Month: April 2021

  • Richard Hill —  The Curse of Concentration (Review of Cory Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism)

    Richard Hill — The Curse of Concentration (Review of Cory Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism)

    a review of Cory Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (OneZero, 2021)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    This short online (free access) book provides a highly readable, inspiring, and powerful complement to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (which the author qualifies and to some extent criticizes) and Timothy Wu’s The Curse of Bigness. It could be sub-titled (paraphrasing Maistre) “every nation gets the economic system it deserves,” in this case a symbiosis of corporate surveillance and state surveillance, in an economy dominated by, and potentially controlled by, a handful of companies. As documented elsewhere, that symbiosis is not an accident or coincidence. As the author puts the matter: “We need to take down Big Tech, and to do that, we need to start by correctly identifying the problem.”

    What follows is my analysis of the ideas of the book: it does not follow the order in which the ideas are presented in the book. In a nutshell, the author describes the source of the problem: an advertising-based revenue model that requires ever-increasing amounts of data, and thus ever-increasing concentration, coupled with weak anti-trust enforcement, and, worse, government actions that deliberately or inadvertently favor the power of dominant companies. The author describes (as have others) the negative effects this has had for privacy (which, as the author says, “is necessary for human progress”) and democracy; and proposes some solutions: strong antitrust, but also a relatively new idea – imposed interoperability. I will summarize these themes in the order given above.

    However, I will first summarize four important observations that underpin the issues outlined above. The first is that the Internet (and information and communications technologies (ICT) in general) is everything. As the author puts it: “The upshot of this is that our best hope of solving the big coordination problems — climate change, inequality, etc. — is with free, fair, and open tech.”

    The second is that data and information are increasingly important (see for example the Annex of this submission), and don’t fit well into existing private property regimes (see also here and here). And this in particular because of the way it is currently applied: “Big Tech has a funny relationship with information. When you’re generating information — anything from the location data streaming off your mobile device to the private messages you send to friends on a social network — it claims the rights to make unlimited use of that data. But when you have the audacity to turn the tables — to use a tool that blocks ads or slurps your waiting updates out of a social network and puts them in another app that lets you set your own priorities and suggestions or crawls their system to allow you to start a rival business — they claim that you’re stealing from them.”

    The third is that the time has come to reject the notion that ICTs, the Internet, and the companies that dominate those industries (“Big Tech”) are somehow different from everything else and should be treated differently: “I think tech is just another industry, albeit one that grew up in the absence of real monopoly constraints. It may have been first, but it isn’t the worst nor will it be the last.”

    The fourth is that network effects favor concentration: “A decentralization movement has tried to erode the dominance of Facebook and other Big Tech companies by fielding ‘indieweb’ alternatives – Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, Diaspora as a Facebook alternative, etc. – but these efforts have failed to attain any kind of liftoff. Fundamentally, each of these services is hamstrung by the same problem: every potential user for a Facebook or Twitter alternative has to convince all their friends to follow them to a decentralized web alternative in order to continue to realize the benefit of social media. For many of us, the only reason to have a Facebook account is that our friends have Facebook accounts, and the reason they have Facebook accounts is that we have Facebook accounts.”

    Turning to the main ideas of the book, the first is that the current business model is based on advertising: “ad-driven Big Tech’s customers are advertisers, and what companies like Google and Facebook sell is their ability to convince you to buy stuff. Big Tech’s product is persuasion. The services — social media, search engines, maps, messaging, and more — are delivery systems for persuasion. Rather than finding ways to bypass our rational faculties, surveillance capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg mostly do one or more of three things: segment the market, attempt to deceive it, and exploit dominant positions.”

    Regarding segmentation, the author states: “Facebook is tops for segmenting.” However, despite the fine targeting, its ads don’t always work: “The solution to Facebook’s ads only working one in a thousand times is for the company to try to increase how much time you spend on Facebook by a factor of a thousand. Rather than thinking of Facebook as a company that has figured out how to show you exactly the right ad in exactly the right way to get you to do what its advertisers want, think of it as a company that has figured out how to make you slog through an endless torrent of arguments even though they make you miserable, spending so much time on the site that it eventually shows you at least one ad that you respond to.”

    Thus it practices a form of deception: “So Facebook has to gin up traffic by sidetracking its own forums: every time Facebook’s algorithm injects controversial materials – inflammatory political articles, conspiracy theories, outrage stories – into a group, it can hijack that group’s nominal purpose with its desultory discussions and supercharge those discussions by turning them into bitter, unproductive arguments that drag on and on. Facebook is optimized for engagement, not happiness, and it turns out that automated systems are pretty good at figuring out things that people will get angry about.”

    The author describes how the current level of concentration is not due only to network effects and market forces. But also to “tactics that would have been prohibited under classical, pre-Ronald-Reagan antitrust enforcement standards.”

    This is compounded by the current copyright regime: “If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can no longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at least as much as influence campaigns. An influence campaign might nudge you to buy a certain brand of phone; but the copyright locks on that phone absolutely determine where you get it serviced, which apps can run on it, and when you have to throw it away rather than fixing it. Copyright locks are a double whammy: they create bad security decisions that can’t be freely investigated or discussed.”

    And it is due to inadequate government intervention: “Only the most extreme market ideologues think that markets can self-regulate without state oversight. Markets need watchdogs – regulators, lawmakers, and other elements of democratic control – to keep them honest. When these watchdogs sleep on the job, then markets cease to aggregate consumer choices because those choices are constrained by illegitimate and deceptive activities that companies are able to get away with because no one is holding them to account. Many of the harms of surveillance capitalism are the result of weak or nonexistent regulation. Those regulatory vacuums spring from the power of monopolists to resist stronger regulation and to tailor what regulation exists to permit their existing businesses.”

    For example as the author documents, the penalties for leaking data are negligible, and “even the most ambitious privacy rules, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation, fall far short of capturing the negative externalities of the platforms’ negligent over-collection and over-retention, and what penalties they do provide are not aggressively pursued by regulators.”

    Yet we know that data will leak and can be used for identity theft with major consequences: “For example, attackers can use leaked username and password combinations to hijack whole fleets of commercial vehicles that have been fitted with anti-theft GPS trackers and immobilizers or to hijack baby monitors in order to terrorize toddlers with the audio tracks from pornography. Attackers use leaked data to trick phone companies into giving them your phone number, then they intercept SMS-based two-factor authentication codes in order to take over your email, bank account, and/or cryptocurrency wallets.”

    But we should know what to do: “Antitrust is a market society’s steering wheel, the control of first resort to keep would-be masters of the universe in their lanes. But Bork and his cohort ripped out our steering wheel 40 years ago. The car is still barreling along, and so we’re yanking as hard as we can on all the other controls in the car as well as desperately flapping the doors and rolling the windows up and down in the hopes that one of these other controls can be repurposed to let us choose where we’re heading before we careen off a cliff. It’s like a 1960s science-fiction plot come to life: people stuck in a ‘generation ship,’ plying its way across the stars, a ship once piloted by their ancestors; and now, after a great cataclysm, the ship’s crew have forgotten that they’re in a ship at all and no longer remember where the control room is. Adrift, the ship is racing toward its extinction, and unless we can seize the controls and execute emergency course correction, we’re all headed for a fiery death in the heart of a sun.”

    We know why nobody is in the control room: “The reason the world’s governments have been slow to create meaningful penalties for privacy breaches is that Big Tech’s concentration produces huge profits that can be used to lobby against those penalties – and Big Tech’s concentration means that the companies involved are able to arrive at a unified negotiating position that supercharges the lobbying.” Regarding lobbying, see for example here and here.

    But it’s worse than lack of control: not only have governments failed to enforce antitrust laws, they have actively favored mass collection of data, for their own purposes: “Any hard limits on surveillance capitalism would hamstring the state’s own surveillance capability. … At least some of the states’ unwillingness to take meaningful action to curb surveillance should be attributed to this symbiotic relationship. There is no mass state surveillance without mass commercial surveillance. … Monopolism is key to the project of mass state surveillance. … A concentrated tech sector that works with authorities is a much more powerful ally in the project of mass state surveillance than a fragmented one composed of smaller actors.” The author documents how this is the case for Amazon’s Ring.

    As the author says: “This mass surveillance project has been largely useless for fighting terrorism: the NSA can only point to a single minor success story in which it used its data collection program to foil an attempt by a U.S. resident to wire a few thousand dollars to an overseas terror group. It’s ineffective for much the same reason that commercial surveillance projects are largely ineffective at targeting advertising: The people who want to commit acts of terror, like people who want to buy a refrigerator, are extremely rare. If you’re trying to detect a phenomenon whose base rate is one in a million with an instrument whose accuracy is only 99%, then every true positive will come at the cost of 9,999 false positives.”

    And the story gets worse and worse: “In the absence of a competitive market, lawmakers have resorted to assigning expensive, state-like duties to Big Tech firms, such as automatically filtering user contributions for copyright infringement or terrorist and extremist content or detecting and preventing harassment in real time or controlling access to sexual material. These measures put a floor under how small we can make Big Tech because only the very largest companies can afford the humans and automated filters needed to perform these duties. But that’s not the only way in which making platforms responsible for policing their users undermines competition. A platform that is expected to police its users’ conduct must prevent many vital adversarial interoperability techniques lest these subvert its policing measures.”

    So we get into a vicious circle: “To the extent that we are willing to let Big Tech police itself – rather than making Big Tech small enough that users can leave bad platforms for better ones and small enough that a regulation that simply puts a platform out of business will not destroy billions of users’ access to their communities and data – we build the case that Big Tech should be able to block its competitors and make it easier for Big Tech to demand legal enforcement tools to ban and punish attempts at adversarial interoperability.”

    And into a long-term conundrum: “Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech instead of breaking up the big companies also forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later. Yet governments confronting all of these problems all inevitably converge on the same solution: deputize the Big Tech giants to police their users and render them liable for their users’ bad actions. The drive to force Big Tech to use automated filters to block everything from copyright infringement to sex-trafficking to violent extremism means that tech companies will have to allocate hundreds of millions to run these compliance systems.” Such rules “are not just death warrants for small, upstart competitors that might challenge Big Tech’s dominance but who lack the deep pockets of established incumbents to pay for all these automated systems. Worse still, these rules put a floor under how small we can hope to make Big Tech.”

    The author documents how the curse of concentration is not restricted to ICTs and the Internet. For example: “the degradation of news products long precedes the advent of ad-supported online news. Long before newspapers were online, lax antitrust enforcement had opened the door for unprecedented waves of consolidation and roll-ups in newsrooms.” However, as others have documented in detail, the current Internet advertising model has weakened conventional media, with negative effects for democracy.

    Given the author’s focus on weak antitrust enforcement as the root of the problems, it’s not surprising that he sees antitrust as a solution: “Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose. If we’re going to break Big Tech’s death grip on our digital lives, we’re going to have to fight monopolies. I believe we are on the verge of a new “ecology” moment dedicated to combating monopolies. After all, tech isn’t the only concentrated industry nor is it even the most concentrated of industries. You can find partisans for trustbusting in every sector of the economy. … First we take Facebook, then we take AT&T/WarnerMedia.”

    It may be hard to break up big tech, but it’s worth starting to work on it: “Getting people to care about monopolies will take technological interventions that help them to see what a world free from Big Tech might look like. … Getting people to care about monopolies will take technological interventions that help them to see what a world free from Big Tech might look like.”

    In particular, the author stresses a relatively new idea: adversarial compatibility, that is, forced interoperability: “adversarial compatibility reverses the competitive advantage: If you were allowed to compete with Facebook by providing a tool that imported all your users’ waiting Facebook messages into an environment that competed on lines that Facebook couldn’t cross, like eliminating surveillance and ads, then Facebook would be at a huge disadvantage. It would have assembled all possible ex-Facebook users into a single, easy-to-find service; it would have educated them on how a Facebook-like service worked and what its potential benefits were; and it would have provided an easy means for disgruntled Facebook users to tell their friends where they might expect better treatment. Adversarial interoperability was once the norm and a key contributor to the dynamic, vibrant tech scene, but now it is stuck behind a thicket of laws and regulations that add legal risks to the tried-and-true tactics of adversarial interoperability. New rules and new interpretations of existing rules mean that a would-be adversarial interoperator needs to steer clear of claims under copyright, terms of service, trade secrecy, tortious interference, and patent.”

    In conclusion: “Ultimately, we can try to fix Big Tech by making it responsible for bad acts by its users, or we can try to fix the internet by cutting Big Tech down to size. But we can’t do both. To replace today’s giant products with pluralistic protocols, we need to clear the legal thicket that prevents adversarial interoperability so that tomorrow’s nimble, personal, small-scale products can federate themselves with giants like Facebook, allowing the users who’ve left to continue to communicate with users who haven’t left yet, reaching tendrils over Facebook’s garden wall that Facebook’s trapped users can use to scale the walls and escape to the global, open web.”

    In this context, it is important to stress the counter-productive effects of e-commerce proposals being negotiated, in secret, in trade negotiations (see also here and here). The author does not mention them, perhaps because they are sufficiently secret that he is not aware of them.

    _____

    Richard Hill is President of the Association for Proper internet Governance, and was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). He writes frequently about internet governance issues for The b2o Review Digital Studies magazine.

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  • Richard Hill — “Free” Isn’t Free (Review of Michael Kende, The Flip Side of Free)

    Richard Hill — “Free” Isn’t Free (Review of Michael Kende, The Flip Side of Free)

    a review of Michael Kende, The Flip Side of Free: Understanding the Economics of the Internet (MIT Press, 2021)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    This book is a must-read for anyone who wishes to engage in meaningful discussions of Internet governance, which will increasingly involve economic issues (17-20). It explains clearly why we don’t have to pay in money for services that are obviously expensive to provide. Indeed, as we all know, we get lots of so-called free services on the Internet: search facilities, social networks, e-mail, etc. But, as the old saying goes “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” It costs money to provide all those Internet services (10), and somebody has to pay for them somehow. In fact, users pay for them, by allowing (often unwittingly: 4, 75, 92, 104, 105) the providers to collect personal data which is then aggregated and used to sell other services (in particular advertising, 69) at a large profit. The book correctly notes that there are both advantages (79) and disadvantages (Chapters 5-8) to the current regime of surveillance capitalism. Had I written a book on the topic, I would have been more critical and would have preferred a subtitle such as “The Triumph of Market Failures in Neo-Liberal Regimes.”

    Michael Kende is a Senior Fellow and Visiting Lecturer at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, a Senior Adviser at Analysis Mason, a Digital Development Specialist at the World Bank Group, and former Chief Economist of the Internet Society. He has worked as an academic economist at INSEAD as a US regulator at the Federal Communications Commission. In this clearly written and well researched book, he explains, in laymen’s terms, the seeming paradox of “free” services that nevertheless yield big profits.

    The secret is to exploit the monetary value of something that had some, but not much, value until a bit over twenty years ago: data (63). The value of data is now so large that the companies that exploit it are the most valuable companies in the world, worth more than old giants such as producers of automobiles or petroleum. In fact data is so central to today’s economy that, as the author puts it (143): “It is possible that a new metric is needed to measure market power, especially when services are offered for free. Where normally a profitable increase in price was a strong metric, the new metric may be the ability to profitably gather data – and monetize it through advertising – without losing market share.” To my knowledge, this is an original idea, and it should be taken seriously by anyone interested in the future evolution of, not just the Internet, but society in general (for the importance of data, see for example the annex of this paper, and also here).

    The core value of this book lies in Chapters 5 through 10, which provide economic explanations – in easy-to-understand lay language – of the current state of affairs. They cover the essential elements: the importance of data, and why a few companies have dominant positions. Readers looking for somewhat more technical economic explanations may consider reading this handbook and readers looking for the history of the geo-economic policies that resulted in the current state of affairs can read the books reviewed here and here.

    Chapter 5 of the book explains why most of us trade off the privacy of our data in exchange for “free” services: the benefits may outweigh the risks (88), we may underestimate the risks (89), and we may not actually know the risks (91, 92, 105). As the author correctly notes (99-105), there likely are market failures that should be corrected by government action, such as data privacy laws. The author mentions the European Union GDPR (100); I think that it is also worth mentioning the less known, but more widely adopted, Council of Europe Convention (108). And I would have preferred an even more robust criticism of jurisdictions that allow data brokers to operate secretively (104).

    Chapter 6 explains how market failures have resulted in inadequate security in today’s Internet. In particular users cannot know if a product has an adequate level of security (information asymmetry) and one user’s lack of security may not affect him or her, but may affect others (negative externalities). As the author says, there is a need to develop security standards (e.g. devices should not ship with default administrator passwords) and to impose liability for companies that market insecure products (120, 186).

    Chapter 7 explains well the economic concepts of economies of scale and network effect (see also 23), how they apply to the Internet, and why (122-129) they facilitated the emergence of the current dominant platforms (such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and their Chinese equivalents). This results in a winner-takes-all situation: the best company becomes the only significant player (133-137). At present, competition policy (140-142) has not dealt with this issue satisfactorily and innovative approaches that recognize the central role and value of data may be needed. I would have appreciated an economic discussion of how much (or at least some) of the gig economy is not based on actual innovation (122), but on violating labor laws or housing and consumer protection laws. I would also have expected a more extensive discussion of two-sided markets (135): while the topic is technical, I believe that the author has the skills to explain it clearly for laypeople. It is a pity that the author didn’t explore, at least briefly, the economic issues relating to the lack of standardization, and interoperability, of key widely used services, such as teleconferencing: nobody would accept having to learn to use a plethora of systems in order to make telephone calls; why do we accept that for video calls?

    The chapter correctly notes that data is the key (143-145) and notes that data sharing (145-147, 187, 197) may help to reintroduce competition. While it is true that data is in principle non-rivalrous (194), in practice at present it is hoarded and treated as private property by those who collect it. It would have been nice if the author had explored methods for ensuring the equitable distribution of the value added of data, but that would no doubt have required an extensive discussion of equity. It is a pity that the author didn’t discuss the economic implications, and possible justification, of providing certain base services (e.g. e-mail, search) as public services: after all, if physical mail is a public service, why shouldn’t e-mail also be a public service?

    Chapter 8 documents the digital divide: access to Internet is much less affordable, and widespread, in developing countries than it is in developed countries. As the author points out, this is not a desirable situation, and he outlines solutions (including infrastructure sharing and universal service funds (157)), as have others (for example here, here, here, and here). It would have been nice if the author had explored how peering (48) may disadvantage developing countries (in particular because much of their content is hosted abroad (60, 162)); and evaluated the economics of relying on large (and hence efficient and low-cost) data centers in hubs as opposed to local hosting (which has lower transmission costs but higher operating costs); but perhaps those topics would have strayed from the main theme of the book. The author correctly identifies the lack of payment systems as a significant hindrance to greater adoption of the e-commerce in developing countries (164); and, of course, the relative disadvantage with respect to data of companies in developing countries (170, 195).

    Chapter 9 explains why security and trust on the Internet must be improved, and correctly notes that increasing privacy will not necessarily increase trust (183). The Chapter reiterates some of the points outlined above, and rightly concludes: “There is good reason to raise the issue [of lack of trust] when seeing the market failures taking place today with cybersecurity, sometimes based on the most easily avoidable mistakes, and the lack of efforts to fix them. If we cannot protect ourselves today, what about tomorrow?” (189)

    Chapter 10 correctly argues that change is needed, and outlines the key points: “data is the basis for market power; lack of data is the hidden danger of the digital divide; and data will train the algorithms of the future AI” (192). Even when things go virtual, there is a role for governments: “who but governments could address market power and privacy violations and respond to state-sponsored attacks against their citizens or institutions?” (193) Data governance will be a key topic for the future: “how to leverage the unique features of data and avoid the costs: how to generate positive good while protecting privacy and security for personal data; how to maintain appropriate property rights to reward innovation and investment while checking market power; how to enable machine learning while allowing new companies strong on innovation and short on data to flourish; how to ensure that the digital divide is not replaced by a data divide.” (195)

    Chapters 1 through 4 purport to explain how certain technical features of the Internet condition its economics. The chapters will undoubtedly be useful for people who don’t have much knowledge of telecommunication and computer networks, but they are unfortunately grounded in an Internet-centric view that does not, in my view, accord sufficient weight to the long history of telecommunications, and, consequently, considers as inevitable things that were actually design choices. It is important to recall that the Internet was originally designed as a national (US) non-public military and research network (27-28). As such, it originally provided only for 7-bit ASCII character sets (thus excluding character with accents), it did not provide for usage-based billing, and it assumed that end-to-end encryption could be used to provide adequate security (108). It was not designed to allow insecure end-user devices (such as personal computers) to interconnect on a global scale.

    The Internet was originally funded by governments, so when it was privatized, some method of funding other than conventional usage charges had to be invented (such as receiver pays (53)– and advertising). It is correct (39, 44) that differences in pricing are due to differences in technology, but only because the Internet technologies were not designed to facilitate consumption/volume-based pricing. I would have expected an economics-based discussion of how this makes it difficult to optimize networks, which always have choke points (54-55). For example, I am connected by DSL, and I pay for a set bandwidth, which is restricted by my ISP. While the fiber can carry higher bandwidth (I just have to pay more for it), at any given time (as the author correctly notes) my actual bandwidth depends on what my neighbours that share the same multiplexor are doing. If one of my neighbours is streaming full-HD movies all day long, my performance will degrade, yet they may or may not be paying the same price as me (55). This is not economically efficient. Thus, contrary to what the author posits (46), best-effort packet switching (the Internet model) is not always more efficient than circuit-switching: if guaranteed quality of service is needed, circuit-switching can be more efficient that paying for more bandwidth, even if, in case of overload, service is denied rather than being “merely” degraded (those of us who have had to abandon an Internet teleconference because of poor quality will appreciate that degradation can equal service denial; and musicians who have tried to perform virtually doing the pandemic would have appreciated a guaranteed quality of service that would have ensured synchronization between performers and between video and sound).

    As the author correctly notes, (59) some form of charging is necessary when resources are scarce; and (42, 46, 61) it is important to allocate scarcity efficiently. It’s a pity that the author didn’t explore the economics of usage-based billing, and dedicated circuits, as methods for the efficient allocation of scarcity (again, in the end there is always a scarce resource somewhere in the system). And it’s a pity that he didn’t dig into the details of the economic factors that result in video traffic being about 70% of all traffic (159): is that due to commercial video-on-demand services (such as Netflix), or to user file sharing (such as YouTube) or to free pornography (such as PornHub)? In addition, I would have appreciated a discussion of the implications of the receiver-pays model, considering that receivers pay not only for the content they requested (e.g. Wikipedia pages), but also for content that they don’t want (e.g. spam) or didn’t explicitly request (e.g. adversiting).

    The mention in passing of the effects of Internet on democracy (6) fails to recognize the very deleterious indirect effects resulting from the decline of traditional media. Contrary to what the book implies (7, 132) breaking companies up would not necessarily be deleterious, and making platforms responsible for content would not necessarily stifle innovation., even if such measures could have downsides.

    It is true (8) that anything can be connected to the Internet (albeit with a bit more configuration than the book implies), but it is also true that this facilitates phishing, malware attacks, spoofing, abuse of social networks, and so forth.

    Contrary to what the author implies (22), ICT standards have always been free to use (with some exceptions relating to intellectual property rights; further, the exceptions allowed by IETF are the same as those allowed by ITU and most other standards-making bodies (34)). Core Internet standards have always been free to access online, whereas that was not the case in the past for telecommunications standards; however, that has changed, and ITU telecommunications standards are also freely available online. While it is correct (24) that access to traditional telecommunication networks was tightly controlled, and that early data networks were proprietary, traditional telecommunications networks and later data networks were based on publicly-available standards. While it is correct (31) that anybody can contribute to Internet standards-making, in practice the discussions are dominated by people who are employed by companies that have a vested interest in the standards (see for example pp. 149-152 of the book reviewed here, and Chapters 5 and 6 of the book reviewed here); further, W3C (32) and IEEE (33) are a membership organization, as are the more traditional standardization bodies. While users of standards (in particular manufacturers) have a role in making Internet standards, that is the case for most standard-making; end-users do not have a role in making Internet standards (32). Regarding standards (33), the author fails to mention the key role of ITU-R with respect to the availability of WiFi spectrum and of ITU-T with respect to xDSL (51) and compression.

    The OSI Model (26) was a joint effort of CCITT/ITU, IEC, and ISO. Contrary to what the author implies (29), e-mail existed in some form long before the Internet, albeit as proprietary systems, and there were other efforts to standardize e-mail; it is a pity that the author didn’t provide an economic analysis of why SMTP prevailed over more secure e-mail protocols, and how its lack of billing features facilitates spam (I have been told that the “simple” in SMTP refers to absence of the security and billing features that encumbered other e-mail protocols).

    While much of the Internet is decentralized (30), so is much of the current telephone system. On the other hand, Internet’s naming and addressing is far more centralized than that of telephony.

    However, these criticisms of specific bits of Chapters 1 through 4 do not in any way detract from the value of the rest of the book which, as already mentioned, should be required reading for anyone who wishes to engage in discussions of Internet-related matters.

    _____

    Richard Hill is President of the Association for Proper internet Governance, and was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). He writes frequently about internet governance issues for The b2o Review Digital Studies magazine.

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