, flows of capital, the challenges to intellectual property brought about by social production of media, and I most definitely study surveillance. My doctoral work on Web 2.0 was basically a critique of new forms capitalism emerging on the Web.
This has led to my published research on YouTube, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and Amazon Mechanical Turk.
However, that only gets at half the story. The other half is military and state power, and this is the second area I work in.
Along with Sean Lawson (another Communication professor at Utah), I am working on mapping cyberwar discourse. Basically, Sean and I are looking at how US military officials and politicians are discussing (and some would say hyping) new forms of warfare as they might appear online.
This is a murky area to study; we might say cyberwar is real and is happening (as so many in the government are now proclaiming) because of things like Stuxnet. Yet was Stuxnet an act of war?
And if so, at whom was it directed? Although many argue it was directed at Iran by the US or Israel (or both), the reality is no one knows. Moreover, it’s unclear just what impact a cyberwar might have.
There’s argument to the effect that our power grids will be knocked out and thus mass panic will occur. But of course, if you look at disaster sociology studies of Katrina or the 2003 blackout, you see no such panic.
And it’s highly dubious that hackers can blow up physical objects because of their ability to get into networks – even though this is constantly asserted by people positing the existence and inevitability of cyberwar.
All that said, cyberwar is real in the sense that we now have a US Cybercommand, the Obama administration is proposing to spend more money on cybersecurity, and the government is increasing surveillance on the Internet. Even without a smoking gun or a real-world impact, we’re committing ourselves to increased governmental power to protect us from hackers.
So, those are the two areas I am working in: the power of large companies over the Web, and the power of the state over the Web. Normatively, I guess you could say I’m for the little guy.
What do you think that companies should know about the new social nature of the web?
The biggest thing I would stress is that intellectual property has to be rethought. There’s two schools of thought here. One includes copyright maximalists who want to increase the scope and length of copyright law so that companies can have more control over IP, especially because of the advent of digital technologies that make copying and distribution so much easier.
Another school of thought centers on the idea that “information wants to be free” – basically, since so much is being digitized, it’s difficult to prevent people from remixing and reusing content, even with strong IP laws. So, this second school argues that there should be collaboration between companies and customers in terms of IP production, rather than an environment where companies attempt total control over their IP.
Obviously, however, this means ceding some of the traditional control and power companies had over brands and ideas. But the payoff is increased interaction between the company and its customers. Any company must struggle with these challenges.
I’ve noticed that the Internet is becoming much more structured. We’re hearing more about companies and governments enforcing their will on a network which seems to have no national borders. What effects will this have on the future of the Web?
Well, the unfortunate truth is that the Internet has always had a contradictory structure; this is built into the very architecture of the network.
On the one hand, it is radically decentralized and heterogeneous – any device anywhere can connect to it provided that device is set up properly.
It is a peer to peer network that is fluid and extremely robust. This side of the structure leads to legitimate claims that the Internet is a democratic, two-way medium in which anyone can participate (provided he or she has the technical know-how and equipment).
On the other hand, the Internet is far more centralized than is popularly believed. Control of the root servers (the dot in “dot com” or “dot org”) has been in the hands of ICANN, a nonprofit company in California.
While ICANN was founded in 1998 to be a democratic organization reflecting the will of the “Internet community,” its control over the Domain Name System gives it incredible power over the Internet, and that level of control is troubling.
The DNS is, as Tim Berners-Lee called it, the “Achilles heel” of the network, because it is so centralized. While the network itself is decentralized, domain names and IP addresses have to flow through DNS servers, and that creates a tempting target for governments to control.
Finally, another point of centralization is at the level of the ISP. Since there’s so few of them, they have incredible potential (and in fact, kinetic) power over the network.
The existence of the DNS, as well as the dearth of ISPs, allows countries like Egypt to shut down the Internet or for China to block particular content.
In Western countries like the US and Australia, the DNS makes the desires of politicians who want to block content for whatever reason – copyright violations, terrorist ideas, obscene content – all too possible.
With the Canadian Internet caps and the proposed Obama Internet Kill Switch, it seems that the “free world” slowly beginning to join countries like China and Saudi Arabia in their efforts to monitor and censor online activity. What will this mean for the average user, and for companies doing business online?
Well, for the average user, it means that the longstanding practices of Western states are simply becoming more salient. That is, people – even in the free world – have been monitored by their governments in many ways.
We’ve seen it in the US since the PATRIOT Act, but of course those of us who have lived through Hoover, Nixon, and so on know that surveillance has been conducted on Americans (those fellows are a bit before my time).
The advent of the Web, data mining, and advanced computer algorithms has provided more tools for this sort of thing.
But the discussion of “kill switches” implies that states are also concerned about their ability to shut off the flows of information. Under the guise of preventing a terrorist cyber attack, a state might argue that it needs to contact ISPs and say, “stop access to the Internet for a while.” I think fears that this power might be abused are very legitimate, and your comparison to Saudi Arabia and China are apt.
For companies that do much of their business online, having their access killed would, of course, be devastating. Many larger companies use private networks to handle payroll and inventory, so they probably wouldn’t be affected by a public “kill” command, but those companies doing business with the public would.
Again, this points to a fundamental inequality on the network: if the public network is subject to the whims of a state, but private networks are not, then people doing business or expressing ideas on the public net are essentially under the thumb of the state – at least if a politician chooses to wield such power – and assuming we cede that power!
From an economic perspective, which do you think would have the most positive economic impact for online trade in the long-term: A “wild-west” Internet or a highly structured and regulated Internet?
I don’t know if I agree with this dichotomy – it seems a bit false to me. It seems that either scenario implies a form of regulation (tho by other names.)
A “wild-West” Internet would mean that anyone with power could shut out people who don’t have it. I’m thinking here about ISPs like Comcast who want to charge Web services like YouTube, Netflix, Skype or Facebook for preferential bandwidth.
It also would mean that access to the Internet would continue to be bifurcated along the lines of haves and have-nots – what’s often called the “digital divide.” If you look at network capacity, we actually have an incredible amount of bandwidth – we can thank manic network buildup during the Internet bubble of the late 90s for that.
However, we still have a dearth of access in rural areas in the US and in poor countries around the world – the network capacity that was built was largely in rich areas that had access aplenty anyway. Additionally, the centralization of the system in the form of DNS has led to the problems I discussed above.
However, much of this has resulted (or would result) because of “deregulation” of the Internet (not to mention the deregulation of financial markets). I’d say that these are forms of regulation by a different name (corporate regulation? I don’t think there’s a good word for this, which is telling in its own right.)
So good regulation is necessary.
Net Neutrality is regulation, sure, but it is something that could maintain the wunderkind entrepreneurial possibilities of the ‘net, not to mention allow for more freedom of information and expression. Regulation that expands the number of top-level domains is good regulation. Regulation against deep packet inspection and surveillance is good regulation. At least in my view.
A rational, structured network built democratically with the advent of a publicly controlled, non-profit, regulated monopoly might be the best thing to happen to our media and economic environment in a long time. Yes, that would imply a form of regulation. But the unfettered free market approach to the Internet has been, in my view, largely a failure.
Can you please explain the basics of Net-Neutrality, and what impact it will have on companies doing business online?
Essentially, Net Neutrality means that the network maintains its common-carrier structure.
The extraordinary efficiency of the Internet lies in the fact that it is a packet-switching network. That means that all data is broken up into packets: equal-sized, small chunks that can flow in myriad directions through the network to their destination.
Packets aren’t sorted by priority or by sender – they simply flow through the network. The network doesn’t discriminate, because to do so would slow things down.
So, this means that, if all packets are equal, all Web sites should be equal. This is what should allow a small business to go toe-to-toe with the largest, or a single blogger to get out ideas just as well as a large newspaper company.
It also means that the network operates at very high efficiency and can scale to handle high-bandwidth media such as video. This is why I cut my cable bill and just went with Netflix!
Net neutrality regulation is meant to preserve this aspect of the network.
Without Net Neutrality, many organizations have raised concern that this could create situations where a large company could block user access to the web sites of their smaller competitors… or a manufacturer might block access to web sites featuring harmful information about their products. How realistic is this concern?
Without a nondiscriminatory network, those companies with deep pockets could pay for preferential treatment by ISPs.
They could pay for faster connections to consumers. Considering that many people are impatient enough as it is when they try to connect to a Web site, this could have a devastating impact on smaller companies or people who cannot afford to pay for preferential bandwidth.
However, we’re de facto approaching this point with or without NN.
After all, a Google or a Facebook has thousands of top of the line, high speed servers that can serve data to customers very quickly.
This gives them an advantage over smaller sites. That said, their advantage would be greater if they could buy preferential treatment from ISPs.
The next Google or Facebook would never have a chance – how could someone with one dormroom server compete if he or she not only had to go against server farms but also had to pay for preferential treatment by ISPs?
What is your opinion on the subject of online anonymity? Is it a good thing or a bad thing, and how do you see the future of online anonymity?
Anonymity is quite the bugaboo these days. I wrote a blog post on it for the Red Thread, the U of Utah blog, and it’s something I am currently researching.
Anonymous speech is being blamed for the disintegration of civil discourse. Here in Utah, the major news organization in Salt Lake City, KSL, shut down its online comment boards because of incivility. And anonymity is being presented as the refuge of pirates, terrorists, and all around despicable people.
Hillary Clinton pointed out the threat of anonymity in her speech on Internet Freedom last year.
To combat anonymity, the Obama Administration is proposing an “Identity Ecosystem” of “Trusted Identities” – essentially a conglomeration of ID systems that would – for those of us who volunteer – always link every action we undertake to our real-world identities.
This is meant to make it easier for us to bank online, avoid ID theft, and so on. Although this ID Ecosystem promises to preserve anonymity for bloggers and the like, it actually asks them to link their anonymous posts to real-world identities with the promise that this link won’t be revealed.
It’s not truly anonymous so much as it relies on trust: those of us who use it must trust that our ID is not revealed by third parties.
So on the one hand, anonymity is vilified – anonymous people are pirates and terrorists, and if you want anonymity you have something to hide! – and the US is attempting to curtail it.
And yet, anonymous speech has been protected by the Supreme Court, and it seems so vital to speaking out against corruption. Imagine how well those protests in the Arab world would be going if people couldn’t share ideas anonymously online.
Those protests have much less chance of happening in any country in which anonymous comments can be linked to real-world identities. But because people can speak out anonymously or pseudonymously, they can have a real impact on their political lives.
The sad irony of anonymity is that, while online anonymity is being eroded for you and I, powerful actors are enjoying it more and more. Anonymous surveillance online is increasingly the norm, conducted both by governments and corporations. National Security Letters come to mind – if a Web service gets one of those, they cannot tell anyone, they simply have to submit whatever information the FBI or whomever wants.
Even Matt Zuckerberg gets some privacy – as Jon Stewart recently pointed out, Facebook is all about us revealing as much of our private lives as is possible, and yet the Goldman Sachs/Digital Sky investment in Facebook is private, and Zuckerberg doesn’t want an IPO because then his books would be publicly scrutinized.
And, if you or I tried to ascertain exactly what data is being collected on us by online marketers, they’d say: it’s proprietary. It’s private.
For more clarification on any of these points, please contact Dr. Robert W. Gehl directly.
http://digitalresearchers.org/
Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/byungkyupark/2655381446/
· Can you tell about your background and your current role at U of Utah? I understand that you did your doctoral work on Web 2.0. Can you tell me a bit about this?
