ABSTRACT
In August 2000, The Economist (2000f: 9-10) assessed the early period of the ‘‘Internet’s coming of age.’’ The Internet’s days as a predominantly scholarly research network were over, and it seemed to be omnipresent in people’s lives, finances, and entertainment. The British magazine entitled its review ‘‘What the Internet Cannot Do.’’ As with all new technologies, a wave of public enthusiasm and hope had greeted the Internet in the early 1990s. Many optimists foresaw the Internet preventing wars, reducing pollution, and fighting inequality. Some authors had ventured as far as predicting the Internet as the end of the nation-state system (Naisbitt, 1994; Burton, 1997) or the beginning of a new brave ‘‘wired world’’ (Burton, 1997). That optimism and those predictions now seem far-fetched after the dot.com bust and September 11. For a start, they could never have been fulfilled, as they set the bar of expectations too high for the Internet. Yet the network has changed the way of doing business, communications, culture, and even international politics. It has done so in ways so subtle that we cannot even realize now that these changes have so much become part of our daily routines. There have been winners and also losers. So, what happened? From the beginning, the ability of governments to enforce their
boundaries has been central to sovereign statehood (Saurin, 1995). Furthermore, the degree of control that they exercise over the state frontiers has always constrained their policies and practices (Anderson, 1996). As long as information was written on paper that had to be carried by human beings, the degree of control was high, but the progressive ‘‘dematerialization’’ of information has undermined the absolute physical control over a finite area (Anderson, 1996). Broadcasting, whether by radio or television, has moderately weakened the states’ critical prerogative of granting
legitimate access to their territories (Krasner, 1995). Normally, firms may enter the market without the approval of governmental authority. The telecommunications industry, however, has traditionally been ‘‘characterized by entry controls’’ (Stone, 1997: 14). The Internet is part of telecommunications, but also of the media, the distribution grids, and so on. In many ways, the Internet is the quintessential part of the whole ICT world. The most important outcome of such a situation was that national
governments became only one of the Internet stakeholders as ICT firms and civil liberties NGOs joined in as the new stakeholders. These three players struggled against one another or joined forces (as in the accidental alliance of ICT firms and NGOs in the cryptowars) to shape the various policies of Internet control. The multiple ways in which the three stakeholders cooperated or impeded each other in the same country depended on three factors: (a) the domestic structure of the country (whether it was a democracy or an autocracy), (b) the domestic interest aggregation (whether the country was more corporatist or pluralist with multiple access points), and (c) how much the executive securitized the debate on Internet control. This first section will examine these factors further ahead. As more and more users went on-line, national governments became
aware that the Internet might introduce information into their territories over which they have limited or no control. That information might affect the attitude of their citizenry vis-a`-vis the political and economic structures of their state. Under these conditions, the set of reactions from national authorities has ranged from mild concern to suspicious alert to outright severing of connections, often depending on which government branch is in charge of Internet control. Given the organizational and cultural obstacles posed by establishing an international regime of regulation over the network, and the increasing accessibility of the Internet, governments had little alternative but to embark on the technically more costly and difficult operation of setting up national rules for control. These projected or actual national dispositions greatly diverged in terms of the extension and intrusiveness of control and of the topics covered by them. This state of affairs was the result of the fact that the Internet came
together unplanned, almost accidentally. The first stakeholder (the governments) could do little to alter its given technical nature. That was the exogenous variable, outside the governments’ reach. They certainly had more leverage to affect and control the behavior of the other stakeholders, such as the ICT private sector and users’ and civil liberties NGOs. So, why do governments want to control the Internet and where do we go from here? In addition to summarizing the main findings of the case studies, this concluding chapter looks at possible future avenues of research for the Internet and ICT in international relations. The nature of the Internet meshes communications and the NII. The two
functions are mostly indistinguishable. These conditions prevented the
emergence of a hierarchical structure, with no specific center managing the network.2 At the same time, protecting the NII is a priority for national security, therefore governments have to ensure a certain level of control to fulfill this goal. The first key element for my analysis was the domestic structure of the countries that practice Internet control. Are they democracies or autocracies? Currently, advanced democracies (the OECD club), along with their national ICT sectors, own the largest portion of the world’s information infrastructure. For them, protection comes understandably before content control. Some authors (Kehoane and Nye, 1998) have argued that democracies fare better in the information society then non-democracies because the former can ‘‘take more information’’ without their social fabric being disrupted. In fact, abundant information produces a multitude of informed actors who, in turn, multiply the levels of bargaining and further subdivide the issue areas. Such an outcome is certainly not efficient, but it is unquestionably consistent with the decision-making process in democracies. For autocracies it is the other way around. Autocratic states control
communication content by default and then are concerned with NII assurance because their share of the global information infrastructure is smaller than that of democracies. However, this situation may change as countries like China or Malaysia increase their portion of the global information infrastructure. One function (control to protect the NII) may easily ‘‘creep’’ into the other (controlling the contents of communications or censorship). The control of certain themes (e.g. neo-Nazi propaganda) might find ample support among the public, and even the majority of users, as in the case of Germany, France, and other European countries. The public would see that control as ‘‘legitimate.’’ Both autocracies and democracies might use the rhetoric of ‘‘threats to national security’’ and securitization to partially justify their control. Again the distinction between democracies and autocracies is important. In the latter, the other stakeholders (ICT firms and users’ and civil liberties NGOs) have multiple access points to influence policy-making. This is not the case in autocracies where the governments can cajole the ICT sector onto their side and simply push around or ignore civil liberties NGOs. Many autocratic governments actually label civil liberties NGOs and human rights groups as threats to national security. This state of affairs makes studying why democracies want to control the Internet more intriguing and meaningful. What then would explain differences among democracies? The second
key element is hence the domestic interest aggregation or how the three main stakeholders find synergies, act together, or resist each other to pursue their own specific interests. The level of pluralism (Lijphart, 1999) denotes the corporatist nature of a democracy. In corporatist democracies (such as Japan, Austria, or Germany) the stakeholders are more likely to look for consensus on what on-line issues should be controlled and how to fight,
and control of
for example, cybercrime and cyberterrorism. Corporatist democracies also tend to have very codified (both formally and informally) access points to the state apparatus, that is, the bureaucracy, government agencies, the legislature, and so on. Among pluralist democracies like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, lobby organizations and civil society NGOs constantly try to create more access points. Whenever the accidental alliance of ICT sector and civil liberties and
users’ NGOs was formed, it proved to be a formidable opponent to governments’ policies to raise Internet control, as the case of the cryptowars clearly demonstrated. The ICT sector could be a formidable opponent since it owns the largest share of the NII in OECD democracies and electronic business in the United States, which is estimated to be around US$ 120 billion in 2004 (The Economist, 2004b).3 More services are now the key Internet strategy to assure customer satisfaction and include, for example, greater care for personal privacy. This is the outcome of civil liberties NGOs’ campaigns to alert users and companies to the importance of this issue. Thus a synergy between the stakeholders emerged. The other important reason why the accidental alliance was a remarkable
challenge for governments was that information asymmetries did not work this time. In fact, information asymmetries worked against national governments, which normally benefit from them. As Milner (1997) noted, information distribution asymmetries influence domestic as well as foreign policy decisions and both create political advantage or penalize certain actors. In the struggle over Internet control, however, the ICT sector and civil liberties NGOs could master technical and legal information far better than government officials could ever hope to do (cf. Keck and Sikkink, 1998: 18-22.). Last but not least, the assurance of the NII requires the full participation of the ICT sector and some democratic governments have even started to recognize that recruiting expert users’ groups (and even some civil liberties NGOs) to that goal would be a very sensible policy. Autocratic governments have a simpler life. As China and Singapore
demonstrate, autocracies also want to spread out the Internet, build their own version of the information society, and collect the economic benefits of the Internet. They enjoy centralized state structures which allow fewer access points to political leaders. Within the country, the number of ‘‘arguing actors’’ is also smaller. However, those governments ponder, how many people should be allowed to have access? Should they be only the politically reliable ones? How much, and what kind of information, would companies really need? The list of questions could go on considerably. For the time being, autocracies can centralize Internet control, restrain users, and resist pressure from interest groups. There is no guarantee that once the numbers of users in autocratic states is as large as the Internet public in industrialized democracies, autocratic governments can maintain the same efficiency and intensity of control. Such circumstances will make for an interesting test of the theses presented in this work.
