The Desktop Regulatory State

Opinion | Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas.

We need a more active role for governments and regulators.

Zuckerberg Op-Ed: New Rules Would Hurt Everyone But Facebook

The social network has the right to air its views on tech regulation — but the public would be wise to ask questions.

The web can be weaponised – and we can't count on big tech to stop it | Tim Berners-Lee

It’s dangerous having a handful of companies control how ideas and opinions are shared. A regulator may be needed

The coming civil war over general purpose computing

Even if we win the right to own and control our computers, a dilemma remains: what rights do owners owe users?

How One 1990s Browser Decision Created Big Tech’s Data Monopolies (And How We Might Finally Fix It) - Above the Law

From the take-back-control dept

Law and Borders - the Rise of Law in Cyberspace

Global computer-based communications cut across territorial borders, creating a new realm of human activity and undermining the feasibility--and legitimacy--of

Opinion | These A.I. Policies Will Hurt Our Business. We Should Do Them Anyway.

The risks posed by A.I. are too great to forgo any regulation, even for those who stand to gain tremendously from the technology’s rise.

Big Tech tried to get young people addicted. Now we’re fighting back

Two seismic court decisions in the US have intervened where legislators have failed to defend social media users from exploitation, writes campaigner Zamaan Qureshi

Bill C-22’s Groundhog Day: Why the Government’s Dismissal of Signal, Apple and the U.S. Congress Concerns Runs Back the Disastrous Online News Act Playbook - Michael Geist

Secure messaging service Signal yesterday became the latest company to warn that Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, could force it to leave the Canadian market rather than comply with provisions it says would compromise its end-to-end encryption and create new cybersecurity risks. Signal vice-president Udbhav Tiwari told the Globe and Mail that the company “would rather pull out of the country than be compelled to compromise on the privacy promises we have made to our users.” The comments are part of a steady stream of similar warnings from Apple, Meta, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, and the chairs of the U.S. House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees. Despite growing concern, the government’s response has been to launch a misleading social media campaign and repeatedly insist that the experts and companies are mistaken.

Toward People’s Community Control of Technology: Race, Access, and Education

This field review explores how the benefits of access to computing for racialized and minoritized communities has become an accepted fact in policy and research, despite decades of evidence that technical fixes do not solve the kinds of complex social problems that disproportionately affect these communities.

Toward a theory of network gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information control

Abstract Gatekeeping theories have been a popular heuristic for describing information control for years, but none have attained a full theoretical status in the context of networks. This article aims to propose a theory of network gatekeeping comprised of two components: identification and salience . Network gatekeeping identification lays out vocabulary and naming foundations through the identification of gatekeepers, gatekeeping, and gatekeeping mechanisms. Network gatekeeping salience , which is built on the bases of the network identification theory, utilizes this infrastructure to understand relationships among gatekeepers and between gatekeepers and gated, the entity subjected to a gatekeeping process. Network gatekeeping salience 1 Salience refers to the degree to which gatekeepers give priority to competing gated claims. proposes identifying gated and their salience to gatekeepers by four attributes: (a) their political power in relation to the gatekeeper, (b) their information production ability , (c) their relationship with the gatekeeper, and (d) their alternatives in the context of gatekeeping.

Gathering the Custodians of the Internet: Lessons from the First CivilServant Summit - Citizens and Technology Lab

An agenda for citizen behavioral science to maintain and protect the communities we love online.

Eaten by the Internet

This book makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?