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People Before Tech – Social Change & Digital Empowerment

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2015

Book review: Geek Heresy, Rescuing social change from the cult of technology by Kentaro Toyama

In 2004 computer engineer Kentaro Toyama started up Microsoft Research’s ICT for development program in Bangalore, India. The idea was to use computers and internet connectivity in order to improve education and reduce poverty. The results fell short of expectations, despite pilots showing initial results. Sometimes new technology even worsened social and psychological problems. The experience shook up Toyama’s worldview.

The ‘heresy’ of the book’s title is Toyama’s turnabout from his Silicon Valley outlook that technology alone drives social change. Social change is less about problem solving, and more about nurturing people.

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency”. Bill Gates, Toyama’s former boss at Microsoft, summed up this important relationship as “The Law of Amplification” in his book The Road Ahead from 1995.

Geek Heresy provides the reader with many examples that Gates’ words went unheeded. Schools in India received new computers, but they did not make up for the lack of educated teachers and committed headmasters. Rather, they added new burdens of maintenance and upgrades. The Egyptian revolution was called a Facebook revolution, but in order for it to happen people already had the ability to read and write, use basic IT and the political will.

Access to computers does not mean that users have the capacity or motivation to use them. In order to do so they also need skills. Purchasing IT, as everything else, has an alternate cost. In some cases it could be better to invest scarce resources in other options. If motivation is lacking, Toyama notes that computers will probably get used for entertainment rather than empowerment, as entertainment is easy to access.

Silicon Valley is a pilot project of sorts. It is a place brimming with highly motivated and talented people with access to the best IT infrastructure available. It seldom looks like that when projects are being implemented. The designers are praised but the implementers are often forgotten, while the capability of the users is overestimated.

It is not a question of more or less technology, rather about what technology should amplify or suppress in order to promote people’s aspirations.

Toyama sees these “packaged interventions”, one-size-fits-all solutions that ignore local contexts and individual capacities, as sloganeering and quick fixes. You cannot package the intention or the desire of the implementation, and neither can it be mass-produced. For the same reasons, he takes issue with micro credits and social business. Democratic elections are also promoted as a quick fix, but a stable democracy is so much more than voting ballots.

From his studies in the history of technology, Toyama finds that both utopians and skeptics share the belief that technology embodies certain moral values. Contextualists see technology being applied on a case by case basis, while social determinists see the importance of human values in implementation. Selling soap is no good if no one knows why to wash their hands, and what good might come out of it.

The book’s idea is similar to computer scientist Don Norman’s use of affordances in the fields of HCI and interaction design. Possible actions are dependent on the actor’s goals, plans, values, beliefs, and past experiences.

Growth in individual character is the basis of progress, but covering the application of technology is a difficult task on its own. When reaching out into discussing the amplification of human society, Toyama loses focus from his argument of amplifying people.

As he points out in the interesting chapter about mentorship, you have to foster a person’s ability to assess and make choices in order to find and achieve goals of their own. People are going to experiment in order to grow, and they will arrive at many different values. Social change faces different conditions, and thus different solutions.

Geek Heresy is laudable for it’s constructive outlook. It is not a question of more or less technology, rather about what technology should amplify or suppress in order to promote people’s aspirations. The book also shows things more connected countries could learn from. Development is a two-way street where all can benefit.

Tags: Bill Gates, democracy, Digital Empowerment, facebook, Geek, IT skills, Microsoft, Silicon Valley, skills, Social Change, technology, Waldemar Ingdahl
Posted in Books | 1 Comment »

Making Law for Thinking Machines? Start with the Guns

Wednesday, November 25th, 2015

The Bank of England‘s warning that the pace of artificial intelligence development now threatens 15 million UK jobs has prompted calls for political intervention.

According to scientists and legal experts responding to the bank’s warning this November, there is now an urgent need for the development of intelligent algorithms to be put on the political agenda.

A lot of sceptics have said that this is the same sort of disruption that we had from technology in the Industrial Revolution; the thing then was only in the agricultural sector. This is happening now and across the board, and that’s the difference. That’s why a lot of us need to start talking about this now. The government needs to pick up on this and put it on the political agenda and look at regulatory issues, said Chrissie Lightfoot, a patent lawyer and author who debated fears over unemployment caused by AI at London’s Science Museum last October.

Top of the agenda as far as Lightfoot is concerned is the economic impact if AI cuts large amounts of jobs and the incomes from people, how will they make a living and what will they do, a concern that Professor Toby Walsh, an expert in AI at Australia’s University of New South Wales and a prominent campaigner against the use of AI in military weapons, says is justified and one that needs to be urgently considered.

There is going to be a fundamental change in the economy and how we work. We are already seeing increasing inequalities happening. The challenge is how do we ensure that all of us benefit from this rising tide and not just the people who own the robots?

There are some real societal issues that we need to confront. Society as a whole has to decide where we are going to go.

Though Professor Walsh and fellow AI expert Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics at London’s Imperial College, were wary of calls for regulation of the sector, which they said would inhibit research. According to Professor Walsh, scientists working in AI have already started to exercise a degree of self-control over the exploitation of the discoveries being made in AI. The areas that need to be focused on are the ramifications of the technology.

A point underlined by Professor Shanahan:

It’s premature to start discussing regulations for AI research in general, but there are a lot of related areas where it makes sense. It certainly makes sense to talk about regulation for autonomous weapons.

It makes sense to talk about self-driving cars, and it makes sense to look at the privacy issues that come with personal assistants based on AI that make use of our private data.

All concerns that point to an urgent need for an informed political debate on AI as the potential now exists for huge amounts of power to be concentrated on the technology companies developing the robots.

Tags: AI and society, AI ethics, AI impact, AI privacy, AI Regulation, AI research, algorithms, artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, Bank of England, Chrissie Lightfoot, Cognitive robotics, data, DSM, economic disruption, future of work, google, Imperial College, income inequality, Industrial Revolution, internet, job automation, military AI, Murray Shanahan, patent lawyer, political debate, political intervention, Robotics, Self-driving cars, technology companies, Toby Walsh, UK economy, unemployment fears
Posted in Stories | 1 Comment »

Morozov: Digital Disempowerment of Citizens

Tuesday, November 24th, 2015

Evgeny Morozov is one of the fiercest and most articulate critics of internet-centrism and the freenomics of Silicon Valley. Talking about the ”internet” stands in the way of understanding the context and suggests that technology in itself is the driver of social change, said the American-Belarusian writer at the Internet Days conference in Stockholm on Monday.

Free digital services disempower citizens but give the illusion of empowerment, says Evgeny Morozov. In a similar fashion, the internet giants’ digital offerings are tempting for governments under pressure from the financials of aging demographics, humanitarian crises and austerity measures. Traditional domains of public service, such as education, healthcare and public transportation can and will be replaced or complemented by big data services, which gives a relief to the government budgets, but at the same time ties them to the global financial and advertising markets. In existing systems, transactions happened through tax payments or such things as stamps and tickets, none with any connection to global advertising and finance. Another dimension is that all solutions are based on individual rather than collective measures. Health becomes an issue of carrying a step counter that nudges the user to walk more, rather than for example looking at urban design to develop a city with more public spaces, walkways, bike paths and other costly public investments. It is the privatisation of the commons. Morozov also makes the point that all data that is traded is data about individuals. It is our data that has value in the ad markets.

Traditional domains of public service, such as education, healthcare and public transportation can and will be replaced or complemented by big data services

Evgeny Morozov’s work includes two influential books which easily could be used as basic textbooks for internet sceptics. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (PublicAffairs 2010) points to the irony of Western technology companies thinking their products can liberate the oppressed, where in fact real people risked (and lost) their lives in the Arab Spring and technology was used just as much to monitor dissidents as for liberation (Netopia contributor Mariam Kirollos is an eye-witness of this in her column and speech). In his next book To Save Evertyhing Click Here – The Folly of Technological Solutionism (Public Affairs 2013), Morozov launched the concept ”solutionism” – a solution looking for a problem which he says is a pattern of digital offers (my own favorite example is ”destination lifts” with no buttons inside) – solutionism is the sister of internet centrism. Read Ralf Grötker’s review here.

Morozov’s talk in Stockholm gives some hints to his upcoming book project. His analysis of the powers at play looks at three nodes: corporations, governments and citizens. The current trends of freenomics and big data tends to shift power away from citizens to governments (through the introduction of digital surveillance for anti-terrorism for example) and from citizens and governments to corporations as described above. A possible objection is that at least in theory, in democracies the interests of the citizens and the government ought to be aligned. The idea that the government has a completely different agenda than the public sounds more like something from survivalists or Tea Party-libertarians than a modern society with functioning institutions. This is where Netopia may differ from Morozov, democracy can be expanded to the digital domain and public institutions protect our rights and interests more than threaten them.

Morozov’s answer is to not look at our data as a commodity that can be traded and to erect some barriers around it, making it more difficult to harvest. One could add that this may bring a shift from freenomics to paid services, which is incidentally what Google chief economist Hal Varian predicted in a comment to Netopia earlier this autumn.

Video from Morozov’s speech here.

Tags: big data, democracy, digital, freenomics, google, internet, internet centrism, Kirollos, Morozov, public service, solutionism
Posted in Stories | 7 Comments »

The Gig Economy and European Labour

Monday, November 9th, 2015

In a recent conference hosted by the Socialists & Democrats Group of the European Parliament the topic of “Employment and Social Security in the Digital Single Market: Chances and Challenges” was discussed, featuring prominent speakers from a range of European agencies, civil society organizations and a number of members of the Socialists & Democrats group.

The Digital Risk to Employment

MEPs Maria João Rodrigues and Jutta Steinruck opened the session by underlining the Socialists’ position on the forthcoming Digital Single Market, noting the groups concerns over the associated risks for the labour market and the potential for the Digital Revolution to distort the understanding of what it means to be a worker.

The prospect of the Digital Revolution’s effect on jobs was a core area discussed during the conference. Indeed, one of the most pressing topics for any sector, not least digital practice, are employment figures. The maxim of growth and jobs going hand-in-hand is at the heart of any government’s economic strategy, but for the implementation of a Digital Single Market (DSM), the European Commission focuses all its effort on the technological detail, whilst failing to address the issue of Europe’s labour market structures. The Commission’s conviction that the DSM will create a range of new jobs is problematic. While the Commission might well be right, the first thing to consider is what exactly these jobs will be and who will be filling the vacancies. One size rarely fits all in the free market.

The ‘Gig Economy’ is a phenomenon that has grown rapidly over the last few years and is challenging labour market structures. The concept was highlighted by Valerio de Stefano of the International Labour Organization, who defined “gig economy” as the emergence of ‘on-demand work’, typical of such services as Uber, which allow work and labour to be allocated to anyone, anywhere in the world, via online platforms. The immediate benefits for the consumers are clear – lower costs for services and quicker-responses to sporadic requests – and such platforms do add some fluidity to the economy, but they could, without checks, do damage to labour standards. As Stefano clearly underlines, “if people come to be identified solely as forms of service, there is a risk of dehumanization and of concealing labour behind closed doors. Risks could shift from business towards workers”.

The current regulatory framework of the labour market has been in place since the 20^th century. Its purpose was to maintain stability for labour forces. But the rise of a ‘Gig Economy’ put at risks crucial aspects of this framework as unchecked “pay-as-you-go” wage system will inevitably result in a race to the bottom. Such systems give employers carte blanche to organize and mobilize cross-border workforces based on the lowest possible cost and without proper regulation or contractual status. Likewise, the platforms relieve employers of the obligation to continue using the labour of the worker who becomes dissatisfied with the conditions of his or her employment.

As Irene Mandl of Eurofound, the EU agency for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions was quick to address, online-based labour poses a significant threat to wages. A monthly income of €300 goes much further in India than in France or the UK. Thus, there is little incentive for employers to pay above that level and meet the minimum wage standards that are currently in place in many EU countries. In other words, applying competitive practices to the workforce expose workers to a reduction in wages and an erosion of their collective bargaining over time.

Is Labour Mobility Even a Concept in the Digital Age?

The labour market is no stranger to paradigm reform. Editor-in-Chief at Social Europe, Henning Meyer, underlines the historical factors concerning technological implementation into the market, “the first emergence of technology onto the market was to replace humans with machine muscle. The second one we are experiencing is seeking to replace cognitive functions with artificial intelligence”. With the former, jobs were lost, but a degree of mobility was still possible as human was still required in the labour force. As such, it was possible to offset job losses by relocating workers. Today’s challenge is to compensate for job losses from the rise of AI. But it comes with many more problems. As Henning sets out, “how likely is it that truck drivers are going to move up the ladder and become software engineers if we replace them with driverless trucks? Where will they go?”

We often speak of interoperability. It works great with machines. For people, not so much.

We often speak of interoperability. It works great with machines. For people, not so much.

Moreover, if the money isn’t going to the workers then it isn’t going to the treasury. Nor are social security contributions being paid. This will inevitably be a strain on government spending on key areas such as welfare. This is where the Commission’s strategy falls short. It may be laced with cool-sounding phrases that grab the reader’s attention, but it has moved the focus away from jobs, filling the gaping holes with technological solutions, without really assessing what the consequences of this will be.

Gig Economy is not a Separate Market

Valerio de Stefano’s closing statements underlined where social structures need to shift before digital deregulation can be safely implemented in the way the Commission is proposing. “A Stronger emphasis [is needed] on defining workers as workers and understanding that the Gig economy is not a separate market”. It will need to be subject to the same rules and regulations that are abided by in the traditional marketplace, with the further inclusion of trade unions to sufficiently protect the labour force.

Certainly the prospect of a new digital economy is an exciting concept, but a mature digital strategy should account both for those who benefit from it and, more importantly, those who stand to lose out. The European Commission would certainly benefit from considering the points raised during the conference.

Tags: digital economy, Digital revolution, Digital Single Market, DSM, European Commission, European Parliament, Gig economy, International Labour Organization, labour market, labour standards, market place, minimum wage, on-demand work, online platforms, pay-as-you-go, S&D, social, Socialists & Democrats Group, Uber, Valerio de Stefano
Posted in Stories | 2 Comments »

“Paid Prioritisation Prohibited”

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2015

3 Questions to Nathalie Vandystadt, European Commission spokesperson for the Digital Single Market.

On 27th October, the European Parliament voted to adopt an agreement reached in June to end roaming charges by 2017 and to set net neutrality rules in the EU for the first time. After the vote, Netopia asked three questions to Nathalie Vandystadt, European Commission spokesperson for the Digital Single Market.

Per Strömbäck: Does the EP vote allow for a two-speed internet? (That is not the same as a neutral network)

Nathalie Vandystadt: No, on the contrary, the vote has fully ensured that every European must be able to have access to an open internet and all content and service providers will be able to provide their services via a high-quality open internet. But more and more innovative services require a certain transmission quality in order to work properly – not just today’s services, such as IPTV, but new ones such as telemedicine or automated driving. These and other services that can emerge in the future can be developed as long as they do not harm the availability and the quality of the open internet.

It is not a question of fast lanes and slow lanes – as paid prioritisation is not allowed – but of making sure that all needs are served, that all opportunities can be seized and that no one is forced to pay for a service that is not needed.

The Regulation sets very clear and strong conditions for the provision of such specialised services and includes the necessary safeguards to ensure that the open internet is not negatively affected. Such services have to meet the following conditions:

– They have to be optimised for specific content, applications or services;

– Optimisation must be objectively necessary to meet service requirements for specific levels of quality that are not assured by the internet access service.

The text also sets very clear safeguards to avoid that the provision of these services impairs the internet access. These services:

– Cannot be a substitute to internet access services;

– Can only be provided if there is sufficient network capacity to provide them in addition to any internet access service;

– Must not be to the detriment of the availability or general quality of internet access services for end-users.

PS : Netflix have done battle with ISPs over net neutrality in order to avoid special charges, but now some ISPs start to pay Netflix – reversing the interests. How does such a change influence the Commission’s telecom single market policy?

NV: The Telecoms Single Market Regulation is based on principles (non-discrimination, access to content of the end user’s choice etc) in order to be future proof.

The Regulation will not change because of changes to the commercial behaviour of some operators

PS : Can a ”neutral” network guarantee fair competition and free speech? Is that not a case for active governance rather than the absence of authorities?

NV: The new rules will create a positive individual right of end users to access or distribute internet content and services of their choice. This right can be enforced by courts as well as by regulatory authorities. The rules apply to all customers of internet access service.

National regulatory authorities are fully present in this process. They shall monitor and enforce compliance with the open internet rules. These authorities will thus have the power and obligation to examine how the traffic management practices of internet service providers affect the end-users’ (consumers and businesses) rights to access and distribute content, applications and services of their choice. They will have to ensure that the quality of the open internet access service reflects advances in technology. National regulatory authorities will also have to ensure that the availability and quality of the open internet access service is not degraded by traffic discrimination through internet service providers or by the provision of specialised services. Regulatory authorities furthermore have the responsibility to assess commercial practices, e.g. as regards differentiated data pricing such as zero-rating, to ensure that they do not circumvent the provisions of the Regulation, including those on non-discriminatory traffic management, and do not lead to situations where the choice of end-users would be materially reduced in practice, in their specific market circumstances. Regulators are also empowered to set minimum quality of service requirements on internet access providers and other appropriate and necessary measures to ensure that all end-users enjoy an open internet access service of good quality.

Tags: data, Digital Single Market, DSM, European Commission, European Parliament, internet, Internet service providers, ISP, Nathalie Vandystadt, Net neutrality, open internet, quality of service, regulation, Roaming, technology, Telecoms Package, two-speed Internet
Posted in 3 Questions | 1 Comment »

“It’s very Hard to Finance a Film”

Wednesday, October 28th, 2015

5 Questions to Helena Bergström, Swedish Actress and Film Director

Per Strömbäck, Editor of Netopia, recently had the opportunity to sit down with critically acclaimed Swedish Actress and Film Director Helena Bergström to talk about her upcoming film ‘A Holy Mess’ (En underbar jävla jul in Swedish) and to discuss her experience as a filmmaker and how the changing audiovisual landscape impacts the cinema sector.

Watch the interview below:

Verbatim

Per Strömbäck: I’m here with Helena Bergström, you are one of Sweden’s most famous actresses and directors, and you’re here in Brussels to screen your new movie ‘A Holy Mess’ which opens this Christmas. You have been very cautious about this film, you were afraid that it would leak or end up in the wrong place, why have you been so cautious?

Helena Bergström: Of course, in the time we are living in now it’s so easy that it can be spread and the other day when I was still working with sound on the film and of course it was not finished, I went on the net to see how the trailer looked and all of a sudden, I saw ““A Holy Mess”, the whole film“. And I just, I was numb; and of course I went into it and it was not the whole film it was somebody who had tried to kind of get clicks, I don’t know who but it was still not the whole film. But there were so many thoughts in my head; who leaked it? Was it from the sound or was it from where we had been grading the film? Who was leaking my film and of course it’s behind you all the time as a threat, because of course if it’s leaked, if it’s there on the net, it’s not yours. How would I get an audience for it? So, of course it’s a huge issue for us that make films, that we somehow just deal with this question. Because otherwise we won’t be able to make films anymore.

PS: You are one of the most influential people in the Swedish film industry do you find it easy to make the films that you like to make?

HB: It’s very hard financially right now and it’s always been but now, it’s even harder than it’s ever been actually to finance a film. It’s because also DVDs is out, doesn’t exist, and was a huge part of the economy of the film, a DVD. First you have the cinema window, then you have the DVD and then of course it went on the different page, Amazon and all of that. But now, that side is just gone and that you really feel within the film business, how hard it is to finance. And then you need to sit with, in my case, with this last film I made you have to sit with private financers to try to get some private finance but it’s hard to say to these people “oh, you’re going to get your money back, no problem”, because it is a very tough time right now and we need all the help we can to sort this side of piracy about the stealing. That’s what it is, stealing, stealing our work if you don’t pay for it. So, for all creators to make films it’s hugely important and it will be for the people watching because it in the end there won’t be any films made.

PS: This is a really typical Swedish story, “A Holy Mess” it’s about the Swedish Christmas, but a lot of movies are co-productions with funding from various countries, how important is this European collaboration?

HB: With this case in my film now its local but I really hope it will travel, I think it could, we say it could be a remake or something like that but I think it would be great if Europeans film could be more spread. In my case right now this film is totally financed in Sweden of course I wish that I could also get some finance from the outside as well. But, I think we need to open up the European market that we are more open to look at one-another’s film. In Sweden we like our local films but then we watch American films. It’s very hard, it’s very seldom of French films or another other we can say non-English speaking films works audience-wide in Sweden but I think there’s a market there, let’s target it to really try to open up and let the distributors be able to distribute more European films because I think in the end that’s also what’s going to open up and make an understanding between each country and we try to collaborate with some many issues right now because Europe is in a crisis we can say, and then we need to understand one-another and I think then to start to see each other’s cultures is very important.

PS: And this goal of increasing the exchange within Europe that’s also a political goal for the European institutions, a current suggestion is the licensing of rights should be made mandatory or similar to mandatory in order to facilitate the traveling of European movies, what do you think about this?

HB: It is one problem that is of course the funding of the films, we need to be able to sell our films, to get funding. If you just open it up then of course we are in a very tough situation of course with the financing of the films. So, we should open up to show more European films for one-another in these countries but we also need to help one-another to finance them and then we need to be able to sell a film. So, to just open up is also very dangerous in that sense.

PS: And my last question, digital technology we like to say has changed a lot, what has the difference for you as a filmmaker before and after digital technology, we talked about the market but what about the making of the films?

HB: Oh it’s huge actually, this film for example I’ve been having my dailies in my phone, I’ve been looking through my phone, everything is so digital I get everything home with me all the time I’ve been cutting something I’m sitting at my computer and my last film was not this highly different in technology as it be now, it’s been very good for me creative-wise because it is so open I can bring it all the time but it’s also fear of course if it goes to me now where is it going, is it going to somebody else, can somebody else watch it? It includes some fear as well. But of course the technology is fantastic in many ways, creative-wise and also this digital copies. Before we had copies on the film, each copy cost a lot but now of course it can go up in many copies but also makes it very fast running the cinema so you need to make it work immediately. Before we could have long runs, we could kind of work a film, not many copies maybe but it still goes and then it can go for three, months, up to a year. One of my biggest audience films I think it was in the cinema for a year, that is an impossibility now of course, sad I think also, so it good and bad.

PS: Thank you very much Helena Bergström we wish you the best of luck with “A Holy Mess”

Tags: A Holy Mess, audiovisual, copyright, Digital Single Market, digital technology, DSM, En underbar jävla jul, European market, European Union, Film Director, filmmaker, Helena Bergström, licensing of rights, movie, piracy
Posted in 3 Questions | Comments Off on “It’s very Hard to Finance a Film”

The Mystery of the Digital Economy: Where Is the Money? Where Are the Jobs?

Tuesday, October 20th, 2015

A Critical Look at the #DigitalSingleMarket strategy Part 1

Time and time again we were promised innovation, progress and not least added value from the digital economy. But now economists are increasingly scratching their heads, because we certainly see a lot of disruption through the effects of digital economy, but – in a broad sense – no added value. The German economic magazine Wirtschaftswoche recently reported that the growth of both industrialised countries and emerging markets is slowing considerably, and that the world economy needs a new growth story. Digitization was hailed by many as such a growth story, but at the moment it does not deliver – at least not on a macroeconomic scale. In the United States the economy has shrunk even faster than anywhere else on the world: Yet Silicon Valley is still hailed as the role model of technological innovation. Is there perhaps a connection between digitization and declining economic growth?

First we have to see the bigger picture.

Looking For Growth: Brand Value

The economic performance of GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) stands in sharp contrast to the overall performance of the world economy. According to Google’s new report, the company improved its turnover by 11% in the second quarter of 2015, and is projected to reach a yearly turnover of 65 Billion € in 2015 (71 Billion US$). The others are on a similar course, so the question why this growth does not affect the general economy does become more and more crucial.

At the same time, many businesses at the fringes of digitization are becoming dissatisfied with the political frame conditions. Whether the entire creative industry, logistics, taxi drivers or even telecom access providers: Everybody fights for a level playing field with GAFA. So where does the growth of GAFA come from, and is it perhaps partially borrowed value from other businesses instead of a classic added value?

Where does the growth of GAFA come from, and is it perhaps partially borrowed value from other businesses instead of a classic added value?

A look at the development of companies’ brand value supports this argument. Brand value companies like Interbrand’s Best Global Brands or Millward Brown’s Brandz try to put a fixed economic value to a company brand. The brand value is based on certain factors, like image reception in public, stock performance and financial performances of the companies. This way company brands can be put into performance charts like music or book sales. As a result you can compare businesses in a broader scale in terms of performance and development over a longer time. And while the brand studies of Millward Brown Brands and Interbrand often disagree in terms of exact value or position of a specific brand, they show the very same tendency: Not only does the brand value of digital companies like Apple and Google soar at unparalleled speeds. At the same time, the values of media and entertainment companies have been going down and being pushed out from the top 100 brand value charts. While 2006 still saw media brands like the New York Times or Reuters in the Top 100 brands, those brands have been completely pushed out of the top 100 in the last decade. Also, Apple and Google overtook Coca Cola as the world’s most successful brand in 2013, while Disney remains the only entertainment brand left in those studies (though it has lost positions). Facebook and Amazon are both top climbers in the recent 2014 studies.

So if you consider the brand values to be representative as the broader picture of the branches in economy, then the last decade has not only seen a rapid growth of digital technology brands, but at the same time a very steep decline of media and entertainment brands. This is a parallel development to many companies’ financial performance. So, does the digital economy favor tech over content in general? And is the internet revolution and digital economy not supposed to liberate content and make the entire economy prosper, not just a few digital technology companies?

Continue reading in Part 2.

Tags: amazon, Apple, Brand Value, digital economy, Digital Single Market, DSM, facebook, GAFA, google
Posted in Columns | 8 Comments »

All Your Data Can And Will Be Used Against You

Monday, August 31st, 2015

Book Review: The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Did someone nudge you in to this website from your previous searches? Who is going to see what articles you looked at here? Will reading this article affect your credit rating?

University of Maryland law professor Frank Pasquale’s book The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information, examines the dangers of data creep and hidden algorithms. The book’s title refers to a term in computing where a system can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs, without any knowledge of its internal workings. According to Pasquale, systematic secrecy is present online, in politics, the legal system and in finance with the explicit purpose to obfuscate. His purpose is to once again make society intelligible.

The big web platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon changed the internet experience quite a lot the last decade without the average user being fully aware of it. When data turned into a valuable commodity, openness was discarded. The current web is about gathering users for a service and acquire data about them to be sold to data brokers, advertisers and other collectors. Many users have no idea of the data trails they are leave behind, nor do they understand how this data is used, making it difficult for them to exercise their rights. Regular users are more transparent than ever, but it is not a two-way relationship as companies and government agencies like the NSA aggregate data.

Online recommendations and interactions turned into filter bubbles. Are the algorithms behind search results as neutral as purported? Pasquale indicates bias through some examples, both on the grounds of prejudice but also self-serving to the interests of the tech giants.

Your online reputation affects your career, medical services, insurances, credit rating etc. but it is difficult to understand precisely how this reputation is created, disseminated, and could lead to cascading disadvantages. Some users get weblined, namely offered preferential prices and services based on their online behavior while others might get discriminated. There could be a valid explanation, but Pasquale points out that this is being kept secret.

Intelligence agencies have put up ingenious systems for exchanging information through back room deals between government and corporations, bending the law by mission creep. Surveillance measures previously directed at terrorism are now used to detect ordinary crimes.

Are the algorithms behind search results as neutral as purported?

The current state of finance is perhaps the most known secretive part of society known to the public. The increased complexity enacted by the quants, financial quantitative analysts, do not serve to make markets more efficient but less so, in order to hide the failures leading up to the crash of 2008.

The Black Box Society makes for a passionate and ambitious read about secrecy, but its anecdotes sometimes make up for a lack of depth. Pasquale overestimates the degree of control the digital giants have over the effects of their algorithms. Algorithms often depend on fudged data, blanks and misinterpretations, which is an issue in itself. How will these bugs in the systems affect us?

Pasquale’s “New Deal” of internet commissions and regulatory agencies do run counter to his complaints, as he argues for even further surveillance. The voucher system proposed for culture sounds like a feeble substitute for the copyright system disappearing on the platforms.

The questions raised will become ever more important, as the current adoption of the Internet of Things will raise a variety of privacy and security-related concerns, but now in physical space.

The drawing of “the creepy line” is not same in every area, but the general direction of drawing it ever further is damaging to individuals and society. The book does point out the necessity of digital sustainability, of keeping reciprocal trust between users and service providers rather than relying on opacity and lack of knowledge.

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“Traffic Management Cannot Be Based on Commercial Considerations”

Friday, July 10th, 2015

3 Questions to Pierre Goerens, Chairman of the Working Party on Telecommunications and Information Society

The trilogue of the European Commission, Parliament and Council of the European Union recently agreed on the proposal for the “Telecoms Single Market” (or TSM). While this has mostly been reported as the end of roaming charges in Europe, the new rules mean a big step in transparency and competition regulation of internet traffic. Netopia sought out Pierre Goerens, Chairman of the Working Party on Telecommunications and Information Society during the Luxembourg Presidency semester, who was involved in the negotiations to find out more.

Per Strömbäck: The open internet rules demand that telecom carriers do not use blocking or throttling “on commercial considerations”. This is a big step for the carriers, as it is common-practice to give less bandwidth to expensive traffic protocols and competing services. Is it not going too far in meddling with how the internet currently functions? Is there not a risk that the well-functioning of the internet will be jeopardized?

Pierre Goerens: It is very important that the European rules safeguard equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic by providers of internet access services. The internet should remain a level playing field, and end-users must have the right to access and distribute information and use and provide services of their choice over the internet.

At the same time the regulation allows operators to apply reasonable traffic management measures that are necessary to optimize overall transmission quality and user experience. However such measures cannot be based on commercial considerations, but on objectively technical quality of service requirements of specific categories of traffic, or in exceptional cases, to preserve network security, to prevent network congestion or to comply with legal obligations. It is a delicate balance between the rights and needs of end-users on one hand and the necessity of traffic management to preserve the well-functioning of the internet on the other hand.

PS: The proposed regulation allows for exception for ”services requiring specific levels of quality”. Who will determine which services fall into that category? What if there are conflicting views? Can the regulator be fast enough to settle such issues before competition is harmed?

PG: The new rules allow for the provision of specialised services requiring a specific level of quality, such as for example e-health services, but only where an optimization is necessary to meet these requirements and under the condition that it is not to the detriment of the general quality of the open internet. These services are not subject to a prior authorization by a regulatory authority, but they will be monitored and national authorities will ensure that all the conditions are met.

PS: New players have entered the internet access market, for example internet platforms offering broadband access. How can the proposed framework handle such market disruption?

The regulation does not make a difference between specialized internet access service providers, network operators or over the top service providers which offer also internet access. The rules aim at preserving a level playing field between different types of actors, ensuring an open internet also for newcomers and start ups, and safeguarding the free choice of end-users. Innovation remains possible both for the well established players and for new entrants and this should foster fair competition and the further development of internet services in the best interest of European citizens and businesses.

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Report: Citizens’ Internet, The Many Threats to Neutrality

Tuesday, March 31st, 2015

On March 31 2015, Netopia launched its report Citizens’ Internet – The Many Threats to Neutrality at the European Economic and Social Committee in Brussels.

Any analysis of the impact of digital technology on our society starts with technology rather than society. It is built into the question: technology first, impact later. With this perspective, it may appear as if technology evolves in a vacuum, only to late be released and applied to the normal world. This attributes a lot of influence to technology: given the right circumstances, technology can be expected to fix jobs and growth, but also new forms of culture and freedom for the oppressed. Or it could drive us toward a surveillance-state, middle-class jobs lost to robots and hyper-capitalism with companies more powerful than states. Whether you ask a techno-optimist or –pessimist, the basic assumption is the same: technology impacts society.

The most recent example is the topic of network neutrality, which has become the focus of policy-making in both Brussels and Washington recently, with the European Parliament’s vote for network neutrality in April 2014, the US Federal Communications Commission’s ruling on the same issue in February this year and the draft agreement from EU member states this March. Again depending on whom you ask, network neutrality is either the solution to freedom and democracy online, or the end of innovation and network investment. Either the internet will end up with slow and fast lanes, further enforcing the winner-take-all dynamics of the network economy, making bigger companies stronger and smaller weaker. Or network neutrality regulation would stand in the way of digital life-and-death matters such as road safety management, connected or self-driving cars, remote surgery and other tele-medicine applications.

Network neutrality is either the solution to freedom and democracy online, or the end of innovation and network investment

Network neutrality is based on the idea that infrastructure is independent from content. That may have been the case with the telephone networks of the 20th Century (often state-owned) and the cables distributing television. However, today we see content and infrastructure merging. Internet services make operating systems for mobile phones, invest in data centers and even offer of high-speed fiber subscriptions to consumers. Device manufacturers operate software marketplaces where third party developers can only offer apps tailored to specific hardware. Internet access providers develop content services and shape traffic to protect their business models. The celebrated “end-to-end”-structure of the network is challenged by the walled gardens of apps and the expanding domains of cloud giants. And the network technology itself changes, with content delivery networks storing popular parts of the internet’s content close to the user rather than on the original server. In contrast to this trend of centralization, there is the opposing trend of fragmentation: public wifi-hotspots connecting users without involvement of telecom operators. The machine-to-machine communication of the so-called Internet of things which often uses different communications channels than the regular TCP/IP-standard internet. Thumb drives with storage capacities far beyond the day-to-day needs of average users allow for swapping files in “meatspace”, the so-called sneakernet. And as increasing amounts of internet content is locked away behind passwords on the deep web, there is no longer one unified internet, but many. In this complex landscape, is a simple principle like network neutrality relevant for regulating technology? Is the infrastructure visible?

These thoughts inspired me as editor of Netopia – Forum for the Digital Society to ask Ralf Grötker, the author of this report, to take a different approach. What if we don’t start by looking at technology and its impact? What if we instead look at what we want to achieve – pluralism, freedom of expression, public participation – and then ask how this impacts technology? Would we then arrive at completely different solutions? The answer to that question is yes. The answer to those solutions is this report. I hope you will find it as inspiring as I have.