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Digital trade protectionism does not protect workers rights and could cost us the Internet

Cross-border data flows and, as a result, the global Internet are being threatened by usual and unusual suspects. Some nation-states have proposed for some time digital sovereignty laws. But now, even governments that have been advocates for the global Internet are changing course. Think tanks and others who were in favor of the global and interoperable Internet also have turned against it. On top of all this, those opposed to digital free trade have once again risen, with the same tired arguments: cross-border data flow is bad for workers’ and people’s rights. This blog is hopefully a first step to start a conversation that reminds us of the myriad benefits of a global Internet that allows cross-border data flow. It will also provide a few counter arguments for the America’s Unions (AFL-CIO) digital trade agenda published recently. Let us be clear: ordinary workers have faced trouble in recent decades. But the AFL-CIO proposals are detrimental to the global Internet and Internet connectivity. Worse, they are not likely to protect the tech workers the AFL-CIO wants to protect.

Back in 2017, some civil society organizations, including some labor unions, allegedly spoke on behalf of “the global civil society” and argued that the prohibition of WTO on data localization as a trade barrier would disallow countries from coming up with laws to protect the public interest and protect privacy and other fundamental rights. These arguments resurfaced again recently as Biden’s administration announced a worker-centered trade policy

The recent AFL-CIO workers’ agenda starts from the mistaken premise that governments cannot regulate data or big tech companies because of digital trade policies. This, it says, leads to lack of protection for workers. Digital trade agreements do not prohibit countries from regulating data or any digital services and products. Every year, there are  myriad of laws and regulations around the world that increasingly regulate data and tech companies: consider Europe’s Digital Market Act and Digital Services Act, or India’s IT Act, for example. As UNCTAD reports, 71% of countries worldwide have come up with data protection and privacy legislation. 

The workers’ agenda is filled with assertions that trade agreements do not consider workers and people’s fundamental rights and the agenda presents data localization and more regulation as the solution. One argument is that digital apps and social media platforms have eroded privacy. However, trade agreements, unlike human rights instruments, can be effective and binding. Civil society groups have even used trade agreements and regional economic cooperation groups such as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation to advance privacy in cross-border data flow. 

Data localization measures tend to work for the benefit of existing, vested interests and against those who might try something new. It is not clear how such measures will make the Internet become a healthier space. 

This takes us to the other argument made in the statement that implies to care about workers’ creativity. To protect their creative rights, it asks for more aggressive copyright protection and less fair-use that supports the interest of creators. Fair use is the mechanism used by creators to assert their rights in the face of large, well sourced corporations. It is unclear how eroding fair use through digital trade agreements can help with workers’ rights and creativity. Especially as the statement itself acknowledges that by advancing intellectual property rights of big-tech corporations, the US government expanded their access to the global market at the expense of others. 

There are many more arguments in the statement that support a protectionist digital trade agenda to seemingly protect the workers and users’ rights. It even goes as far as supporting contested arguments such as online platforms should be held accountable for the third party user generated content and provision of bulk access to source codes and algorithms for the governments to address harmful practices and content is necessary. 

To protect workers and users on the Internet when dealing with digital products and services is a wonderful goal. However, it is unclear how the AFC-CIO solution can actually help with reaching that goal. Fortunately, there are both private and regulatory initiatives around the world that address the well-being of the workers in tech companies. For example, the Digital Trust and Safety Partnership, an industry consortium, includes investing in the wellness and resilience of teams dealing with sensitive materials as part of its Best Practices Framework. Tech workers have also started creating workers’ union inside tech-companies. We need to think about supporting alternatives instead of attacking the critical characteristics of the Internet. It is those characteristics that make meaningful connectivity possible.

Access to the Internet is not just access to another form of communication. It is access to essential services and a lifeline during a crisis. This was quite clear during the years of a global pandemic. We need to stand up against what hampers our interconnectivity. Our solutions should not cost us the Internet.   

Trust and Safety Outreach and Engagement

Digital Medusa supports stakeholders outreach and engagement activities for Digital Trust and Safety Partnership. The activities entail liaising with civil society, academics, governments and external stakeholders. The outreach and engagement takes place through a series of workshops, one-on-one meetings with various stakeholders, taking part and speaking at different digital governance and digital trust and safety gatherings.

Digital Medusa supports stakeholders outreach and engagement activities for Digital Trust and Safety Partnership. The activities entail liaising with civil society, academics, governments and external stakeholders. The outreach and engagement takes place through a series of workshops, one-on-one meetings with various stakeholders, taking part and speaking at different digital governance and digital trust and safety gatherings.

  • Year of collaboration: Started in 2022
  • Status: Ongoing

Related Events

Immersive technology is poised to transform the way people work, play, and learn. From an emerging creator economy of virtual goods and services to cutting-edge applications that can improve education, health care, and manufacturing, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) technologies are unlocking new opportunities to communicate, access information, and engage with the world. These changes raise important questions, and how policymakers respond will have profound implications for the economy and society.

https://itif.org/events/2022/09/14/ar-vr-policy-conference-2022/
Watch here: ARVR Policy Conference 2022
Trust and Safety Research Conference 2022: https://www.tsresearchconference.org/
OECD Ministerial meeting: Building an Inclusive Digital Future: Digital Ministerial 2022

Syllabus for Schools on Internet Governance

This syllabus was designed for the United Nations Internet Governance Forum. The syllabus is an advisory document that may guide those who wish to convene a school or teach Internet governance, or know more about the structure of IG courses.
In addition to explaining how the syllabus was created and how it could be used, the document contains the following sections:.

This syllabus was designed for the United Nations Internet Governance Forum. The syllabus is an advisory document that may guide those who wish to convene a school or teach Internet governance, or know more about the structure of IG courses.
In addition to explaining how the syllabus was created and how it could be used, the document contains the following sections:.

  • Core Internet governance modules and elective modules, learning outcomes as well as a sample of faculty members and topics they teach.
  • Teaching methods such as practicums, hands-on industry presentations, moot courts and others, How to find lecturers and experts?
  • How to build coalitions, contribute to the Dynamic Coalition on Schools of Internet governance (DC-SIG)?
  • Teaching methods such as practicums, hands-on industry presentations, moot courts and others, How to find lecturers and experts? How to build coalitions, contribute to the Dynamic Coalition on Schools of Internet governance (DC-SIG)?
  • Year of collaboration: 2022
  • Status: Complete

Human Rights Lifecycle of a Terrorist Incident Online

From January 15 to May 31, 2022, the Working Group on Crisis Response Protocols (CRWG) – a subgroup of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) – met with stakeholders across civil society organizations, governments, academics and companies (through a series of individual and group meetings in addition to tabletop exercises). The output of this effort is the present report that aims to: 1. Outline the lifecycle of a terrorist incident on the Internet and its human rights impact; 2. Propose a framework for crisis protocol operators and GIFCT to use for explicating the lifecycle of incidents and to consider human rights implications in crisis response; and 3. Clarify the relationship between human rights and GIFCT’s mission through explaining the human rights impact at each stage of the crisis lifecycle. It also provided one of the first “categories of terrorist attacks with an online angle”. Digital Medusa led the working group and wrote the report with the help of the working group members.

From January 15 to May 31, 2022, the Working Group on Crisis Response Protocols (CRWG) – a subgroup of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) – met with stakeholders across civil society organizations, governments, academics and companies (through a series of individual and group meetings in addition to tabletop exercises). The output of this effort is the present report that aims to: 1. Outline the lifecycle of a terrorist incident on the Internet and its human rights impact; 2. Propose a framework for crisis protocol operators and GIFCT to use for explicating the lifecycle of incidents and to consider human rights implications in crisis response; and 3. Clarify the relationship between human rights and GIFCT’s mission through explaining the human rights impact at each stage of the crisis lifecycle. It also provided one of the first “categories of terrorist attacks with an online angle”.

Digital Medusa led the working group and wrote the report with the help of the working group members.

  • Year of collaboration: 2022
  • Status: Complete

SancNet

Geopolitical conflicts and wars have been affecting access to the Internet since the Internet became more formalized and in a way, industrialized. This project focuses on “economic sanctions”, their effect on access to the Internet and the value of interconnectedness without discrimination.

Geopolitical conflicts and wars have been affecting access to the Internet since the Internet became more formalized and in a way, industrialized. This project focuses on “economic sanctions”, their effect on access to the Internet and the value of interconnectedness without discrimination.

Because of its history, the Internet and access to it were always affected by geopolitical conflicts and wars. Once it became widely accessible to consumers, however, the Internet became subject to trade sanction regimes in the US and Europe and possibly elsewhere.  There are debates about whether sanctions are effective for changing States’ behavior and what can be effectively sanctioned. As the Internet is a relatively new industrial area, this project proposes to adopt a systemic approach and document how sanctions are currently applied to the Internet, why there have been previous attempts not to apply sanctions to the Internet, whether contemporary problems necessitate application of sanctions to the Internet, and what a desirable outcome might be for sanctions and Internet access in the future.

We will use interviews, desk research and analytical narratives to provide a background on how sanctions have directly or indirectly affected access to the Internet. 

- Policy solutions: considering past sanction exemptions, what are the potential pathways to arguing for policies that can diminish the impact of sanction on access to the Internet but at the same time help governments achieve their sanction goals. 

- Strategies for compliance with sanctions while keeping the Internet global: the research discovers why businesses over comply with sanctions and how the risk strategies can change to maintain provision of services while still being in compliance with sanction rules. 

- Institutional changes: the research will also look into whether we need institutional and governance changes in Internet governance organizations in order to maintain interconnectedness.

Related meetings

Articles

Progress reports

Researchers 

  • Farzaneh Badiei, Digital Medusa 
  • Zhenye (Ryan) Pan, Columbia University 

Funding

This project is being funded by RIPE NCC 

Contact 

https://digitalmedusa.org/contact-2/

Shall we resume dreaming? Decentralized web and decentralized governance 

The Internet and the world wide web are not the same thing. First, there are parts of the Internet that are not the web (the most obvious of which is email). But second, even though the web as a whole is decentralized, the design of the web is not technically a decentralized technology in the way some other Internet services are. That has had many implications for digital governance. 

In a recent paper I co-authored with professors Meares and Tyler, we include a brief history of how, gradually, communities and autonomous decision-making on the Internet turned into a centralized, top-down governance on social media platforms. One reason we have identified is the “centralized” nature of the web. (P.26) Before the web became popular, services such as Usenet operated in a decentralized manner. Multiple Internet site operators had a role to play in governing the space and it was not possible to take control of an entire operation. Attempts to impose central control resulted in people objecting and setting up alternatives.   

When the web started becoming popular, its comparatively centralized technology encouraged centralization of content and a more top-down governance approach. However, note that it was still possible to have a decentralized governance on the web and early on, platforms such as Slashdot and Wikipedia continued using a community-based governance on the web (they still more or less do). Gradually, however, new platforms emerged with a tendency to be more and more centralized. It was the website owners who would decide the governance of that site, and it is costly to set up alternatives to a site if a governance mechanism is not desirable. Economically, it was also in these platforms’ interest to keep users inside their “ecosystems”. It was easy to predict that the centralization and top-down governance approaches and the disappearing communities would eventually happen. But the question is, how innovative are we in our technological and governance approaches that can create a decentralized digital space?  

Perhaps we should be more creative than just arguing for tired content moderation governance systems and arguing with social media platforms about who is “really” in charge and keep bringing up platform responsibility. Maybe decentralized technology can help us with solving some of the contemporary social media platform problems. Last week at the Unfinished Live event Jonathan Dotan (Starling Lab) gave an excellent and powerful presentation on a new paradigm for preserving history and human rights. By creating a new “web” protocol that is decentralized, it might be more feasible to create trust in the digital records of human history— for example to preserve the accounts of a holocaust survivor or an Afghan Taliban victim. They intend to provide a way to create a chain of custody, store data in a decentralized way that cannot be manipulated or altered (but that doesn’t necessarily need consensus) and provide the ability to verify data without having to trust the source. Imagine if, instead of tech-giants, the nodes (i.e. humans) were able to authenticate a piece of data and store it.

These kinds of initiatives are worthwhile to follow as they are very issue specific and, unlike other claims about decentralized technologies, they are not too abstract. However, one thing that I think we should stop doing is to separate decentralized governance from decentralized technology discussions. The combination of decentralized governance and technology might be an answer to some of the digital problems we are facing. Perhaps MacKinnon’s thought piece about governance of Web3 is a step in that direction.

Copyright trolls are out in force around the world. And the pandemic is their perfect excuse

Farzaneh Badii, (former) Executive Director of the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, agrees, saying that the “rationale behind their actions is to generate revenue. They use and lobby for laws they can make profit from and the positive effect of these laws and harsh enforcement on the society is unfounded and mostly anecdotal.”

In Germany, explains Badii, “the wifi providers and ISPs are liable for copyright infringing if their service is used to commit the infringement.” Meanwhile in the US there are several methods lawyers use to go after alleged copyright infringements and users.

“In some jurisdictions they have to get a court order or some other legal order to get the personal information. They might also go through an easier and faster process (like a government agency tribunal). If the personal information is not protected by appropriate laws, the ISP might hand in the personal information even without a court order. And in some jurisdictions the ISP has to send the notice the lawyer has sent to the alleged copyright infringer,” explains Badii.
Badii comments that copyright trolls will tell you that “they want to protect the rights of the authors, that copyright is good for innovation and creativity! Some claim that they are protecting the Internet from dangerous materials, they argue they want to keep us safe.”

But when they use such excuses, Badii notes, “I imagine Fake Gucci bags attacking the Internet.”

Raphael Tsavkko Garcia, CyberNews

About The Author

Farzaneh Badii

Digital Medusa is a boutique advisory providing digital governance research and advocacy services. It is the brainchild of Farzaneh Badi[e]i.Digital Medusa’s mission is to provide objective and alternative digital governance narratives.