The Global Flow of Information

Legal, Social, and Cultural Perspectives

Ramesh Subramanian, Eddan Katz

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814748961
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Law
• Index: Law

The Internet has been integral to the globalization of a range of goods and production, from intellectual property and scientific research to political discourse and cultural symbols. Yet the ease with which it allows information to flow at a global level presents enormous regulatory challenges. Understanding if, when, and how the law should regulate online, international flows of information requires a firm grasp of past, present, and future patterns of information flow, and their political, economic, social, and cultural consequences.

In The Global Flow of Information, specialists from law, economics, public policy, international studies, and other disciplines probe the issues that lie at the intersection of globalization, law, and technology, and pay particular attention to the wider contextual question of Internet regulation in a globalized world. While individual essays examine everything from the pharmaceutical industry to television to “information warfare” against suspected enemies of the state, all contributors address the fundamental question of whether or not the flow of information across national borders can be controlled, and what role the law should play in regulating global information flows.

Ex Machina series

Contributors: Frederick M. Abbott, C. Edwin Baker, Jack M. Balkin, Dan L. Burk, Miguel Angel Centeno, Dorothy E. Denning, James Der Derian, Daniel W. Drezner, Jeremy M. Kaplan, Eddan Katz, Stanley N. Katz, Lawrence Liang, Eli Noam, John G. Palfrey, Jr., Victoria Reyes, and Ramesh Subramanian

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Perspectives on the

Global Flow of Information

Ramesh Subramanian and Eddan Katz

PATTERNS OF INFORMATION FLOW are one of the most important factors shaping globalization. The sheer scope of these flows is vast, encompassing global intellectual property, scientific research data, political discourse, brand names, and cultural symbols, to name just a few. Digitally networked environments subject information to ever newer methods of distribution and manipulation. Today, individuals, groups, countries, and international organizations actively promote and try to control the flow of different kinds of information across national borders. Conflicts over control of information flows help define who holds power in the global information economy. The information infrastructure—which includes methods of production, reproduction, and transmission and transformation of information symbols and artifacts—as well as economics, politics, and culture, determines who does and who does not have the power to control access to information.

Globalization’s biggest enabler is the Internet, which began as a government-funded, mostly academic project and has now become the single most important network facilitating most, if not all, global information flows. In doing so, it has also become the single most profound transformative force that informs today’s conduct of commerce, culture, education, politics, and war. Transformations wrought by the Internet, both massive and swift, show no signs of abating. Rather, they continue to accelerate exponentially as they have over the past decade and a half, strengthening and confirming the ever-expanding extent and reach of the global networked society.

From the ARPANET to the “Network Society”

The evolution of the Internet, starting from its ARPANET beginnings in the late 1960s to the colossal global “network society” that it is today, is a fascinating story of collaboration among computer scientists (seeking better, bigger, and faster networks), sociologists (seeking to use this new network to enhance human collaborations), and entrepreneurs (seeking to provide newer, more innovative services). A bit of this history is worth more than just a mere mention.

In 1971, just a few years after the “birth” of the Internet, Murray Turoff, a computer scientist working in the Office of Emergency Preparedness, Executive Offices of the President of the United States, was tasked with developing an electronic information and communication system to aid the U.S. government’s response to emergencies. The resulting system, EMISARI (Emergency Management Information System And Reference Index), is considered to be the first computer-mediated, multi-machine communications and conferencing system and an early precursor to many of today’s chat, messaging, conferencing, and collaboration systems.¹ Throughout the 1970s, sociologists, noticing the promise of social transformations emanating from networked communities, began actively studying the phenomenon. In 1978, collaboration between Turoff and the sociologist Roxanne Hiltz resulted in the earliest and brilliantly prescient seminal work on the emerging networked nation, described in their book The Network Nation.² The book became a defining document and a standard reference in computer-mediated communications. In her 1993 review in The Village Voice, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Teresa Carpenter said the book contained:

… a fascinating vision. In it home computers are as common as the telephone. They link person to person, shrinking, as the authors put it, “time and distance barriers among people, and between people and information, to near zero.” In its simplest form, the Network Nation is a place where thoughts are exchanged easily and democratically and intellect affords one more personal power than a pleasing appearance does. Minorities and women compete on equal terms with white males, and the elderly and handicapped are released from the confines of their infirmities to skim the electronic terrain as swiftly as anyone else.

Around the same time The Network Nation was published, Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociologist, was also studying the emerging network society, but from a purely sociological angle, arguing that societies are best seen as networks of people rather than as hierarchically organized social structures. He developed this theory in his 1979 article “The Community Question” and then expanded that idea substantially in his 2001 article “Physical Place and Cyber Place: The Rise of Personalized Networking”³ to include technological advancements that enable individuals to expand their individual networks temporally and spatially.

The early 1990s saw a major escalation of the networked society. The nascent Internet, which had maintained a predominantly academic presence through the 1980s, suddenly became a household presence with the development of the World Wide Web (WWW). A network that connected all of global humanity became a clear possibility, prompting more scientists and sociologists to study the shape of things to come in this new environment.

One of those attracted to this area of research was Jan van Dijk, a Dutch professor of communications science, who, in a seminal 1999 book, The Information Society, noted the rise of the networked society and the inherent dualities that existed in it:

A combination of scale extension and scale reduction marks all applications of the new media in the economy, politics, culture and personal experience. This combination is the prime advantage and attractiveness of these media. It explains their fast adoption in what was considered to be a communications revolution. A dual structure returns in several oppositions described in the former chapters: centralization and decentralization, central control and local autonomy, unity and fragmentation, socialization and individualization.⁴

Van Dijk foresaw the tensions that such networked flows would cause:

The main actors designing and introducing this advanced and expensive technology are at the top of corporations and governments. They are the investors, the commissioners and the decision makers. It is to be expected they use it to strengthen central control, be it in flexible forms, and to limit personal autonomy and free choices at the bottom of the organization not matching their interests. In this book it was noticed several times that ICT [Information and Communications Technology(ies)] enables better means of advanced and intelligent forms of central control than old technologies. It is a matter of social and organizational struggle whether the (other) opportunities of ICT to spread decision making will be utilized.⁵

He also predicted that the changes wrought by the networked society would be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and that the networked society would not be an altogether different type of society.

Of the many works of this period, perhaps none has so comprehensively catalogued the coming networked society as that by Manuel Castells, a sociologist from Barcelona, Spain, working at the University of California, Berkeley. In his voluminous 1990s trilogy The Information Age,⁶ he presciently portrayed the advent of a hyper-networked society, terming the new mode of development “informationalism”—paying tribute to Max Weber, who published his classic essay “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” in 1904–5 and whose ideas Castells used as a guideline in his theory of informationalism. Castells addressed many topics in his trilogy: the promise of a new networked world in the development of communications among peoples, the economic benefits and the cultural changes that this networked world would herald, the crisis of identity that it could lead to, and the real possibility of disintegration of societies “left behind” by the fast-moving train of globally networked economies. Even though Castells did not specifically focus on the power and expanse of the Internet, he nevertheless noted its enormous influence on the ongoing “network age”—the “microelectronics-based, networking technologies that provide new capabilities to an old form of social organization: networks.”⁷

The most impressive aspect of Castells’s work is the depth of empirical data he deployed to explain informationalism’s connections to numerous apparently unconnected phenomena—such as the economic successes of Southeast Asia; Russia’s capacity to retain a healthy civil society after the fall of communism; the future likelihood of Japan’s regaining a leadership role in the Asia Pacific region; and even cocaine-trafficking networks around the globe. Castells also noted that new networking technologies are fundamentally different from older networking technologies by virtue of their being more adaptive and flexible and by their enabling decentralized structures to flourish, whereas older networks were characterized by their focus on the private life and vertical organizations such as “states, churches, armies, and corporations that could marshal vast pools of resources around the purpose defined by a central authority.”⁸

Castells’s trilogy covered the three sociologic dimensions of production, power, and experience. His real feat was in synthesizing these dimensions with the emerging network technologies and offering a theory of cyberculture that stresses the role of the state, social movements, and business. He observed that each of these entities has a competing agenda and interests, and there exists a permanent tension among these entities in controlling the flow of information.

Castells is often the most-cited socioinformation theorist and is often compared to Karl Marx and Max Weber in his analysis of modern production, its destabilizing effects on capitalism, and the meaning and role of identity politics, which in turn determine social relations among classes, all within the context of the networked society. As noted by Andrew Calabrese⁹ in his extensive review of Castells’s trilogy, the areas that Castells focused on in the most sustained manner are the nature and status of sovereignty, citizenship, and democracy in light of the globalization of information flows—which are also the topics of focus in this book.

Effects and Consequences

All of these early scholars of the information society—from Turoff to Castells—easily recognized that the network age is characterized by global flows of information. The flows shrink the spatial and the temporal and have the effect of exhilarating, aweing, and shocking their global participants. For better or for worse, network-enabled global information flows are here to stay, and here to change. Changes include cultural assimilation, unified standards of governance, massive decentralization of all matters commercial, global access to goods and services, and global projection of power. To critics, the network age aids and speeds up monoculturization, imposes particular governance standards (such as democratization) on all regions of the globe, increases global outsourcing leading to massive shifts in jobs, and forces unneeded products and services on countries that don’t need them. Even modern terrorism conveniently places its raison d’être on the alleged threats to culture and values—posed by global information flows—mostly from developed Western nations. And distressingly, terrorists use the same global networks and network flows to promote their philosophy, propound their propaganda, gather recruits, and plan and implement their destructive agendas.

But the criticisms have come not just from the developing world. Many experts and commentators from the developed world—those that have advanced well into the network age—have also been equally strong in criticizing many of those governments that initiate, support, and extend policies that seek to impose a cultural hegemony on the rest of the world. Of course, some extreme critics of these practices (e.g., anti–world trade activists) have sought to neutralize the effects by commandeering the same technologies that enable the functioning of the network age (and thus global flow) to pursue (sometimes) violent and asymmetric struggles against those whom they perceive to be perpetuating globalization. An excellent example of this was the anti–World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1990. The primary agenda of anti–world trade activists is to negate, neutralize, or just strenuously oppose what they consider systematic efforts by developed economies—especially the United States and to a slightly lesser extent the European Union—to dominate the world economically through international IP laws and agreements. While it is easy to categorize these activists as belonging to fringe groups, it should be noted that impediments to free global flows of information orchestrated by developed countries are most often the cited reasons for such protests.

Impediments to the Free Global Flow of Information

Impediments to free information flows have also been extensively studied and catalogued by scientists, activists, lawyers, and humanists. Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite catalogue the impediments to free global flow by developed countries and call it a form of “information feudalism.” They argue:

Information feudalism is a regime of property rights that is not economically-efficient, and does not get the balance right between rewarding innovation and diffusing it. Like feudalism, it rewards guilds instead of inventive individual citizens. It makes democratic citizens trespassers on knowledge that should be the common heritage of humankind, their educational birthright. Ironically, information feudalism, by dismantling the publicness of knowledge, will eventually rob the knowledge economy of much of its productivity.¹⁰

Such proponents of truly free global flows of information have further sought to focus on the economic efficiencies, not to mention global equity, that could arise out of free flows of information unrestricted by stringent and often self-defeatist forms of copyright and other control regimes that seem to stifle, not further, innovation. Lawrence Lessig, the “American academic and political activist”—according to Wikipedia—and an ardent advocate of free culture, notes that the Internet is a prime answer to those who suggest that innovations can take place only in a controlled sphere. He notes:

… always and everywhere, free resources have been crucial to innovation and creativity; that without them, creativity is crippled. Thus, and especially in the digital age, the central question becomes not whether government or the market should control a resource, but whether a resource should be controlled at all. Just because control is possible, it doesn’t follow that it is justified. Instead, in a free society, the burden of justification should fall on him who would defend systems of control.¹¹

Yochai Benkler of Harvard Law School goes further in explaining the networked information economy (NIE) and the challenges it faces from entrenched economic interests. He argues in favor of creating appropriate social structures (by the mechanism of public policies) by governmental bodies that would promote and help retain the “commons-based peer production.” However, these “free flow” arguments face constant challenges from various fronts—the content providers, service providers, intellectual property guardians (mostly consisting of industry lobbyists, who effectively pressure governments and influence more protective laws).¹² Jonathan Zit-train, also of Harvard Law School, notes that industry pressure to enact and retain control over copyrights all over the globe is killing the “generative” characteristic of the hitherto “free” Internet, causing it to become fractured into smaller and smaller components, each governed by its own technological walls, rules, culture, and laws. Unfortunately, governments have only aided this unwelcome development, seeing that it would eventually provide them with more control over their own vested interests. This, argues Zit-train, is much to the detriment of free global information flow.¹³

Global Flow of Information: Current Perspectives

This book, coming a full twelve years after Castells’s trilogy was published, aims to provide more contemporary perspectives to the nature, effects, and consequences of global networks and corresponding information flows. It takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining current facets of the Internet and the patterns that it weaves, be they political, economic, social, or cultural. The plurality of views expressed here covers international law, culture, global inequities, modern practice of war, governmental actions, and culture—all touched by current global information flows. Consequently, the book features essays from key experts from a variety of disciplines—from sociology, law, and culture to technology and economics. Given its preeminent role in the world today, the Internet—and its effects—forms a constant undercurrent in most, if not all, of the chapters. Many discussions focus on how the Internet is shaping the forces of globalization and, in turn, how the Internet is itself being continually reshaped by the politics of globalization in areas ranging from culture to commerce to warfare. The essays, taken together, focus on five key questions:

• Can the flow of information across national borders be controlled? If so, how?

• Whose interests are going to be affected by flows of information across borders? Who will be empowered and who will lose influence and authority?

• What role can or should international law play in securing freedoms, rights, and democratic accountability as...