Tag Archives: Internet

Why is Net Neutrality in Germany in Danger?

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The debate about net neutrality in Germany is not a new one. But it has reached a peak because the Deutsche Telekom announced that it will introduce a new tariff structure (link in German). So far, so boring.

What’s the matter? Why is net neutrality in Germany in danger?

First of all, the Deutsche Telekom supplies more than 12 million clients (link in German) in Germany with broadband Internet access. If the company will change its tariff structure a good deal of the German population will be affected. Now the Telekom’s plan is to introduce a new tariff for broadband internet access very similar to what we already know from mobile phones. Most of the mobile phone subscribers have a contract with a certain data volume. If this data volume is exceeded you have to pay for a supplementary service in order to use high-speed Internet. If not, the speed of your Internet connection will be heavily reduced.

So what, those who pay more get a better service. Isn’t this the bottom line of a service economy?

Well, in this case only partly. The Deutsche Telekom is not only a company that provides the infrastructure. The Telekom itself provides content as well. Its own platform Entertain makes dozens of TV channels as well as Video on Demand services available. These services won’t be deducted from the data volume. There will also be so-called managed services, which means that some content providers pay the Telekom for a preferrential transmission of their content. The result will be that big players will definitely be at an advantage because they can pay the infrastructure providers like the Telekom. But what about smaller, innovative and new companies? They could be the losers (besides the customers) in this game.

Net neutrality flyer.

Net neutrality flyer. Published by Flickr user skyfaller, CC BY-SA 2.0

Is it only about money?

No. It’s also about data protection and privay. The Telekom only knows which service they want to favour if they scan the content. This means that every data package has to be checked in order to find out who is the sender, who is the addressee and what’s the content. Just try to imagine what an outcry it would cause if parcel services would control every parcel they deliver (if you speak German you should read this great blogpost. It explains the similarity between controlling data packages and „real“ packages).

According to Wikipedia net neutrality „is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication“. This principle will be broken if the Telekom will really implement what it has announced yesterday. It seems like there is only a small chance to stop this if Telekom’s customers send a signal that they will change their Internet provider. This could also prevent other providers from implementing similar tariff structures. Unfortunately the German government is not willing to pass a law that secures net neutrality in Germany.

The Revolution in Your Pocket

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This blogpost has been written by Ajinkya Pawar from India and it has originally been published on futurechallenges.org. I publish this blogpost here as well because the underlying assumption is interesting:  ICT is shaping our world. This does not come as a surprise! But there is a very interesting experiment: How do people react who are deprived of their mobile phones?

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are essentially, ‘tools’, and a tool is essentially neutral. It’s a matter of ‘who is using the technology and to what end’ rather than ‘which technology’ that provokes questions about vulnerability, threats to freedom and so on.

However, ICT differs from most other technologies in one key aspect – in the virus-like efficiency and resilience it has exhibited in being integrated into humanity’s social and economic fabric. No other technology has altered our world view, our way of  life and our economics as much as the connected world of ICT. Anxiety about our vulnerability and the threats to our freedom and privacy is a natural reaction to the sudden changes brought about by ICT. We are living in amazing times – times when the course of evolution of ICT will be charted. The decisions and actions taken now will affect our future profoundly as ICT get more entrenched in our sense of being.

I will give a few examples from India to illustrate how profoundly  ICT is shaping our world.

First – the importance of ICTs

I work in an advertising agency and am sharing here just the topline findings of the qualitative research we did recently to try and understand the importance of cell phones in the lives of the average middle class Indian. (It’s a hot topic for research, some of the reports can be found here, here and here). In this exercise we took away cell phones from a few volunteers for three days and recorded their feelings and emotions about the absence of their cell phone. The results were astounding: their lives really were significantly affected by the absence of their phones – they became anxious and unhappy about the loss. Daily chores and interactions were hampered. Anxiety levels rose alarmingly as we are no longer used to entertaining uncertainties about the whereabouts of our loved ones and  always plan our day on the move. Deprivation of mobile phones led to visible withdrawal symptoms among the participants of study. The cell phone is now a part of an entrenched physical habit, the absence of which creates physical tension and reactions such as automatically checking our pocket to see if the cell phone is still there or not.

Our study conclusively indicated that mobile phones are now an integral part of our very being that shapes not just our actions and interactions but also our sense of self and our relationships. We are vulnerable and under pressure when deprived of our own very personal mobile phone.

2 curious kids peering into a cell phone.

Everyone loves their phone by Ajinkya Pawar

Second- balancing vulnerability and freedom

In April last year, the Indian government issued rules demanding internet service providers delete information posted on websites that officials or private citizens deemed ‘disparaging’. Last year, it threatened to shut down Blackberry services in India if its manufacturer, Research In Motion, did not allow government officials greater access to users’ messages. Later in the year, Union Communications and the IT Minister Mr. Kapil Sibal came under immense criticism from the online community over government attempts at censoring and monitoring online content.

Though these matters are yet to be resolved, the strong reaction from social media platforms against any kind of censorship or monitoring is a telling  indicator of how we relate to ICTs: they are integral to us, and monitoring ICT is akin to violation of our privacy and freedom of speech.” What we now need is a more comprehensive debate and an understanding of the new shift in our notion of boundary, propriety and freedom.

Third- ICT enabled empowerment

For most of human history, the majority of humanity has lived wretched lives – barely surviving. Most people never even knew about the opportunities the world had to offer to them, let alone have the means to access them. They never knew of their right to exploit these opportunities either. Thanks to ICT the situation is changing. Take, for example, thefarmers from the Sangli district in Maharashtra who used Facebook to create a community of farmers who share their knowledge of farm produce prices.Low cost telephony has revolutionized the trading paradigm as even the smallest retailer and producer of goods and services in the country is able to reach the market where demand resides.

In short, I believe that the ideas of human dignity, equality and power of self determination that were born with the European enlightenment, have now truly found their voice with the birth of digital technology. As we gradually comprehend and absorb this notion, we have to be aware of the many complexities that it engenders – the notion of freedom, the notion of identity, the notion of boundaries and so on. We should never forget that it is we ourselves who are charting the course towards a possible utopia or dystopia, not the technology.

Political Parties as Open Platforms

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I’ve been noticing for some time that it is getting more and more difficult to choose a party that best represents my interests. The world is getting evermore complex which means that solutions have to be more complex as well.

A few decades ago we experienced deep societal rifts, for example in the late 1960s. It was pretty easy to differentiate between left-wing and right-wing voters. Those who were in favour of a libertarian model of a society and those who preferred a rather authoritarian kind of society. These clear differences seem to have bottomed out (I would like to point out that this blogpost focuses on Germany, in other parts of the world it may be different. Please comment if it’s totally different in your country).

You won’t find suitable answers to complex and often global problems by adjusting solutions to a certain ideology. For each and every challenge you have to find an appropriate answer that is in accordance with the respective challenge instead of serving any ideology.

What if today’s political parties are not able to cope with modern societies’ challenges? It’s simply impossible for conservative parties to find purely conservative solutions to each and every problem that arises. The same applies to liberal and other parties out of the political spectrum as well.

The solution can only be to open up parties. Listen to the people, their concerns and their proposals. Political parties could act as platforms that are keen on generating innovative ideas and that are thankful for getting feedback. I am surely not in favour of dissolving political parties. I think they are an important institution to organise people (some might say that the Internet is nowadays the tool to organise these people). But, I am convinced that they should be far more responsive. We are witnessing that citizens want to gather around a common purpose and not a one-size-fits all ideology. This trend will likely get stronger. If political parties want to survive in modern societies they have to find an answer to these challenges.

Threefold Democratisation via the Internet

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„How the Internet Changes Our Reality“ was the motto for a BarCamp that was hosted by FutureChallenges.org, the Humbold Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft and the Club of Rome. As you might imagine, this title left much room for a variety of sessions (Here you can see a list with notes from the different sessions, some in German and some in English.)

I would like to speak specifically about the session „Internet and Democracy“. The session touched on many topics, but all were related to democratisation in the political sphere. This is a limited view which neglects changes in the economic and societal spheres.

Politics and Democratisation

This is the most obvious aspect of the Internet’s democratisational impact. I will spare you the details of the revolutions in Northern Africa and the role of modern ICTs. We have read so much about it that it even runs risk of becoming a cliché. Even before these uprisings took place, digital revolutions had been successful.

The Orange revolution in Ukraine 2004 for example “may have been the first in history to be organized largely online”, says Michael McFaul. After the presidential elections, state media proclaimed that Leonid Kuchma’s handpicked successor had won whereas several websites did intense reporting on fraudulent elections. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities spent many freezing nights in tent cities. SMS and the Internet played an important part in mobilizing people.

But there are other examples as well. In Iran and Burma, large-scale uprisings might not have been successful in terms of regime overthrows. But activists flooded cyberspace with photos, videos and blogposts covering the demonstrations. The whole world was thus able to get a peek into the events. This may have saved lives. Which regime wants to kill its citizens when the world is watching? (Some months ago I wrote a blogpost on “Digital Revolutions: Beyond Tunisia and Egypt” in which I sketched short and long term democratisational effects of the use of the Internet.)

Picture taken from Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy http://www.nimd.org

Economy and Democratisation

Democracy means „rule of the people“. In the economic sphere we could however translate it by „rule of the consumers.“ A prime example of what can happen when companies do not listen to their customers is presented by Jeff Jarvis and his Dell story. Jarvis, a popular pundit on media in America, published some blogposts expressing his anger at the computer manufacturer. The company was soon confronted with a storm of criticism on the Internet. It severely affected Dell’s reputation. As a result Dell tried to more actively attend to its critics and made considerable efforts to better-involve its customers.

Another example these days is the social media storm that Adidas and other sponsors of the European Soccer Championships 2012 in the Ukraine and Poland are facing. In the Ukraine, stray dogs get killed in order to „clean up“ the streets for the tournament. As a result, the social media channels of Adidas and other sponsors have been flooded with furious comments. It remains to be seen how the companies will react, but remaining silent is certainly not the right approach.

Nowadays, companies have to listen to their customers and their needs. If they do not act responsively, they will lose the contest for market share.

I have to admit that this is a one-sided perspective on the economy. The economic sphere is not only about the relationship between businesses and customers, but also about business and politics. And here we see that companies (like big banks) have too much influence on politicians. This is a concern that is expressed by the worldwide Occupy movement which also relies heavily on the Internet to build and mobilize support.

Society and Democratisation

Knowledge is Power. Before the printing press was invented, only a few chosen ones had access to books. They were pretty rare because they were handwritten. The dissemination of books contributed to an explosive spread of literacy.

Martin Luther’s campaign against the Catholic church could not have been successful without the printing press. This machine enabled the wide dissemination of Luther’s ideas and the erosion of the Vatican’s privilege of interpretation.

What we’re witnessing today with the use of the Internet is that information is acessible to nearly everyone with Internet access (see the digital divide). There is wikipedia, there are free (online) universities and so forth. Knowledge is everywhere. It is not limited anymore to a small group of people.

Authority is often the result of an advance in knowledge. But what happens when this advantage in knowledge erodes? I think that there is justified reason to believe that many of our societies’ authorities will erode as well. In this sense, modern societies experience a democratisation as well.

This blogpost has orginally been published on futurechallenges.org. Please see the “In Focus: Occupy Wall Street” series on futurechallenges.org.

The Internet and the Costs of Organising Protests

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The student Sophie Scholl was a member of the German resistance during the Nazi dictatorship in Germany. She had been sentenced to death because she and some of her fellow students (all members of the Weiße Rose) printed and distributed flyers calling for a toppling of the Nazi regime. The members of the Weiße Rose had to be very careful and constantly they had to be frightened that their cover would be blown especially when they went out to distribute the flyers.

Today, it’s much easier to organise protests and demonstrations. You don’t have to hide a printing press and go out at night to distribute any flyers in a conspiratorial manner though this does not mean that there is no risk of voicing dissent online (For more information see CyberDissidents.org).

I don’t want to bother you with another story praising Internet or Facebook Revolutions in Egypt or Tunisia. Nevertheless, I am really astonished how people can spread the impression that in Egypt or Tunisia the Internet did not have a stake in toppling the regimes in Tunisia or, even more so, in Egypt. It’s the people that take to the streets, who risk their life and who bring about change. But the Internet definitely helped in quickly organizing widespread  mass protests.

This weekend I attended a policy bar camp (PolitCamp) in the former German capital Bonn. One session was titled: “Communication Revolution: Toppling Regimes and Building Governments with Facebook and Twitter”. Well, the title of this session was far too ambitious. Perhaps this is why Deutsche Welle’s  head of the editorial department for the Arab region was so skeptical. He argued that Facebook had been used in Egypt since 2004 and that we haven’t seen any substantial changes until this year. So what does this prove? At least, it doesn’t say anything about the Internet’s and Social Media’s role in organizing mass protests once they have been sparked.

Today, the Internet enables us to reduce the costs of organizing. You don’t have to focus on mass protests like in Egypt, Tunisia or elsewhere. Let’s be humble. Take for example the Doodle surveys. It’s so easy to coordinate with friends, colleagues or others to find suitable dates, locations and so on.  Just ask them via Doodle what date would be suitable for most of them.  You can get a nice overview at short notice.

Again, I don’t want to overestimate the role of the Internet and Social Media in the revolutions in the Arab World but please let’s take into account the very important fact that the costs of organizing protests have massively been reduced thanks to the Internet. Who would deny that?