What's the Big Idea? Production,Consumption and Internet Regulatory Discourse

Abstract

The internet is most often described in technical terms — as a combination of network protocols, infrastructure and access devices. However, rather than reduce the internet to a technical specification, it is more useful to understand it as an assemblage of technology, people and ideas. The dominant idea informing the internet has been one of openness —embracing a desire for freedom of information and the cultural potential of new communicative possibilities. This ‘meme’ of freedom is predicated on expanded notions of consumption, production and distribution of information, Internet technologies open up a space of possibility that allows for innovative options for information creation and dissemination. This article considers the possibilities of consumption and production that the internet has so far allowed, and suggests that the imposition of new limitations on those activities is indicative of a reconfiguration of the dominant idea of the internet — a reconfiguration that is currently being contested, but one that threatens its ultimate shape.

Some suggest — deterministically — that the internet is a technology of freedom, and that openness is embedded in its design. I argue that, far from being intrinsic to the technology. the ‘idea’ of openness is merely one of several competing ideas which might define the internet. Recent constraints on internet consumption and production are evidence that a less open network is not merely possible, but central to the more recent imaginings of government and corporate actors.