The days of a free and open global internet have already passed. The global Internet has been supplanted, with little notice, by a series of national networks that have taken shape in recent years as companies have bowed to the laws of the countries they operate in. And, really, how else could it be? Google notwithstanding, do we really imagine a company saying, “We’ll operate in your country but won’t obey your laws?”
This is, in effect, what Net Neutrality is all about: what should our Internet be and how open and interconnected will our network be? We make those choices, just as other nations do, through our laws. And we’ve pretty much decided that for us, capitalism is synonymous with freedom. We’ve designed our network accordingly, and do our best to have our principles of free trade adopted around the world.
Now, while we’ve hardly made it through that debate unscathed, we are about to undergo another change. This one, Charles Leadbeater says, is “as profound and unsettling as the development of web 2.0 in the last decade, which made social media and search – Google and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – mass, global phenomena.” That change is the coming of age of cloud computing:
[O]ur links to one another will be increasingly routed through a vast shared “cloud” of data and software. These clouds, supported by huge server farms all over the world, will allow us to access data from many devices, not just computers; to use programs only when we need them and to share expensive resources such as servers more efficiently. Instead of linking to one another through a dumb, decentralised network, we will all be linking to and through shared clouds.
We see the promise but do we see the danger? Leadbeater says “open cloud culture” is threatened by traditional media companies hungry for new monopolies and governments intent on even more control over the web. He proposes five main points towards a manifesto, an Open Cloud Declaration, to defend the public, open cloud against the encroachments of both corporations and governments:
• The first main threat to open cloud culture is homogeneity: we do not want a digital sky dominated by standardised clouds branded Google and Apple. The first principle should be variety: we need public clouds, such as the World Digital Library being created by a set of leading museums around the world and open, social clouds such as Wikipedia.
• The second threat to open cloud culture is corporate control. To counter that, we need new approaches to regulate these commercial clouds, to limit their power and to expose them to competition, ensuring people have a diversity of potential suppliers of cloud-based services. Personal information stored in clouds needs to be safe and clearly to belong to the person rather than the cloud. The emergence of cloud capitalism will need to be matched by new forms of media regulation.
• The third threat is the rearguard action being fought by industrial-era media companies to prevent clouds forming. At the heart of this is copyright. Cloud culture will breed creativity only if people can easily collaborate, share and create. New forms of licensing are required, building on open access and creative commons, which are designed to allow sharing but also to channel rewards to creative artists.
• The fourth threat comes from attempted government control of the cloud on grounds of state security, public decency or economic necessity. These threats do not just come from authoritarian regimes in the east, but also from western liberal democracies where governments lack the courage to stand up for the open web. To counter that we need to find ways to support online activists in authoritarian regimes with ways around firewalls and to connect them with potential supporters outside.
• The fifth, and most significant challenge to a truly open, public web is inequality. When people from the poorest countries arrive in the digital world, as many million will in this decade through the mobile web, they will find people in the rich countries a long way ahead. For cloud culture genuinely to promote global cultural relations, we should focus on: open source development of tools that develop capabilities outside the dominant regions; creating more initiatives like Wikipedia that are public, but diverse and global in reach; promoting more global exchanges such as Kiva which allow resources and skills in one place to be matched with need in another.
I like the principles, but I’m not optimistic for their broad adoption. Neither am I pesimistic. For as the Supreme Court has blurred the definition of personhood, I can be forgiven my blurring of the definition of statehood. The sweep of history may yet see us past the city-state, and the church-state and, even, the nation-state, on in to the corporate-state.
Not the worst thing I can imagine.