The Internet society and its struggle for recognition and influence

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Internet Utopianism and the Practical Inevitability of Law

Writing at the dawn of the digital era, John Perry Barlow proclaimed cyberspace to be a new domain of pure freedom. Addressing the nations of the world, he cautioned that their laws, which were “based on matter,” simply did not speak to conduct in the new virtual realm. As both Barlow and the cyberlaw scholars who took up his call recognized, that was not so much a statement of fact as it was an exercise in deliberate utopianism. But it has proved prescient in a way that they certainly did not intend. The “laws” that increasingly have no meaning in online environments include not only the mandates of market regulators but also the guarantees that supposedly protect the fundamental rights of internet users, including the expressive and associational freedoms whose supremacy Barlow asserted. More generally, in the networked information era, protections for fundamental human rights — both on- and offline — have begun to fail comprehensively. Cyberlaw scholarship in the Barlowian mold isn’t to blame for the worldwide erosion of protections for fundamental rights, but it also hasn’t helped as much as it might have. In this essay, adapted from a forthcoming book on the evolution of legal institutions in the information era, I identify and briefly examine three intersecting flavors of internet utopianism in cyberlegal thought that are worth reexamining. It has become increasingly apparent that functioning legal institutions have indispensable roles to play in protecting and advancing human freedom. It has also become increasingly apparent, however, that the legal institutions we need are different than the ones we have

NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES AND THE EMERGING SOCIAL TECHNICAL NETWORK

World history has been characterized by periods such as Feudalism, Industrialism and Capitalism that have served social scientists as tools to analyse and identify particular societies. Similarly, the characteristic and defining feature of the contemporary society is Information and Communicating Technology (ICT). Resultant to the ICT explosion and application there has been radical transformation in education, corporate sector, Government sector and most significantly, democracy is being reassessed. This paper attempts to gaze into the social impacts of new media technologies assuming that in this ICT dominant world human and social contexts of technology are undermined with an assumption that ICT and its applications have the same meaning and consequences for all. But recognizing the fact that social context plays a significant role in influencing ICT and its applications in diverse ways, an attempt is also made to highlight the reciprocal relationship between social context and information technology.  Article visualizations

Implementing Public Platforms for Mobile Phone Content Services: Standardization in an Era of Convergence

Mobile Telecommunication standardization in Europe builds on a history formed by European and International standardization bodies, the governments as regulators and the R&D departments of PPT-owned telecommunication operators. This paper describes the standardization approach related to the implementation of the public CPA (Content Provider Access) platform and business model for provision of content services for mobile phones in Norway. CPA builds on complementary services and common incentives for mobile telecommunication operators and content providers to create an open, transparent and easy to access service platform through standardization, but is at the same time developed outside both the scope and the central control of standardization organizations and their standardization practices. The nature of this process can be attributed to processes of convergence. Applying an Information Infrastructure perspective, we discuss the standardization process as open, where the trajectory of development is determined by heterogeneous actors with different and possibly conflicting agendas, powers, needs and incentives. Our aims are both to identify and describe new approaches to standardization as well as new kinds of standards within telecommunications

Digitale Unterschiede und das Internet

"Die digitale Spaltung bzw. der digital divide ist eine beliebte Metapher, mit der Unterschiede in der sozialen und territorialen Ausbreitung und Nutzung des Internet bezeichnet werden. Während von einigen die Spaltung als ein Übergangsphänomen auf dem Weg zur digitalen Vollversorgung betrachtet wird, fordern andere gezielte Maßnahmen ein, um die Spaltung zu überwinden. Regierungen, Unternehmen, aber auch zivilgesellschaftliche Gruppen haben sich zum Ziel gesetzt, den digital divide zu bekämpfen. Dabei überwiegt eine statische und dichotome Betrachtungsweise des Problems, und Maßnahmen zur Beseitigung der Unterschiede setzen an der Erleichterung des Zugangs zum Netz an. Tatsächlich sind viele digitale Unterschiede aber eher kontinuierlich als diskret, und es ist zu erwarten, dass sie sich im Zeitablauf reproduzieren. Schon die frühe Entwicklung des Internet ist eine Geschichte von Disparitäten und Differenzierungen. Sie zeigt, dass aus technischen Innovationen resultierende Ungleichheiten Bemühungen der Betroffenen auslösen, die Unterschiede auszugleichen, was die Ausbreitung des Netzes vorantreibt. Im Entwicklungsverlauf verlagern sich die Disparitäten von der bloßen Möglichkeit des Zugangs zum Internet auf technische und soziale Mechanismen der Inklusion und Exklusion. Speziell technisch unterstützte neue Nutzungsmöglichkeiten lösen aber wiederum auch Nachahmer-Prozesse aus, die - auch ohne staatliche Intervention - digitale Unterschiede verringern. Insgesamt überlagern sich politische (industrie-, technologie- und infrastrukturpolitische) Prozesse und Marktprozesse, die je für sich und im Zusammenwirken digitale Unterschiede beseitigen und erzeugen. Ein Blick in die Forschung über die Strukturierung sehr großer Netzwerke lässt vermuten, dass auch bei relativ gleich verteilten Fähigkeiten der Nutzung des Internet die einzelnen Nutzer (Netzknoten) keineswegs jeweils ähnliche Positionen in der Netzstruktur einnehmen. Vielmehr ist zu erwarten, dass das Nutzungsverhalten eine sehr schiefe Verteilung mit vielen schwach und wenigen stark vernetzten Knoten erzeugt ('scale-free' networks), was die Erwartungen einer generell Gleichheit fördernden Wirkung des Internet enttäuscht." (Autorenreferat

Emergence of the E-Government Artifact in an Environment of Social Exclusion in Kenya

Purpose: E-Government, introduced in African countries under the banner of New Public Management (NPM), is envisaged to fundamentally aid in improving governance in developing countries. The imported model of E-Government is therefore transferred to African countries as a panacea to bad governance by carriers such as international donor agencies, consultants, Information Technology vendors and Western-trained civil servants. Improved governance is expected to impact on the socio-economic development of these countries implementing E-Government, as an NPM instrument. This article recognizes that E-Government success, which is critically dependent on the World Wide Web, requires socially inclusive national information infrastructure. The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical analysis into the emerging E-Government artifact in the context of a developing country. By combining three independent research streams related to governance, social exclusion, and national information infrastructure, the emerging E-Government artifact was explored from a supply-side perspective. Design/methodology/approach: The research approach was critical in its philosophical orientation. The case study research strategy was adopted, which relied on various sources of data on E-Government policy and its related strategies in Kenya. Theoretical discourse analysis was employed as the predominant mode of analysis. Findings: The findings reveal that the emergent meanings of E-Government have strong managerialist intentions pointing to a thinly veiled control agenda couched in the language of a desire for efficiency in governance. An unexpected consequence of this conceptualization of E-Government is to help in solidifying and possibly exacerbating the social exclusion problem

The regulated end of internet law, and the return to computer and information law?

The 2020s will finally be the decade of cyberlaw, not as ‘Law of the Horse’, but as digital natives finally help bring the law syllabus, legal practice and even legislatures into the Information Society. In the first part of the chapter, I explain how the cyberlawyers of the 1990s dealt with regulation of the then novel features of the public Internet. Internet law was a subject of much interest in the 1990s in the US, and some specialist interest in UK and Europe. In Part 2, I explain the foundational rules for the adaptation of liability online initially focussed on absolving intermediaries of legal responsibility for end user posted content. This exceptionalist approach gradually gave way. While some US authors are hamstrung by a faith in the myth of the superuser and somewhat benign intentions of corporations as opposed to federal and state government, there has been a gradual convergence on the role of regulated self-regulation (or co-regulation) on both sides of the Atlantic. In Part 3, I argue that the use of co-regulation has been fundamentally embedded since European nations began to enforce these rules, with limited enforcement in which judges and regulators stated that business models largely focussed on encouraging illegal posting would not be protected. Settled policy on liability, privacy, trust, encryption, open Internet policies against filtering, were arrived at as a result of expert testimony and exhaustive hearings. In the final Part 4, I argue that hanging those policies on a whim results in potentially catastrophic results in terms of untying the Gordian knots of intermediary safe harbour/harbor, privacy, copyright enforcement, and open Internet European regulations

[[alternative]]The Legal Implications of Internet Technologies-Structural Regulations in the Information Age

計畫編號：NSC88-2412-H032-004研究期間：199808~199907研究經費：536,000[[sponsorship]]行政院國家科學委員