Government and the Online World
Recognising the connection between politics and technology demands rejection of another widely held belief about the Internet; namely that it is an essentially free and ungovernable space.
For years this view fed a kind of cyber-libertarianism in the Internet’s early days, and is centred on the belief that Internet technology would render the state powerless. As an assertion, it is flawed, if understandable. It is flawed because it underestimates the variety of ways in which governments can exercise regulatory power. It is understandable because the almost unlimited points of access, the ease of content creation, the possibility of many to many communication, and the global nature of the Internet phenomenon all create new challenges for those whose job it is to regulate.
The view that the government is powerless to regulate technology in general, and the Internet in particular, has always been wrong. Government can regulate code, and program code itself is a form of politics in the online world. Code can be regulated by law, through government use of its power in the technology marketplace, and/or through government manipulation of incentives to ensure that certain kinds of code receive more use than others.
In terms of regulating code by law, there are many examples from both sides of the Atlantic which illustrate this point. In the UK, the government’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), among other things, regulates code. It places a burden on ISP’s to install black box technology that can gather data on network traffic. This is intended to assist law enforcement agencies, increasingly aware as they are that the Internet is being used for criminal activities. Two high profile cases in the US meanwhile, include that of the Audio Home Recording Act (1992) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998).
The first of these cases was a response to the arrival of new Digital Audio Technology (DAT), which effectively facilitated the making of limitless and faultless taped copies of original recordings. As a threat to the intellectual property rights of recording artists and the music industry, taped copies of original recordings had previously been less of a concern because of the loss of quality involved in the taping process. With the advent of DAT the threat had to be taken seriously.
Since trying to control the individual behaviour of all those who might make a copy was unrealistic, Congress responded with an act which forced the producers of digital recording equipment to install special chips in recording equipment. The chips implement a code-based system which counts the number of copies of a particular recording made while automatically degrading the quality of the recordings as the number of copies made increases.
In the case of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998), the process was somewhat reversed. In this case, the US government did not require a particular deployment of technology and its associated code but actually made it illegal to either write and/or sell software that circumvented copyright management schemes.
Again though, regulating the code, or more properly regulating those who write the code that individuals use, was seen as a response to the difficulties involved in trying to regulate individuals themselves. The commercial technology sector has every incentive to fall in line with government wishes and requirements in such cases of outlawed software since the costs of not doing so may be substantial.
Moreover, the government can add further to the weight of law by use of its own market power in the technology sector. Government is after all, a major purchaser of hardware, software and IT consultancy services. Government can create markets for the kind of code it views as desirable and can limit and hamper markets in code which it would rather was not in use.
While law and market pressure combined may not guarantee perfect regulatory compliance then, they can ensure that very little software is written which the government either explicitly does not want or, alternatively, which itself makes use of law-breaking code written by others.
Governments then, do have regulatory power in the digital age. In particular they can regulate code and can consequently regulate online behaviour to some extent. They can also use network applications to stimulate the kinds of social activity and social outcomes they would like to see and can choose to be instrumental in determining the political character of network architecture itself.
The important point, in all this then, from the progressive point of view, is that this opens up the possibility of the Government being more active in shaping Internet space as well as being active in using the Internet as a new channel of communication.
At the moment, despite extensive government activity, there is very little sign that the former type of activity is complementing the latter. Unless, therefore, both the Government and the centre-left more broadly comes to understand the ways in which digital technology can and does embody values, then both run the risk of using good technology to create bad politics.
