Pollution-insidious practices such as "search engine optimisation"? But that's my job!

July 13, 2011 - PRLog -- In May this year, the e-G8 event brought together Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive, Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, and Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy who, addressing the summit, argued that internet users must not forget that "governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people". He championed tougher government control around the governance of the web, focusing on increased regulation.

In Morozov's piece he stated in "Two decades of the web: a utopia no longer" that the early pioneers of the internet shared the ideal that the medium should emphasise the "importance of community and shared experiences" and that they "viewed humans as essentially good, influenced by rational deliberation, and tending towards co-operation."

BigBrotherWatch wrote of the Sarkozy doctrine: "It is curious too that a man who has been such an effective advocate for military intervention in Libya would seek to legitimise the power of "government" at all costs. Does this include the same Gadaffi-led "government" in Libya who have engaged in heavy-handed tactics such as shutting down all of the country's ISPs in order to suppress rebel, anti-government sentiments?"

Morozov also argues: "This vision of a world without intermediaries satisfied the communitarian former hippies and the libertarian anti-system cyber-pundits. They both wanted the internet to ‘flatten' the world, by which they meant level things out — make things fairer."

Not that I agree with Don Tapscott of the University of Toronto on this point when he said: "Without the Internet — and social media in particular — the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt would have never occurred." There is another social meme at play here and it is pure, overstated arrogance to suggest that the internet fuelled the collapse in the Mahgreb. However, I do agree that Sarkozy doesn't like a medium over which his government does not have ultimate control. Presidents seem to be a bit like that.

However, Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt pushed back against these calls for government regulation, rebutting Sarkozy's opening remarks, when he said: "To forget [governmental control] is to run the risk of democratic chaos and hence anarchy. To forget this would be to confuse populism with democracy of opinion." To which Schmidt responded that as far governments go, implementation of "stupid" rules such as these would "slow the growth of the internet".

Morozov then argues, quite correctly in my opinion, that "one set of intermediaries may well be on the decline — print media — which has been quickly jettisoned by the younger generation." He says that "search engines and social networking sites hold as much power today as newspapers and radio stations did three decades ago."

He then goes on to argue what seems like a chink in the internet's armoury: that utopianism now must recognise that some fundamental questions were sidestepped: "Who would take out the trash — that is, deal with spamming and scamming? Who would be in charge of preserving historical memorabilia: the ephemeral tweets and blog posts that tend to disappear into the digital void? Who would deal with the problem of pollution — insidious practices such as ‘search engine optimisation', or content farms that produce trivial content to earn advertising revenue? Who would protect the dignity of online citizens? Who would secure their privacy and protect them from defamation and libel?"

However, Sarkozy does not stand alone in calling existing regulations inadequate to deal with the challenges of a borderless digital world. Britain's prime minister David Cameron said that the focus on privacy was a timely debate and he would ask parliament to review British privacy laws after Twitter users circumvented super-injunctions, which prevented newspapers from publishing the names of public figures having extramarital affairs.

The founding fathers of the internet had laudable instincts: the utopian vision of the internet. But then they got co-opted by big money and became trapped in the self-empowerment discourse that was just an ideological ruse to conceal the interests of big companies and minimise government intervention.

Maybe we now need to address whether the internet is primarily a marketplace or a public forum? What seems to be long overdue is a fundamental reconsideration of the primacy of whether we want the internet to look like a private mall or a public platform.

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