[Air-l] Conference Report: Grounding Internet Regulation in Lived Experience

[Christian Sandvig]

Dear AIR Colleagues,

Attached is a brief conference report that may be of interest.  Please feel
free to forward it where it might be helpful.

With this I have tried to sketch the areas of some agreement -- themes found
across more than one presentation and developed in the discussion -- but
ethnography is one of the harder things to generalize about. For this
brevity I oversimplified, with these words I speak only for myself. I would
welcome any comments you might have about my comments.

Regards,
Christian


--
Grounding Internet Regulation in Lived Experience:
A Conference Report

by Christian Sandvig (christian.sandvig at csls.ox.ac.uk)
Programme in Comparative Media Law & Policy
Oxford University

On March 8th, Oxford hosted leading Internet researchers, policymakers, and
industry representatives from the on-line media to discuss the present state
of the art in ethnographic Internet research and its implications for the
many attempts to regulate the Internet. Forty-two people presented case
studies or expertise from seventeen countries, considering settings both
public and private, at home and work, urban and rural. (*) Further products
will be forthcoming from this conference, but I would like to take a moment
to briefly relate the lessons I learned as conference chair. These fall into
six areas:

INTERNET ACCESS. Even where Internet infrastructure is very poor, people
find ways to use the Internet -- often through novel forms of sharing.
Public access centers succeed in allowing the pooling of limited computer
expertise among strangers. Relying on them is difficult without stable,
neutral, portable email provision and file storage. The physical placement
of the computer in a room at home or in a public place is one of the most
important (and most often overlooked) factors that influence how the
Internet will be used.

INTERNET AND CHILDREN. Children (especially young children) do not use the
Internet to find pornography nearly as often as policy discourse and news
stories suggest. Children (even young children) are aware of so-called
'stranger-danger,' and they are often savvy in selectively releasing
information about themselves, and minimizing their risk. They are equally
skilled at circumventing both the technical and social restrictions of
parents and teachers, and such circumvention is commonplace (e.g., time
limits, 'educational' use only, prohibitions on chat). Children often know
more about computers than parents and teachers. Content rating and filtering
mechanisms are currently far too complicated for most intended users.

INTERNET CENSORSHIP. Efforts by non-democratic states to 'selectively'
liberalize ICTs are only partially successful - the Internet seems to allow
at least some new opportunities for political action wherever Internet use
is encouraged, even if only policies related to economic development are
liberalized. In its present form the Internet is not inherently liberating,
but it may tend to shift state control from ex ante to post hoc.

INTERNET AND POLICY MECHANISMS. The recent emergence of complex regulatory
schemes (e.g., in e-commerce) mixing state and non-state actors, co- or
self-regulation, and a diverse package of incentives and/or penalties may
reduce transparency and accountability, while creating policies that fail
because they are incomprehensible. Co- and self- regulatory schemes in the
area of Internet content were received with skepticism.  In conditions of
criminal harm, well-publicized prosecution in selective instances may be
more effective and is almost certainly more efficient (e.g., in cases of
child pornography and hate speech) despite the jurisdictional problems of
national criminal laws.

A considerable amount of Internet use is not easily interpretable in
utilitarian terms, while policy discourse is usually restricted to
utilitarian reasoning. This precipitates conflict with parents, employers,
and the state about concepts such as 'economic value' and 'educational
content.'

PERCEPTIONS OF INTERNET. The present policy concern in the industrialized
world with the dangers of the Internet (pornography and predation) is
overstated, as are the benefits promised in the developing world. There may
be an emergent public interest role similar to the UK tradition of public
service broadcasting for Internet Service providers. The Internet is
globally understood as a location of anxiety, pitting people against
technology, adults against children, or individuals against the state.
Despite the arrival of the 'mundane Internet' in some advanced democracies,
people still hold strong beliefs about the emancipatory 'nature' of the
network even while seeing few of these benefits or working at cross-purposes
to them.

INTERNET POLICY AND ETHNOGRAPHY. Ethnographic studies with methodological
rigor and extended fieldwork are needed to understand the Internet, but they
remain rare. The abstracts submitted to this conference indicate much
current academic concern with the home and the 'everyday.' A wide range of
methods use the term 'ethnography,' which is itself contentious. There is a
new need in policy circles for more nuanced, 'on the ground' research, yet
ethnographers have been reluctant to fill (or had difficulty filling) this
role: chiefly because policy work usually assumes sequential causation and
research objectivity. In addition, policy timelines are much shorter than
ethnographic research timelines. Finally, the researchers that do wish to
shape policy often wish to engage with an overly romantic notion of the
policy process.

Still, many of the ethnographic researchers came away appreciating the
difficulties of achieving consensus on policy and a renewed sense that their
work is worth presenting in an accessible manner to policy-making audiences.
Many of the policymakers came away with some appreciation for the value of
qualitative research - for some this conference was their first exposure to
Ethnography as a research method.

This meeting was hosted by the Programme in Comparative Media Law & Policy
(PCMLP), Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford University. A brief
rationale for this meeting, the agenda, and the complete list of
participants is available here:
<http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/Ethnographies/>. Information about future
written products of the conference will be available soon from the PCMLP Web
site.

(*) Participants presented case studies or expertise from: Singapore,
Malaysia, India, China, Japan, Russia, Croatia, Belgium, Spain, Italy,
Germany, the Netherlands, Trinidad, New Zealand, Canada, the US, and the UK.

------------------------
Christian Sandvig
christian.sandvig at csls.oxford.ac.uk
http://www.niftyc.org/