Great first meeting as a new member of the Quello Center Advisory Board, 9 May 2019. It was a great opportunity to thank Gary Reid, who is retiring, for his contributions to the Center, and to see members of the Board, who continue to contribute to the Center’s success.
Merit Innovation Award to the Quello Center at MSU
Wonderful to see the growing range of research activities, anchored in some major projects, including the award winning ‘Michigan Moon Shot Project’ being conducted with Merit Network. This project began when I was still at the Center, but it has surpassed all expectations in overcoming the challenges of academic-practitioner collaboration in developing such a large scale project. I’ll post a photo of the award, which is well deserved and fun. The Center is also continuing a set of lectures and roundtables, bringing in a number of absolutely major authorities, such as Professor Laura DeNardis, a member of our Quello Advisory Board.
The second half of the meeting was anchored around a roundtable discussion of emerging issues. Not surprisingly, key technical innovations seemed to draw the greatest attention, including advances in AI, IoT, and 5G, but members of the Board were refreshingly skeptical of much of the hype, such as that surrounding 5G. Discussion also moved to the growing focus on ethical questions about what should be done with AI and related technologies, and how to grapple with the so-called ‘techlash’ that has replaced the euphoria over the Internet and related ICTs.
My sense was that the rise of new regulatory initiatives, driven largely by this techlash, will bring debate right to the heart of the Quello Center – which was born around the discussion of policy and regulation.
Congratulations to Professors Johannes Bauer, the new Director, Laleah Fernandez, Assistant Director, and Keith Hampton, Research Director, for sustaining and building on the strength of the Quello Center.
The TPRC is seeking to select up to 6 TPRC Junior Fellows – early-career researchers engaged in research on the Internet, telecommunication and media policy in the digital age. Please nominate individuals whom you think might make outstanding fellows. Those who have wond student paper awards at the TPRC conference as well as those who served Benton Award winners could be candidates, but we are open to anyone you feel to have the potential to do outstanding research on key issues for the TPRC, and engage other early-career researchers in our activities.
The TPRC Junior Fellows Program was designed in part to award excellence but also tobring new members into the TPRC community. Those appointed will be honoured and serve as ambassadors for TPRC, working pro bono and appointed to two-year terms by the Board. Junior Fellows will be emerging scholars with good connections to their peers, including but not limited to successful TPRC paper presenters and alumni of the Graduate Student Consortium and Benton Award.
TPRC hopes that Junior Fellows will help broaden the TPRC community, and improve the participation of underrepresented groups, such as young academics, certain disciplines not traditionally involved in telecom research who are engaged in new media and digitial policy, and those engaged in new research areas, as well as those who bring greater diversity to our community, including women, minorities, and under-represented groups.
The TPRC Board anticipates that Fellows will disseminate information about TPRC on their personal networks, and identify and engage 1-1 with prospective attendees and encourage them to participate in TPRC. In return, TPRC will recognize Fellows on the TPRC web site, and publicly welcome new appointees during the conference, and provide material and mentoring to support their outreach mission. Of course, the Early Career Fellows will be able to list this service on their resumes. Each Fellow will have a designated Board liaison, who will check in periodically to discuss support needed and progress made. TPRC will aim to support your career.
Desiderata
We’re looking for people that meet as many of the following criteria as possible. None of them are required qualifications; we don’t expect that anyone will check all the boxes.
From under-represented groups, including women and minorities
Working in new research areas and those under-represented at TPRC
Academic talent and promise
Good network of contacts, e.g. active on social media
The fifth annual conference of Oxford’s Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre (GCSCC) was held in late February 2019 at the Oxford University’s Martin School. It engaged over 120 individuals from the capacity building community in one full day of conference sessions, preceded and followed by several days of more specialized meetings.*
The focus of the conference was on taking stock of the last five years of the Centre’s work, and looking ahead to the next five years in what is an incredibly fast moving area of Internet studies. So it was an ideal setting for reflecting on current themes within the cybersecurity and capacity building community. The presentations and discussions at this meeting provided a basis for reflections on major themes of contemporary discussions of cybersecurity and how they come together in ways that reinforce the need for capacity building in this area.
The major themes I took away from the day concerned 1) changing nature of threats and technologies; 2) the large and heterogeneous ecology of actors involved in cybersecurity capacity building; 3) the prominence of cross-national and regional differences; and 4) the range and prevalence of communication issues. These themes gave rise to a general sense of what could be done. Essentially, there was agreement that there was no technical fix to security, and that fear campaigns were ineffective, particularly unless Internet users are provided instructions on how to respond. However, there was also a clear recommendation not to throw up your hands in despair, as ‘cybersecurity capacity building works’ – nations need to see capacity building as a direction for their own strategies and actions.
Bill courtesy of Voices from Oxford (VOX)
I’ll try to further develop each of these points, although I cannot hope to give justice to the discussion throughout the day. Voices from Oxford (VOX) has helped capture the day in a short clip that I will soon post. But here, briefly, are my major takeaways from the day.
Changing Threats and Technologies
The threats to cybersecurity are extremely wide ranging across contexts and technologies, and the technologies are constantly and rapidly changing. Contrast the potential threats to national infrastructures from cyberwarfare with the threats to privacy from the Internet of Things, such as a baby with a toy that is online. The number of permutations of contexts and technologies is great.
The Complex Ecology of Actors
There is a huge and diverse set of actors and institutions involved in cybersecurity capacity building. There are: cybersecurity professionals, IT professionals, IT, software, and Internet industries; non-governmental organizations; donors; researchers; managers of governments and organizations; national and regional agencies; and global bodies, such as the World Economic Forum and the Internet Governance Forum. Each has many separate but overlapping roles and areas of focus, and each has a stake in global cybersecurity given the risks posed by malicious actors that can take advantage of global weaknesses.
One theme of our national cybersecurity reviews was that the multitude of actors within one country that were involved with cybersecurity often came together in one room for the very first time to speak with our research team. Cybersecurity simply involves a diverse range of actors at all levels of nations and organizations, and with a diverse array of relationships to the Internet and information and communication technologies, from professional IT teams and cybersecurity response teams to users. Developing a more coherent perspective on this ecology of actors is a key need in this area.
National and Regional Differences
Another clear theme of the day was the differences across the various nations and regions, including the obvious issues of the smaller versus larger nations in the scale of their efforts, but also between the low and high income nations. We heard cases of Somalia juxtaposed with examples from the UK and Iceland. And the range and nature of actors across these nations often differed dramatically, such as in the relevance of different global facilitating organisations, such as the World Bank.
Communication in So Many Words
Given this ecology of actors in a global arena, it might not be surprising that communication emerged as a dominant theme. It arose through many presentations and discussions of the need for awareness, coordination, collaboration (across areas and levels within nations, across countries, regions), as well as the need for prioritizing efforts and instruction and training, both of which work through communication. Of course, the conference itself was an opportunity for communication and networking that seemed to be highly valued.
What Can Be Done? Capacity Building
However, despite these technical, individual, and national differences, requiring intensive efforts to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate nationally, regionally, and globally, there were some common thoughts on what needs to be done. Time and again, speakers stressed the lack of any technical fix – or what one participant referred to as a silver bullet – to fix cybersecurity. And there was a general consensus that awareness campaigns that were basically fear campaigns did not work. Internet users, whether in households or major organizations, need instructions on what to do in order to improve their security. But doing nothing was not an option, and given the conference, it may not be surprising, but there did seem to be a general acceptance that cybersecurity capacity building was a set of instructions on a way forward. Our own research has provided empirical evidence than capacity building works, and is in the interest of every nation.**
Increasingly, the dilemmas facing politics in the United States if not worldwide are being portrayed as outcomes of polarization. It is an attractive topic for discussion, because there is undeniably a great deal of polarization, if defined as wildly different (polar opposite) viewpoints on one or more issues. Moreover, it seems to be tied to popular conceptions of the role of the Internet in enabling individuals to find support for their views online, even if extreme. Conceptions of echo chambers and filter bubbles are tied to this perspective. While I have argued that echo chambers and filter bubbles have been over hyped and under researched, I also can’t believe that polarization has not been prominent throughout the history of American politics.
So what is the problem? What has changed?
Perhaps it is the degree that proponents of different viewpoints have begun to take more ideological, righteous, or even sectarian positions. Their opponents are not wrong, they are seen and portrayed as bad if not evil.
What is surprising about this in the context of American politics is our history of being the model of a so-called ‘civic culture’ (Almond and Versa 1963: 8), defined by a culture based on “communication” and “consensus” in which diverse opinions are moderated by the structures and process of the political system, such as the two-party system and our system of checks and balances. This view was roundly criticized as simply a description of American politics post-World War II, as contrasted with less stable democratic systems leading up to the second world war, such as the Weimar Republic. However, there has been some face validity to this civic culture notion, at least up to the divisions surrounding the Vietnam War. Today, the idea of a civic culture seem ludicrous.
So I don’t think we should be as focused on the dynamics of polarization, or a diversity of opinions, but more on the dynamics of this politically sectarian righteousness. Maybe it is the nature of the issues being considered, such as the right to life, the environment, and immigration, that have connections with deep ethical or religious principles. But the search for answers to this question will lead in different directions than the search for the dynamics of polarization on the issues of the day.
There is a thoughtful letter to the editor of USA Today by David Engen of Spokane, Washington, that focuses on the decline of civil discourse. I find myself in agreement with him and others who are focusing on the decline of civility in American politics as absolutely central to fixing or mitigating what seems to be a decline of our political processes. Yet even the discussion of civility in American politics has been steeped in claims that one or another sectarian group is to blame, such as a recent story about whether voters see the Democrats or President Trump as more responsible for a decline in civility (Wise 2018).
Are we lost in what I would call a post-civic culture?
References
Almond, G. A., and Verba, S. (1963), The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
The editors of the Internet Policy Review are pleased to announce the publication of our newest special issue, bringing together the best policy-oriented papers presented at the 2017 annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) in Tartu, Estonia. The issue – on the broad theme of networked publics – was edited by guest editor William H. Dutton, Professor of media and information policy at Michigan State University.
The seven papers in the special issue span topics concerning whether and how technology and policy are reshaping access to information, perspectives on privacy and security online, and social and legal perspectives on informed consent of internet users. As explained in the editorial to this issue, taken together, the papers reflect the rise of new policy, regulatory and governance issues around the internet and social media, an ascendance of disciplinary perspectives in what is arguably an interdisciplinary field, and the value that theoretical perspectives from cultural studies, law and the social sciences can bring to internet policy research.
This special issue is the first major release of Internet Policy Review in its fifth anniversary year. The open access journal on internet regulation is a high-quality publication put out by four leading European internet research institutions: The Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), Berlin; the Centre for Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology (CREATe), Glasgow; the Institut des sciences de la communication (ISCC-CNRS), Paris; the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), Barcelona.
The release of this special issue officially kicks off the Internet Policy Review anniversary series of activities, including both an Open Access Minigolf during the Long Night of the Sciences (Berlin) and the IAMCR conference (Eugene, Oregon) in June, a Grand anniversary celebration (Berlin) in September and a participation in the AoIR2018 conference in October (Montreal). For up-to-date information on our planned activities, please kindly access: https://policyreview.info/5years
Papers in this Special Issue of Internet Policy Review
Editorial: Networked publics: multi-disciplinary perspectives on big policy issues
William H. Dutton, Michigan State University
Political topic-communities and their framing practices in the Dutch Twittersphere
Maranke Wieringa, Utrecht University
Daniela van Geenen, University of Applied Sciences Utrecht
Mirko Tobias Schäfer, Utrecht University
Ludo Gorzeman, Utrecht University
Big crisis data: generality-singularity tensions
Karolin Eva Kappler, University of Hagen
Cryptographic imaginaries and the networked public
Sarah Myers West, University of Southern California
Not just one, but many ‘Rights to be Forgotten’
Geert Van Calster, KU Leuven
Alejandro Gonzalez Arreaza, KU Leuven
Elsemiek Apers, Conseil International du Notariat Belge
What kind of cyber security? Theorising cyber security and mapping approaches
Laura Fichtner, University of Hamburg
Algorithmic governance and the need for consumer empowerment in data-driven markets
Stefan Larsson, Lund University
Standard form contracts and a smart contract future
Kristin B. Cornelius, University of California, Los Angeles
Vint Cerf is internationally recognized as “an Internet pioneer” – one of the “fathers of the Internet” – in light of his work with Bob Kahn in co-inventing Internet protocol (TCP/IP). He will be in East Lansing, Michigan, giving a Quello Lecture in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Quello Center. The Center was founded at MSU in 1998 to recognize the importance of James H. Quello’s contributions as one of the longest serving and most distinguished Commissioners of the Federal Communication Commission (FCC).
Arguably, over the first twenty years of the Quello Center’s existence, there has been no greater development shaping media and information technology, policy, and practice than the rise of the Internet and related information and communication technologies such as the Web, social media, and mobile Internet. But will the Internet play as central a role over the next twenty years?
To stimulate and inform debate around this question, we’ve asked Vint Cerf to provide his perspective on the Internet’s role in shaping media and information over the past twenty years, and in the coming decades. It is difficult to imagine another person who could provide such an authoritative perspective on twenty years in Internet time.
His lecture will be followed by questions and discussion as well as a reception. Join us on May 10thto celebrate and reflect on the most significant development shaping communication, media, and information over the life of the Quello Center, and also welcome Google’s Internet Evangelist to MSU.
I met for the last time with my last class at MSU in the Department of Media and Information. In a university with over 50,000 students, I am still able to teach a small class with three students – a virtual small tutorial. This one was on media and information policy with students doing papers on the moral panic over fake news (or is it warranted), whether there is a knowledge gap in understanding search algorithms that is shaped by socioeconomic factors, and a study of how to bridge broadband divides in Michigan.
So thanks to the Department and the College as well as the students for such an enjoyable way to conclude my teaching at MSU. I began as an undergraduate at the University of Missouri by tutoring the athletes in political science. I think I’ve always learned more than the students in my classes, but they always humor me. Thank you.
