Abstract
In this dialogue, Terry Flew first outlines “a synoptic history” of the dominant discourses on Internet regulation. By exploring the global experiences over the past decades, Flew then articulates “the third way” of global Internet governance. Differing from both the “Silicon Valley” model of the United States and the state-led Chinese model, “the third way” is proposed to be built on trust and regulation. The typology of Internet governance addresses the tension between the nation-state and global market and emphasizes the balance between communication technology and law. Flew further elaborates on the importance of the multi-stakeholder approach in the future of global Internet governance and the challenges such an approach is facing. In addition, Flew offers advice on further research in Internet governance and platform regulation.
Terry Flew is Professor of Digital Communication and Culture at the University of Sydney. His recent book,
In your most recent books (Flew, 2021; Flew & Martin, 2022), you have extensively discussed digital platform regulation from a global perspective. You have documented that the dialogue on Internet governance has experienced a dramatic shift from the “Californian ideology”, the liberal attitude towards the Internet, to a more regulatory view on platforms nowadays. What has happened and why?
In the book
In the first stage, we have the notion of an
Probably the first really effective business model was that of Google. At that time, the dominant discourse was around freedom, and the prevailing concern was about state interference. Now, that is not the case for all countries around the world. Some people talk about China as an exception, but it was always a reasonably significant exception. For the dominant Internet user population in North America and Europe, the notion of the Internet as what Ithiel de Sola Pool referred to as a ‘technology of freedom’ (de Sola Pool, 1983) prevailed and shaped public policy to a very significant degree.
What we saw from the mid-2000s was the
So since platformization, there has come the push for regulation. It is partly about political power, but it is also about what Manuel Castells (2013) refers to as “communication power”. The capacity to be the new gatekeepers of communication raises the questions of social responsibility. There is an interesting historical parallel in this debate to the early years of the industrial revolution that the sociologist Karl Polanyi discussed in his 1944 book,
The final point I would like to make is that the process of platformization had another consequence in demonstrating that the Internet was not unregulatable. For anyone who was around these debates about Internet governance a decade ago, people argued that you could not regulate the Internet because the Internet was so decentralized. Thus, regulating the Internet would be like trying to regulate air or regulate smoke. However, much of what we now call the Internet operates on a relatively small number of platforms that are governed. The governance of platforms is as core to their operations, data, interfaces, algorithms and so on. Tech companies have to handle these relevant relationships to manage the value derived from all parties involved, manage their connections to the governments and address their business interests. For instance, deciding what advertisements to be placed alongside content on YouTube requires governance practices of managing advertisers, consumers, algorithms, laws and so on. In other words, we have shifted from what was seen as unregulatable technology to one that clearly is being privately regulated and, with that, a push towards public regulation.
If regulations are inevitable, then the question would be how to regulate the Internet. The development of the Internet has brought unintended consequences, such as data privacy, security concerns and so on. What is your regulatory prescription for these emerging problems?
The regulatory apparatuses have emerged in a very ad-hoc manner, across countries, across agencies, and jurisdictions. There is no single textbook out there that says this is how you regulate the Internet, or that this is how you regulate platforms. So, it is very much an element of learning by doing around it.
The critical point is that the type of regulation that agencies are most appropriately engaged with depends in no small part upon the nature of the concern. So, if the issue is concentrated economic power, for instance, antitrust, consumer protection to give individuals greater control over their data are needed to facilitate greater competition and openness in markets. Now, one thing we know about having more platforms is that if you focus in the other direction on online harms and problematic content, more platforms could give you more problems. You have competitors emerging as you have in the United States to Facebook and Twitter, such as Gab and Telegram, among others. Now, if you are concerned with platform racism, the level of platform racism on Gab is more extreme than that on Facebook or YouTube. If this is your primary concern, then the locus shifts from competition to content.
In some respects, it is easier for regulators to deal with content on fewer platforms and to, in a sense, look to inculcate the ethos of social responsibility within those companies, or at least a greater degree of oversight of what they do. There was a crucial moment in 2018 when after many years of refusing to appear before the US Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg chose to appear before the US Congress. During that fascinating session, he pointed out that the question is not whether there should be regulation or not. There has to be regulation. The question is, what type of regulation? From the company’s perspective, the virtue of government setting parameters around what can or cannot be said online is that it moves the responsibility for that away from the tech companies. So, the real difficulty was that they were both setting the guidelines and enforcing the policies. In many respects, that is an untenable position because there is no accountability, transparency, and so on. So, Facebook developed a third-party quasi-self-regulatory model called the Oversight Board. The Oversight Board consists of experts worldwide and was created to serve as a quasi-judicial mechanism to govern Facebook’s content moderation decisions. So, every one of these companies is grappling with those questions. The point here is that rules that are put in place around speech and content may have different structural implications to rules that are put in place to promote competition and innovation.
Regulatory practices vary not only by the nature of the problems but also across different societies. In the spectrum of Internet governance, the American model is located on one side while the Chinese model is located on the other. You have proposed “the third way” of digital platform governance. What is “the third way”?
Regarding the typology of global governance of the Internet, it is worth discussing Emmanuel Macron’s 2018 address to the Internet Governance Forum. Because before then, we essentially had two positions, as they were articulated at the International Telecommunications Union forum in Doha in 2012. On the one hand, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and a number of other states said that they do not accept multi-stakeholder governance and that global governance needs to be governance by bodies convened through nation-states, the United Nations-type model. Also, they considered that the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) should take over. This was very strongly and ultimately effectively resisted by a coalition of the tech companies, the US government, the European governments, and Australia, on the other hand. They argued that the multi-stakeholder model is central to innovation and reflects their democratic values. That is where the debate was in the first half of the 2010s. Macron was looking to push this idea of something between Shenzhen and Silicon Valley.
So, the idea of the third way, to take that old phrase of Tony Blair, is that the Internet is built on trust, which requires some light-touch regulation but not comprehensive state oversight of platforms. So, that model is being presented. Some might argue that there are now effectively four, possibly five, models of global governance. One is what remains of the
We also have different regulatory practices emerging in various jurisdictions. Germany applies robust hate speech laws, which impacts upon the conduct of platform companies operating in Germany. Australia requires Google and Facebook to make payments to news companies for the use of their content. Canada is introducing new rules. The United Kingdom is considering an Online Safety Bill. This is all difficult for the tech companies because they are global companies. The problem is not so much being regulated. Although there were campaigns against being regulated, the genuine concern is the lack of standardization of these models and the anxiety that what happens in one jurisdiction ratchets up what happens in others. This is the risk of having the so-called “splinternet” emerge where things just operate in different ways in different jurisdictions.
That naturally brings up the question of the tension between localization and globalization, or re-globalization. Especially during the pandemic, the scope and extent of digitalization have intensified. From this perspective, what kind of platform ecology would you imagine in the future?
Global companies adjust to different national and regional markets. If we take the example of YouTube, there are different national rules for YouTube videos. This goes back to a very important legal case as early as 2000 about whether Yahoo should be allowed to sell Nazi memorabilia in France and Germany where the promotion of Nazi ideology is prohibited by law. There will be content that would be accessed in North America but would not be available in the Middle East. And Europe increasingly has a set of requirements that ask for different practices. There might be things like age verification becoming stronger on YouTube because it is required in some jurisdictions. We are all familiar with having to tick various consent boxes around cookies. This is a product of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) passed by the European Union. We do not know what it means to tick a box and accept all cookies, but we do those things. That is the consequence of the GDPR.
So, global companies make adjustments in the same way. A McDonald’s meal will differ from one part of the world to another, although the Big Mac is a constant. There are different experiences of the Internet or platforms in various jurisdictions. But that can only go so far because the virtue of this technology is that it operates beyond the space of the nation-state even when companies are registered in national jurisdictions.
The vital part of the process here will be the extent to which our regulatory agencies and jurisdictions are in dialogue. There is a growing awareness that just as Google or Facebook act in some countries based on an awareness of what particulars might mean when applied in other countries. Regulators are becoming increasingly aware of the need to dialogue about what works and what does not because there are a lot of regulations that do not work or have counterproductive or unanticipated consequences.
One point that is made, for instance, about content, is that more stringent content rules are likely to benefit those platforms that are already the largest because they have more resources to put into content moderation than smaller platforms would have. Thus, a one-size-fits-all approach can present its own problem. We are in a space where laws, policies, and regulations remain national, and global tech companies can work at the edges of those laws. Still, there is only a limited extent to which they want to or that it can be sustainable for them to work outside of it. The global shakedown we are now seeing around cryptocurrencies indicates a fairly predictable set of adverse consequences that could happen if you tried to develop a model of stateless finance.
That would bring our discussion to the agency in the process of Internet regulation and governance. One of the long-lasting debates is whether the nation-state can be an effective agent for global Internet regulation. How do we understand the role of nation-states in the regulatory process?
The nation-states are always there. The Internet, we may recall, was primarily funded in its early stages by the US Defense Department and agencies connected to the US Defense Department. The great wisdom of that period was to recognize that it should not be run by the US Defense Department. It was one of those moments when, wisely as it turned out, they pushed the money through to the universities and the scientists to develop a model that suited their modes of practice. The state was at arm’s length from this but never away from it. If we look at the discussion that took place in the 1990s and early 2000s, the role of the state was seen mainly as an enabling one about putting in place broadband infrastructure, addressing the digital divide, promoting computers in schools, and taking various measures to build the Internet. But even then, nation-states were always involved. So, there is quite interesting literature on the role played internationally by the Clinton administration in the 1990s in enabling multi-stakeholder governance to form in the manner that it did. And it was a form of soft power. The Internet was seen as an instrument of soft power, proving that liberal democracies and capitalist market economies were better at technological change than authoritarian states. They were better because they gave scientists the freedom to act, engage in civil society, and so on. In China in the mid-1990s, there was a very intense debate about whether to open up to the Internet or not. And they did open up to the Internet. They did it so strenuously, but always with the sense which I think it was Xiaoping Deng’s idea, to open the window but put up the fly screen. That means to keep a tight rein on what content comes through.
For many observers, a pivotal moment was the Edward Snowden revelations in 2012. That indicated the extent to which US-headquartered tech companies have been working very closely with the National Security Agency to monitor the online activity of foreign and non-American citizens and international leaders. And I recall at the time that I taught a reasonable number of students from China. None of them were shocked. But in the United States, Europe and other countries, there was a lot of consternation at this. And from then on, particularly in Europe, the discourse changes to how to rein in the power of Google, Apple, and others. In the instance, this is around tax. It is also relevant to note that Europe does not have major platform companies. Spotify may be an exception to some extent; but for the most part, the largest tech companies in the world are American or Chinese. So, for Europe to get a stake in this regulation becomes an essential part that can lever off the size of the European market to set and ratchet global standards. So, if you can conceive that the European Union behaves like a state around digital policy, this is an important locus of the return of the state in these debates.
Many dialogues proceed as if governments cannot and should not be regulating the Internet, whereas in practice governments already are regulating the Internet. There was even a moment of discussion that tried to pretend we could evolve a governance model that leaves governments at arm’s length, which was the dream of the 1990s. That said, I think it will be difficult to get coherent global Internet governance in the multipolar world where there is just not going to be an agreement on fundamental questions around the Internet. It is different from the environment, greenhouse gases or something like that.
Balancing the tension between technology and laws is also challenging. New information and communication technology might bring creative destruction, while conservative laws might deprive the opportunity for innovation.
We have to balance between governing too little and governing too much. A platform is not a kind of separate sovereign entity that is beyond the law. Communication has always had normative principles. It has been fascinating to track how we have talked about misinformation and fake news. If we took the early purist vision of the Internet, the idea would be that if someone puts out misinformation, someone else will expose it as misinformation, and people will make up their own minds and make their own choices. It is like “the answer to bad speech is more speech”, and the whole tradition of that idea.
Now, at a certain point, which I think can probably be dated to the 4th of November 2016, and the election of Donald Trump as the US president, there was an awareness that misinformation and fake news have consequences. And in Democrat-voting Silicon Valley, in particular, there was heightened alarm at this result. Someone did a study of this: 97% of voters in San Francisco voted for Clinton, and only 3% of San Franciscans voted for Trump and Pence. Silicon Valley is politically and socially liberal. But there was this sense that Silicon Valley’s platforms have generated the monster that comes to be known as fake news. And there are all sorts of questions about Russian interference. The Russians might have been there, but you do not need the Russians to have a misinformation problem. Because if there are business models that work with misinformation, then there are famous Macedonian teenagers who discovered there was a lot of money to be made in developing lies which looked like news and putting them online. This is a real problem because we usually have certain expectations that in democratic societies, differences of opinion are expected to be derived from a common state of facts. Once you end up in the realm of alternative facts, as Donald Trump’s press secretary put it, you do not have an ontological layer there, which is so unstable. And it becomes tough to do anything. Of course, COVID-19 brings the misinformation questions to the fore again because there is a need for a collective response. People simply did not believe the problem was real, and people refused to wear masks or refused to get vaccinated. So, the misinformation issue has grown to the extent to which the earlier freedom-at-all-costs model of the Internet has proven untenable from a societal point of view.
You mentioned the third way being built on trust. Misinformation and fake news brought lots of discussion on the trust in public institutions. What is the role of trust in making the system of platform governance?
The question of trust is important as a catalyst to platform regulation. I do not think action at the level of technologies can in itself address all the issues around trust. The most recent works on trust coming out of the Reuters Institute and others suggested that there has been a recovery of trust in traditional media. So rather than, say, people whom you can best trust are people like yourself from your immediate circle, or your Facebook friends or whatever, you get this sort of backlash phenomenon that says you need sources that verify their information to trust them, and you need a degree of professionalism around news gathering. There is undoubtedly a turn towards trusted news brands, and it is interesting what goes on with trust. Of course, institutional trust varies from country to country. But there are some common patterns, such as a lower level of trust in newspapers, television, political parties, the courts and so on. Also, people trust complete strangers to drive them somewhere, go out on a date, live in their house, all the app-based mediated trust models. I think there is an interesting dynamic around the crisis of institutional trust, yet people are prepared to take these sorts of leaps into the unknown with various online services.
As most regulatory discourses are still north-dominant (Global North has the dominance/has a say), how would the global Internet governance impact the global south in the future? Do you think this ongoing development of technology will close or enlarge the gap between the Global North and the Global South?
I do not think the technologies themselves will close the gap between the Global North and the Global South. I believe that there are a variety of factors in play there. I guess the question is whether countries in the Global South can acquire a greater degree of tech sovereignty rather than tech dependency. In that sense, the inequalities issue is difficult to measure because different forces are at play. But will we see new types of handsets emerge in the Global South? Will we see new types of platforms emerge in the Global South? Will we see different models associated with data appear in the Global South? They are all important questions. They are different questions in some respect to the regulatory questions because it is challenging for small countries to get regulatory clout over global platforms.
I think we are in the early days of this discussion, but we could envisage it. There is no compulsion to be on Facebook. For instance, 2.5 billion people might be on it, which is part of the problem. If social media has value in its own right, one could envisage more decentralized models of social media emerging and ones that are built on a different business model. So rather than having a free service, but one where your data are endlessly being extracted from you and then pushed back to you as largely irrelevant advertising, misinformation, fake news, or whatever, there may be other ways to harness some platform capabilities. We may be at an early stage of the discussion that need not be just a conversation of the Global South incidentally. It is around the idea of where this sort of the bottom-up spirit of the early Internet can be rediscovered in an age of platform monopolies. Otherwise, we are going to see, I think, an increasing fusion of corporate power and state power.
As Internet governance and digital platform have become a rising field, what are the frontiers or the new directions of research in this field, in your opinion?
This will always be an interdisciplinary field. There are a lot of significant works around understanding how platforms are used, user behaviour, data inequalities, data sovereignty and so on.
The first thing to say is that the gulf between studying the Internet and studying other things is less than it was once perceived. So, understanding policies, institutions and the economics of networks, those sorts of issues have become increasingly prominent. Some particular kinds of social science orientations have been emerging. I think alertness to the diversity of experiences, policies and practices is critical because, for too long, the Internet was treated as a kind of extension of the United States. People talk about the First Amendment rights as if they have existed as a universal force. Freedom of expression certainly exists as a universal force, but not in the particular manifestation of the First Amendment. Also, I think that the general trend is one of learning by doing. There tend to be a lot of easy-to-use technological affordances that are available to young scholars around the globe. So, they can develop their own methods to track some of these global trends and their relevance in local content.
As a senior fellow, what advice would you like to offer to the younger generation who are about to start their academic journey in this field?
Do not get attached to any one technology. A lot of literature on the Internet would have come out in the early 2000s ended up looking very dated. It is not so much because things changed, but because it was premised on the assumption that the Internet was completely different from everything else.
In reality, some bits are different, some bits similar. I do not conduct studies on one platform. That said, I will look at Facebook, I will look at Twitter, or I may be looking at TikTok or different particular platforms. There is a process of platformization and a generalization of platform business models. That means that traditional media companies are increasingly becoming platformed businesses. For instance, McDonald’s is increasingly a platform business. All those home deliveries generate data that are used for predictive analytics. That is a platform business model, but it is not a tech company. Thus, it is important to keep an awareness of the diversity of institutional forms and ideas about technology and interests.
