With the US government poised to legislate against Tiktok in the coming days, it is worth going back a few administrations to see how the US once approached the question of the internet, back when it looked a lot different than it did today.
In many ways, the internet is a modern miracle - much of its development was truly community-driven, whether that be the technical community developing standards through organisations like the IETF, or groups like ICANN and the RIRs harnessing a multistakeholder approach to determine policies around names and the distribution of IP addresses.
Of course, these organisations are not perfect, but having organisations like these, where the technical community, academia, the private sector, civil society and governments can come together on equal footing to make decisions about the most fundamental communication technology in our societies, is a remarkable phenomena. Contrast this to, say, organisations like the ITU or the UN, which are primarily led by governments.[^1]
One of the best recent endorsements of this approach to internet governance was during Covid. The internet was essential in supporting and buttressing countries all over the globe, whether that be in terms of information-sharing or supporting workers by allowing them to work from home.
Almost overnight, we went from a primarily 'consumer-based' network, with most people using the internet to access websites, read email, stream videos, i.e., to 'download' or 'receive' content, to a network which now had to handle a huge increase in 'uploads' from clients, via the increase in use of video-conferencing software by office workers working from home.
In other words the nature of traffic shifted quite significantly in a very short period of time with little (or no) noticeable impact on end-users.
Consider the following figures for Cisco's Webex videoconferencing platform:
| | Feb 2020 | Mar 2020 | Apr 2020 | |------------------------+----------+----------+----------| | Meeting Minutes | 6.7B+ | 13.3B+ | 21.8B+ | | Number of Meetings | 37M+ | 73M+ | 96M+ | | Number of Participants | 161M+ | 350M+ | 509M+ |
These are taken from an IETF presentation which also includes useful charts showing the scale of the increase in usage.
Why was the internet able to handle this shift in traffic volume and type so well? I'm not a network engineer, so I can't answer that question authoritatively, but I'm guessing it had something to do with the general purpose and very open nature of the internet protocols themselves and the infrastructure running these protocols, owned and maintained by no single entity.
At this point an important question arises. If a nation state or single company (or conglomerate of companies) had been tasked with designing and building internet protocols and architecture, would they have built something as resilient, flexible and efficient? Or would they have traded those virtues in favour of something that is more centralised and easier to control?
Somewhat fortuitously, the Bill Clinton administration recognised the risks of having the US government be too involved in the development and operation of the internet in the late 90s. They saw that the power of the internet lay in the way that it enabled seamless, efficient global communication and trade, and published a framework to help enable its unhindered growth.
=> Whitehouse - Framework for Global Electronic Commerce
You can be cynical here and say that this was completely in-line with a neoliberal worldview (after all, this was the same administration that established NAFTA), and that the results of global connectivity through the internet have primarily benefitted the most wealthy.
However, from the perspective of the internet as a technology, you have to give the Clinton administration credit for having the foresight to recognise the risks of having lone nation states make technical and regulatory decisions about the internet.
Some highlights in relation to the question of the global nature of the internet (from the executive summary):
The private sector should lead. The Internet should develop as a market driven arena not a regulated industry. Even where collective action is necessary, governments should encourage industry self-regulation and private sector leadership where possible.
Governments should recognize the unique qualities of the Internet. The genius and explosive success of the Internet can be attributed in part to its decentralized nature and to its tradition of bottom-up governance. Accordingly, the regulatory frameworks established over the past 60 years for telecommunication, radio and television may not fit the Internet. Existing laws and regulations that may hinder electronic commerce should be reviewed and revised or eliminated to reflect the needs of the new electronic age.
The Internet should be declared a tariff-free environment whenever it used to deliver products and services. The Internet is a truly global medium, and all nations will benefit from barrier-free trade across it.
The Administration encourages industry self-regulation, the adoption of competitive content rating systems, and the development of effective, user-friendly technology tools (e.g. filtering and blocking technologies) to empower parents, teachers, and others to block content that is inappropriate for children.
The marketplace, not governments, should determine technical standards and other mechanisms for interoperability on the Internet. Technology is moving rapidly and governments attempts to establish technical standards to govern the Internet would only risk inhibiting technological innovation.
The US government didn't invent the model of multistakeholder internet governance that still persists today, but it recognised its success and knew how to get out of its way.
Can the same still be said of the current US administration? What about the next one?
Much has already been written about how silicon valley is now flocking to the new Trump administration in the hope of less regulation of the internet. Will this be a return to the Clinton era which handed the keys to the internet willingly over to the private sector and technical community?
Probably not. So much has changed with the internet since the late 90s. A handful of companies now control much of internet infrastructure (which has become a lot more cloud/services based, as opposed to peer-to-peer). Both the US and the EU have been trying to bring governments back into the picture in a more forceful way in recent years, through attempts to impose anti-trust measures and other regulations.
Governments may, justifiably so, also be starting to have 'buyers remorse'. The tech giants have gotten so large that they are becoming very difficult to actually regulate. Think of the recent case in Canada where they are attempting to introduce legislation to 'protect' legacy media companies by forcing internet platforms to pay a fee to news organisations whose stories are shared on the platform. Facebook's response was to simply stop news content from being shown in Canada. Not exactly the response the regulators were hoping for.
Arguably, even Europe has started to realise the negative impacts of regulation. Last September's Draghi report highlights how EU productivity and GDP are now lagging behind the US and China, in large part due to restrictive regulatory environment that inhibits tech startups.
At the same time, most end-users themselves are frustrated with the negative impacts social media has on things like politics/misinformation or children's mental health.
In other words, you are damned if you regulate, and damned if you don't.
I don't think the Trump administration will be like the Clinton one, for one important reason. The Clinton framework called out the importance of /both/ the private sector and the technical community. With Trump, I can see the established companies doing well, but not necessarily other parties to the internet, like the technical community, civil society groups or end users.
Within the IRTF, for example, there is an interesting research group studying the centralisation of the internet. While the technical community certainly don't want government regulators making engineering decisions about the internet, it is also not clear that they necessarily want Amazon, Google, and Meta as the chief architects of the internet either.
=> Datatracker page for Decentralisation of the Internet Research Group (dinrg)
While governments certainly seem to be struggling to effectively regulate things about the internet that we may very much /want/ regulated (and often governments will go after the wrong things all together), they are arguably a very important counter-weight to the monopolisation of the internet by a handful of companies.
Which is why the Tiktok ban is extra disappointing. Governments are actually the only force powerful enough to truly stand up for end-users against the monopolising forces of the current tech landscape, but instead they are choosing to return to the cold-war era, a divided globe. They are trying to control and centralise the most powerful communication medium today.
A nice moment has occurred in the past week, which the Chinese government almost certainly won't allow to last. Tiktok users have begun flocking to the popular Chinese app 'Little Red Book'/'Red Note'. On this platform you now have Chinese and Americans having discussions and exchanging information. This is exactly the kind of thing the internet excels at, and it is exactly the kind of thing that powerful forces try to fight against.
[1] Not to say that these organisations aren't effective, but when it comes to something like the technologies and protocols that shape the internet, we have to ask whether multilateral organisations are best placed to make decisions about it.
=> Gemlog This content has been proxied by September (ba2dc).Proxy Information
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