Legal is defined as everything connected with the system of law within a country or area. The definition Law is a system of rules created and enforced to regulate behaviour, usually it belongs to a country or an area.
Online and innovation have often evolved way in advance of laws and the legal system’s ability to cope.
The emphasis that different systems have produces a number of challenges. China’s systems are locked down under their view of cyber sovereignty to avoid a contagion of western ideas. Yet they and other authoritarian regimes treat the open western systems as a battle space to destabilise other countries and attack their critics.
The US system favours free speech over privacy, which directly clashes with European values. Much of these European values were shaped in the aftermath of having lived under Warsaw Pact era authoritarian regimes.
There is a clash of the ages undertaken over ethics and power and what’s legal. The law offers up more questions and ethical traps than answers. It’s into this legal morass that my posts tend to land, usually at the point of intersection between ethics, the law and technology.
When I started using the web I believed that it was a unique extra-legal space similar to what John Perry Barlow outlined at the start of the ‘web’ as we now know it. The reality is that the net has already been staked out by businesses that look rather similar to the robber barons of the gilded age. Authoritarian regimes found it surprisingly easy to bend to their will and now sell their expertise around the world.
Apple: Terrorist’s Apple ID Password Changed In Government Custody, Blocking Access – BuzzFeed News – The Apple ID password linked to the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists was changed less than 24 hours after the government took possession of the device, senior Apple executives said Friday. If that hadn’t happened, Apple said, a backup of the information the government was seeking may have been accessible – so why don’t the FBI track down the government employee who changed the Apple ID password and Gitmo their butt to get it? In theory, it could be a conspiracy inside the San Bernardino local government to aid and abet terrorism I suspect this about covering up a FUBAR on the government side – Feds versus state. If I were more cynical it looks like it was deliberately done to exploit San Bernardino by government looking to crack encryption. I suspect that its an opportunistic plan by the government to break the US tech sector, making lemonade out of the lemons handed to them by the blocker to break Apple ID
Hong Kong has probably lost HSBC’s headquarters for good—and Beijing is to blame – Quartz – There is an argument that could be put up that HSBC’s sole responsibility is to maximise shareholder value. Could the board be sued over the decision? If the Chinese government really wanted them to stay they’d squeeze them like an anaconda, until HSBC came to the right decision.
Is WeChat headed for regulatory trouble? – Tech in Asia – WeChat hasn’t been looking like a real international contender for a good while. Its international marketing efforts were lacklustre and sporadic. But in China its ubiquity and usefulness attracted the attention of the government in an unsavoury way. Given the tight linkage between Party and media, these comments from People’s Daily look like a statement of intent towards WeChat “malicious rights-infringement, excessive marketing, coercive sharing, deliberate swindling, and chaos.” I am sure WeChat headed towards taking remedial action forthwith.
Feeble Noise Pollution — Medium – interesting insights on the FBI’s use of San Bernardino as a crow bar to break the US tech sector
Luxury
Why I’m Over Susie Bubble – Racked – that’s where bloggers like Lau and Bryanboy fall flat to me, why I think we’ve outgrown them. It’s not just that these former outsiders have been subsumed by the mainstream fashion industry, or that Google Reader’s demise in 2013 took Style Bubble out of my daily reading rotation. Rather, it’s because it’s time for Asian bloggers and style stars who don’t just dress distinctively but are also comfortable in their own skin and with the features on their face – quite a takedown
Beijing is banning all foreign media from publishing online in China – Quartz – this is interesting as it would impact entertainment media, gaming companies, book publishers and news media. In addition to western brands it would also hurt Chinese brands like Tencent who has South African company Naspers as a shareholder
CNN brings its digital war room to London | Digiday – the digital war room is big with American brands like Gatorade and can be useful for reputation management monitoring. But the idea of having a team doing real time marketing a la Oreos makes no sense compared to the sunk costs of the digital war room and ongoing investment. For a brand like CNN however, it allows the channel to jump on stories that are breaking online. During the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, The Guardian managed to do timely coverage by seeing the first reports breaking on Twitter. Back in 2005, when I was at Yahoo!, the first we know of the July 7 bombings was when engineers told us of the increase in picture uploads to flickr.
Back on February 9, 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote his declaration of of the independence of cyberspace. The declaration pointed out the folly of trying to govern something thought to be virtually ungovernable at the time.
Barlow first came to prominence writing lyrics for The Grateful Dead. His ethos came from the libertarian do your own thing ethic that underpinned much of the hippy movement. This probably come more naturally to Barlow than other people having grown up on a cattle ranch and being the son of the Republican politician.
By the time he wrote the about the independence of cyberspace; he was already had published extensively about the internet. He was on the board of directors of The WELL – an online community that sprang out of Stewart Brand’s back to the land influence catalogue of useful things The Whole Earth Catalog (The WELL stands for The Whole Earth eLectronic Link). He contributed to Wired magazine (founded by aging hippies Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand), Barlow’s essay Economy of Ideas published in the March 1994 issue provides a clear view of the thinking that prompted him to write the declaration. He had already founded The Electronic Frontier Foundation with by John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor in response to a series of actions by law enforcement agencies that led them to conclude that the authorities were gravely uninformed about emerging forms of online communication.
The declaration was a reactionary document, brought upon by the 1996 Telecommunications Act in the US. The act eventually resulted in consolidation of US media ownership.
I suspect the similarities in style between the declaration and the Doc Searl’s et al later Cluetrain Manifesto are an intentional nod to Barlow on cyberspace.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
So two decades later, how does Barlow’s declaration stand in comparison that what’s actually happened? At first blush not very well. The digital economy outside China is dominated by an oligarchy of four main players: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.
Scott Galloway’s presentation at DLD conference this year, highlights the winner take all nature of the online world. This is partially down to the nature of the online platform. Amazon grew to critical mass in the US as for a critical amount of time buyers didn’t need to pay state sales tax until state legislation started to catch up.
Zuckerberg and his peers marked a changing of the guard in Silicon Valley as yuppies took over from the the hippies.
Inside China there is a similar state-directed oligarchy of Alibaba, Tencent, Netease and Sina.
The oligarchy impact has been most pronounced in Europe, where consumer demand and a lack of effective competition saw Google go to 90+ percent in market share across the EU, when the US market share was less than 70 percent at the time.
Futurist and science fiction author Bruce Sterling summed it up rather well:
“Globalization” is over for 2016. We have entered an era of Internet Counter-Revolution. The events of 1989 feel almost as distant as those of 1789. The globalizing, flat-world, small-pieces-loosely-joined Internet is behind us, it’s history. The elite geek Internet could not resist those repeated tsunamis of incoming users.
It turned out that normal people like the “social” in social media a lot better than they ever liked the raw potential of media technology. In Russia and China in 2016, digital media is an arm of the state. Internet has zero revolutionary potential within those societies, but all kinds of potential for exported cyberwar. The Chinese police spy and firewall model, much scoffed at in the 1990s, is now the dominant paradigm. The Chinese have prospered with their authoritarian approach, while those who bought into borderless friction-free data have been immiserated by the ultra-rich.
In the USA it’s an older American story: the apparent freedom of Henry Ford’s personal flivver has briskly yielded to the new Detroit Big Five of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and, in last place, Microsoft.
In 2016, everything that looks like digital innovation, “big data,” “the cloud,” the “Internet of Things,” are actually promotional slogans that play into the hands of the GAFAM “Big Five.” Anybody who lacks broadband and a mobile OS is in deadly peril, especially the digital old-school likes of IBM, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle… and the hapless TV networks, whose median viewer age is now in the 60s.
The GAFAM Big Five, the “Stacks,” will turn their wrath on the victims closest to them, well before they complete their lunge for control of cars and thermostats. However, their destiny is obvious. The rebels of the 1990s are America’s new mega-conglomerates. Google is “Alphabet,” Apple pruned the “computer” from its name, Amazon is the Washington Post. In 2016, that’s how it is, and in 2017, 189, 19, much more so.
So the not-evil guys are the new evil guys, but don’t be scared by this. It’s quite like watching the 1960s Space Age crumble from giant-leaps-for-mankind to launching low-orbit gizmos for profit. It’s comprehensible, it can be dealt with. Sure, it’s tragic if your head was in the noosphere, but if you have any historical awareness of previous industrial revolutions, this is really easy to understand. It’s already in your pocket and purse, it’s written on every screen you look at It could scarcely be more obvious.
Yes, Internet Counterrevolution is coming, much of it is here already, and it’s properly considered a big deal, but it’s not permanent. This too shall pass.
And this post hasn’t even touched on how government has looked to plug itself into all facets of online life in the interest of discovering terrorist plots, organised crime or paedophile rings. Assaults on cyberspace sovereignty are numerous, from Pakistan’s special editable version of YouTube to several governments looking for cryptographic backdoors.
At DLD 2016, you have a German politician talking about the mechanism of how the government needed to rollback citizen rights to privacy to give German start-ups a chance. In this winner takes all world, the beneficiaries are likely to be Google, Facebook Amazon and Microsoft rather than a local champion.
I started on this post in mid-January and scheduled it to go out on February 8, 2016. danah boyd also published on the declaration of Cyberspace and I recommend you go and check out here. More privacy related content here.
Chips on their shoulders | The Economist – THE Chinese government has been trying, on and off, since the 1970s to build an indigenous semiconductor industry. But its ambitions have never been as high, nor its budgets so big, as they are now. More on semiconductors here and on China here.
Does Better Internet Access Wind Up Disenfranchising Lower Income Groups? – As counterintuitive as it seems, reducing the digital divide isn’t necessarily beneficial: Our results show that participation in local elections has dramatically declined in recent years, in part as the internet has displaced other media with greater local news content
Safari Suggestions bug causes browser crashes in iOS and OS X | Ars Technica – I noticed this first thing in the morning with Safari Suggestions my Mac, goes to show how dependent we are on network based services. Safari Suggestions are a great concept, let’s hope that Apple gets it right. More Apple related posts here.
Focus On The User – interesting lobby and direct consumer action that is very EU focused. The idea of Focus On The User brings to mind past antitrust remedies against Google and Microsoft. It will be interesting to see where Focus On The User goes. More posts related to antitrust in the EU specifically here
Recovering Teletext data from VHS recordings / Boing Boing – it takes such “phenomenal processing power” to accurately and reliably scan VHS recordings of text that we’re only now on the cusp of being able to do so. That hundreds, even thousands of frames of each teletext page are required to OCR each one is also a powerful tribute to just how astoundingly awful VHS is.
Microsoft decrees that new PCs will ONLY be able to run Windows 10 | SiliconAngle – Microsoft is stepping up its efforts to push the world onto Windows 10 by revising its support policy in a way that means newly purchased PCs will no longer support older editions of its OS. Given how much of China is on cracked versions of XP; expect legal trouble ahead
How Tumblr Can Save Yahoo — Thoughts on Media — Medium – there is delicious irony to this post being hosted on Medium. The problem is that a lot of the magazine content which has failed is also hosted on tumblr, how could Yahoo! be trusted to monetise third party content any better
