This was the question on wednesday afternoon, when 4 ranking participants in ICANN were speaking and roundtabling at university of Tampere.
Can you blame the Internet for all teh bad things it allows to exist?
As it seems, you sure can take credit for all the good things the world wide web, the web 2.0 and global access to unbelievable sources information are doing. But when it comes to solving problems...well not much will to participate in this.
Yrjö Länsipuro had a good point that we should keep in mind what we speak about when we speak about governing. It is not just about goverments, stabile institutions of power, but power itself to steer the development.
The Internet, and www, and web 2.0, is a technology. It does not represent any danger or treath to anyone by itself. Technology just allows something to exist. It is truly understandable that people in ICANN are fond of their realm. Those are the people who are running this technology.
The internet revolution could be compared to printing press, steam engine and industrialization. There are more analogies and comparisons in our verbal toolbox than we should have.
In wednesday’s roundtable people of ICANN did position themselves as inventors and defenders of a technology: they were seemingly the Johannes Gutenberg, James Watt and Henry Ford of today.
Of course it is important to confess the fact Wolfgang Kleinwächter brought up: the Internet does not produce child porn or nazi propaganda (both examples brought up by ICANNers btw.). People do produce those unwelcome forms of information. And another analogy by NSN representative Jonne Soininen: the buildings of a city does not create crime and violence. City dwellers do create those unwelcome forms of communication.
But even after knowing and confessing this fact I cannot see why the architects and infra builders should not contribute to removing these evil problems their technology does not create but allows to exist. There is no dialogue when approaching problems of ubiquitous status of electronic networks in our society is welcomed by telling that the Internet should not be filtered in order to remove child porn. Yes it should not be, but what about the problem with ubiquitous status of the electronic networks our society makes us to use!
In wednesday’s round-table a member of audience asked who has power to act if Facebook does something wrong with their galactic database of private user information. Answer was: Don’t be on Facebook, don’t accept the terms of service, they are a company providing service you have every right not to subscribe.
And another answer was by Kleinwächter to cite Mark Zuckenberg as he once responded to one case of accused privacy violation that ”we should see privacy differently than in the past”.
Those are not real answers to this problem. The problem is that there is no (at least in the minds of ICANN) anyone that could defend this poor Finnish person against the multi-national corporation invading his/her privacy. That individual stands equal to multi-million business in front of God and the court of law in Texas.
My opinion is that we really have to see the Internet revolution (started only 20 years ago) analog to industrialization. It is not the production lines that are causing the problems. It’s the people gathering from far rural areas to constantly growing cities, having a hope to work by those production lines and trying to learn to live again in different kind of social and economical enviroment. We still have huge problems with urbanization that has been going on for 200 years!
So why should these engineers that tweak the factories and product lines be held accountable for the impact their machine has in society? My answer is that they should not be. But when they start and run institutions like
ICANN and
Internet Governance Forum that promote themselves as the best (and in many ways the only) way to govern the Internet (as opposed to goverment- and UN-based
ITU, representated as Darth Wader (Länsipuro) and Dr. Evil (Soininen)), they should at least try to address these problems.
Henry Ford isn’t to blame for rock music. But his factories turned in to cities and those cities were filled with people and those people needed something to do when not working for mr. Ford and they started to play rock music.
Sure mr. Ford will be glad to take credit for Elvis, Beatles and U2. But is he as willing to address the problems that arise from
national socialist black metal?
This post is part of my lection diary to course International Communication and Globalization in university of Tampere. http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/tiedotus/opiskelu/kurssimateriaalit/mejos7_klk10.html
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