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Home > Science Magazine > 2 December 2011 > Palfrey et al. , 334 (6060): 1210-1211
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Science 2 December 2011: Vol. 334 no. 6060 pp. 1210-1211 DOI: 10.1126/science.1210737
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* Author for correspondence. E-mail: zittrain@law .harvard.edu When people took to the streets across the UK in the summer of 2011, the Prime Minister suggested restricting access to digital and social media in order to limit their use in organizing. The resulting debate complemented speculation on the effects of social media in the Arab Spring and the widespread critique of President Mubarak's decision to shut off the Internet and mobile phone systems completely in Egypt (see the photo). Decisions about when and how to regulate activities online will have a profound societal impact. Debates underlying such decisions touch upon fundamental problems related to economics, free expression, and privacy. Their outcomes will influence the structure of the Internet, how data can flow across it, and who will pay to build and maintain it. Most striking about these debates are the paucity of data available to guide policy and the extent to which policy-makers ignore the good data we do have.
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Web sites and Internet service providers collect statistics about seemingly every aspect of Web usage throughout the commercial world. Companies collect so much information about how individual people use the Internet that we are seeing a growing backlash, in the name of user privacy, against corporate data collection (1). Yet at a systemic level, we understand little about what's going on in the digital world in the ways that should matter most to policy-makers. Policy-making is based, too often, on anecdotes collected at random (or worse, self-servingly) or on research produced or funded in ways that call into doubt its scholarly integrity. Examples of this uninformed policy-making abound. Data that for decades have driven much policy-making on broadband have been funded and collected by the providers of telecommunications services themselves (2). Although industry involvement in research can be helpful, policy-makers need independently collected and vetted data on which to base their decisions. In matters of child safety, most decision-making has been driven by fear about what kids might be doing online, not data about what they are in fact doing online (3). The largely ineffective regime of protecting online privacy in the United States, based on an incomplete understanding of youth practices in particular, demonstrates this point. Social networking. In downtown Cairo at El Tahrir square, a large crowd with handheld devices communicates what's happening on the ground using social networks like Twitter and Facebook
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Rather than make decisions based on bad information, states might hold off from regulating the Internet for the time being, continuing the laissez-faire approach that has predominated in many jurisdictions from the 1960s to the mid-1990s (4). There are attractive elements to such cyber-libertarianism: Innovation has flourished in the digital world (5). Such a pure wait-and-see approach to forging public rules that affect the Internet and its impact on society is nonetheless risky. A complete vacuum of public involvement can in some circumstances give rise to private, less accountable regulation. It is unwise to assume that there is no need to regulate harms that occur online, even as authorities pursue harms done offline.
Herdict (8) exemplifies this approach. Instead of relying on researchers to test at a given moment, Herdict allows anyone to report Web censorship anywhere around the world at any time. The system then aggregates responses from the crowd. The crowd has helped to map the first incidence of Web blocking in Guatemala and to flag the blocking of Facebook in Egyptjust before Internet connectivity was completely cut off. The combination of expert researchers with specially tailored methodologies and the crowd's ongoing monitoring improves the picture of Web-based censorship. The addition of data from companies that either participate in censorship or come to observe it could further fill out the picture.
10. J. Taylor et al., Web Science Trust Review 2011 (Web Science Trust, London, 2011). Leave a comment (0)
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