Monday offered an opportunity for interaction with the European Commission’s Vice President for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip, a twitter chat hashtagged #AskAnsip. Ansip’s main message was that he wants evidence of “online barriers” standing in the way of the DSM. Questions regarding digital VAT, spectrum and cross-border access to entertainment got most of Ansip’s attention. Netopia of course also asked some questions, none of which got a reply.

From Netopia editor Per Strömbäck

.@Ansip_EU How will fair competition be secured across the #DSM? Will you put an EU online competition watch dog in place? #AskAnsip

#AskAnsip Will #Copyright enforcement be harmonised in #DSM? No level playing field if infringment is only enforced in some member states.

#AskAnsip Free press is essential to democracy but losing ad revenue to global competitors in digital space. Can the #DSM save the press?

#AskAnsip How can checks & balances be introduced to #DigitalSingleMarket to avoid abuse of dominant position by ” #InternetSkyscrapers “?

@Ansip_EU Pls make sure #DigitalSingleMarket puts people over data and does not harm #CulturalDiversity in EU #CitizensInternet #AskAnsip

#AskAnsip Great if #DigitalSingleMarket can help #StartUps but main competitive disadvantage is access to risk capital. What is the plan?

#AskAnsip Why the big focus on cross-border access to Movies & TV – is this really the most important goal of the #DigitalSingleMarket ?

From @netopiaforum

@Ansip_EU How will you protect funding for local content that relies on territorial licensing? #AskAnsip #culturaldiversity

And in response to VP Ansip’s tweet “Everyone should be able to buy the best products at the best prices, wherever he or she is in Europe. #AskAnsip”

@Ansip_EU If that is the dogma, make sure to set aside extra funds for #CreativeEurope as local culture content funding will be killed

We can only speculate why Ansip chose not to answer any of these questions or any other questions on similar topcs. Maybe the volume made it impossible – there were more than 700 tweets with the #AskAnsip-hashtag – but this still means important questions are left unanswered. The Commission is or course not unaware of the dangers of abuse of dominant position, its previous actions against Microsoft and Google are examples of that. But how does that insight carry over into competition regulation for the digital single market? There is no reason to believe anything other than that these issues will only become more important, the risk of abuse greater and the consequences more severe. Also the topic of local content and cultural diversity should be close to home for the European Commission, but for all the talk of ending “geo-blocking” the solution is not clear how Team Juncker plans to protect the sensitive echo-systems that fund local content on a digital single market. Surely the answer is out there, perhaps the Commission even knows it. But we would like to know also.

Ansip puts a lot of faith in the Digital Single Market to fix jobs and growth for Europe, but as many have pointed out, the productivity increases of digitalization is often used for rationalization rather than job creation, not least in industries such as manufacturing, transport, construction and many others. The clear exception to the rule is the creative sector: digital content is a big job creator – Ansip himself pointed to the predictions made in last year’s Eurapp report with millions of jobs expected in the app economy. But this content relies on some of the fundaments that Ansip seems to want to remove in order to make the DSM come true: protection of intellectual property rights and freedom of contract for creators (including territories). Without these mechanisms, a digital single market runs the risk of becoming a machine for feeding the cloud companies with free or cheap content that their algorithms can monetize, for the benefit of Silicon Valley share-holders more than European employers. For all the Commission’s love for “evidence-based policy-making”, at the moment the Digital Single Market looks more like “faith economics”.

The real question for VP Andrus Ansip is “Do digital markets work like analog markets?”

The idea that there is a single truth, with no interpretations or shades of grey, seems to be at the heart of the digital promise. Wikipedia is one example, with it there is no need for multiple encyclopaedias with different perspectives or focuses: the truth is, so to speak, out there. The hive mind, or algorithms, or combination of both, will rise above the biased perspectives of the individual mind. Nowhere is this promise more prominent than in search. The ever-improving algorithms have only one objective, to provide you the user with the best, most relevant results. Or at least this is how it is often perceived according to Swedish author and journalist Andreas Ekström, in a recent TEDx talk in Oslo. Ekström makes a convincing case that the algorithms we trust are not as objective as we might like to think and that there is significant human influence and bias on particular search queries. The keywords neutrality, objectivity and independence we have learned to associate with the internet seems to never reach further than the conscience of the designers, executives and owners of the tech companies will allow. I can only agree that there is often need for such intervention and that “neutrality” is at best a dead end and at worst the recipe for disaster. The problem is that the principles of interference are not transparent or predictable, nor can decisions be appealed. With all that power over our facts and knowledge about the world, search engines can do a much better job on this. First order of business: acknowledge this power. Second: develop transparent systems and process of accountability. Look at how the traditional press has developed principles of press ethics, much of that can also be applied to online editors and curators, not necessarily limited to search: social media feeds are ruled by presumably unbiased algorithms too. Let’s wake up from this dogmatic slumber.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Ekström was a contributor to the Swedish Netopia-project and also contributed a chapter to an anthology I edited in 2009.

This week was the third LetsGoConnected Brussels and this humble blogger had the honour of hosting it. It is a digital media event, and while Netopia’s focus is broader, digital media is a perfect illustration of where some of the challenges and conflicts line are online (plus it’s my background, which makes things easier). Digital media has been very much in focus in the past month. A silly Hollywood comedy leaked in a hacker attack started an international crisis involving the world’s last Communist dictator and the leader of the free world. Terrorists use digital channels, not only for cyberterrorism but also for spreading their terror in social media. And that terror became very real for our colleagues at Charlie Hebdo – when we say “Je suis Charlie” we express our sympathy with the victims and their families, but we also take a stand for freedom of expression. The pen is mightier than the sword. The sword knows this and keeps trying to kill the pen over it. This is true in this digital age, as ever.

So there are many reasons, good, bad and ugly, to look at digital media. The Juncker Commission has made it its first priority to fix jobs and growth in Europe and a key part of its plan is the “digital single market”. There can be many definitions of what this DSM entails exactly, but a lot of the conversation focuses on copyright, and particularly on territorial licenses and portability of services. This is of course too narrow, a digital single market must also take into account such issues as infrastructure, spectrum access, marketing regulation, protection of minors, competition law, payment services, local language adaptation, sales tax, consumer protection and probably dozens of other factors. The European Commission is of course aware that the issue is broader than copyright, but the discussion keeps coming back to that particular topic (and especially that eurocrat headache of not being able to access the home country’s content services). Many LGC-speakers stressed the importance of local quality content for reasons of both business and cultural diversity. One speaker stressed that local television series in Central and Eastern Europe beat global hit shows like Game of Thrones. Whichever way the DSM is implemented, it needs to be set up in a way that doesn’t undermine the possibility to fund this local content is what Netopia takes away from the panels. Author Andrew keen gave a thought-provoking keynote based on his new book The Internet Is Not the Answer, which Netopia will cover in a separate post.

Lastly, this brilliant quote by RTL Nederland’s digital manager Arno Otto was the thought of the day (on success factors for digital entertainment services): “People love choice, but hate to choose”

Is this the end of file-sharing piracy? We have learnt to think about file-sharing as a law of nature, almost. Something that cannot be stopped. The tide of the digital ocean, to which content creators must adjust but not resist. I have many objections to this idea, as Netopia readers will know. Technology is not bigger than man; it is created by us. Built by us. Humans design the features based on decisions influenced by values. If we want it different, we can make it different. But my voice has often drowned in the noise of a thousand techno-centrists.

When the first police raid on The Pirate Bay happened in 2006, the notorious file-sharing site was back online the day after. But as of last Tuesday, when Swedish police seized the TPB hardware from the same server hall as eight years before, the website is still down, almost a week later. Is this the end? One of the founders, Peter Sunde, thinks it should stay down—he feels it lost its soul and became too commercial (which is a little ironic as Sunde and his partners once tried to sell it for €5 million).

The Pirate Bay has been described as a hydra, impossible to kill and only becoming more vicious for each head cut off. For sure, many copycats have arrived, some accused of stealing torrents, scamming users, faking uploads and phishing for TPB-passwords and usernames. The irony is even thicker: infringing on the infringers – is there no honour among… pirates?

Some say the spirit of file-sharing will not go away and welcome a future with multiple torrent hubs, but the network effects that have created the winner-takes-all niche monopolies which dominate the internet as we know it (one Ebay makes more sense than many, one career network etc) apply as well to torrent trackers. Without the central resource gone, it may take a long time replace it. After the raid, other torrent sites (EZTV, Zoink, Torrage, Istole) fell like dominoes, indicating that many services relied on The Pirate Bay as a backbone.

Is this the end? Already the anonymous operators of The Pirate Bay are making excuses and explanations why it may not be so easy to put it back up, hoping for others to keep the spirit of “kopimi.”. That’s not the sound of someone determined on coming back. That is the sound of a towel thrown.

Perhaps The Pirate Bay will return, perhaps not. Perhaps another pirate site will come in its place; perhaps there will be confusion and infighting for a long time. In any event, the idea that file-sharing is a force of nature just took a big hit.

Network neutrality is great – it can mean whatever you want it to. When the European Parliament made network neutrality into law this spring, it said all internet traffic should be treated equally regardless of its source. The other week, President Obama asked the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to make sure network operators don’t do any paid prioritizing, throttling, blocking etc of the internet traffic, which is a different flavour than what the MEPs wanted (or at least another color of ice-cream). And now there is a leak draft of EU member states position which bans ‘management measures which “block, slow down, alter, degrade or discriminate against specific content”’, but allows for ISPs to make deals with so-called “specialised services” to have priority. The ISPs themselves of course would much prefer to be left to their own devices, in part because they want to manage traffic in order to maximise revenue and minimise cost, but also in part because they have a point that some traffic may be more important (imagine telesurgery with a lag or self-driving cars depending on traffic data – of course all examples are of altruistic applications). On top of all this, there is the convergence of infrastructure and services, making it difficult to tell who is an ISP in the first place.

Now, the internet is often described as a public utility (this is also part of the language in Obama’s bid), which makes it similar to things like ports, water pipe systems, sewers, power grids… natural monopolies which don’t match well with market economy solutions. Strictly speaking, this is not the case for ISPs, there is competition – typically four providers in each territories for some reason – but the offers are very similar which make it look more like an oligopoly than a functioning market. (Whether this is due to cartels or normal market forces is a question I’ll dodge for the time being.) The internet itself may look like a public utility, internet access probably not so much. That may have been the case with the pre-deregulation national telephone monopolies, though. (If nationalisation is the answer is another question I’ll save for another day!)

However, one internet phenomenon that is looking more and more like a public utility is search. With more than 90% market share in Europe and 80+% globally on mobile, Google is moving out of the zone where it can be discussed as an anti-trust issue and into public utility land. Imagine a similar situation in any other market! Google is like the city port, the remaining ten percent is the marina at the beach resort. How does the network neutrality logic apply to an “essential facility” like search? It may be a better candidate for neutrality regulation than internet access.

European Parliament voted to break up Google, which in this view is contradictory to the previous parliament’s stance on network neutrality. Why not find a middle ground in competition regulation that helps search engines, ISP’s, internet platforms, payment providers, ad networks and other supposedly independent intermediaries behave? That’s the way it works in, say, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, air transport, energy, construction, finance, agriculture and pretty much any other sector you can think of.

Will artificial intelligence be the end of mankind? We should be worried, at least if the world’s smartest scholar, Stephen Hawking, is to be trusted. It is the speed of change that may unleash the Skynet scenario; humans can’t change fast enough to keep up. We have heard similar concerns regarding job loss due to digitalization. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt fretted over this in Davos earlier this year. Hawking seems to be a little more optimistic than Schmidt: the former says we should avoid unleashing sentient AI, whereas Schmidt rather urged society to deal with the consequences. The central question is “Can we control technology?”. Hawking says yes, Schmidt no. Netopia sides with Hawking and points to its report Can We Make the Digital World Ethical?*, which points to several ways people can take control over the technology. In fact, tech development is very much in the hands of people like Schmidt, except the notion that there should be some level of democratic influence on his company’s doings stands in the way of its business. Luckily, Stephen Hawking has some advice also to this point: “More must be done by the internet companies to counter the threat, but the difficulty is to do this without sacrificing freedom and privacy” (responding to a question on cyber-terrorism).

*) See also the video from the launch seminar where Cognitive Robotics-professor Murray Shanahan discusses a super-AI-scenario in detail

Cory Doctorow is most known for his science fiction novels and his “internet activism” (he used to be the European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), in a keynote speech at Stockholm’s Internet Days-conference he tried to connect the two. Doctorow presented a view where free speech online is restricted not so much by the entertainment industry’s ambitions to contain piracy, but by the lock-in effects that those actions create with the internet platforms. To demonstrate this, Doctorow articulated three laws:

1. Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and won’t give you the key, that lock isn’t there for your benefit.

According to Doctorow, digital locks (i e DRM) serve to protect the intermediary rather than the content. Using the Hachette-Amazon dispute as an example, Doctorow described how difficult it is for a consumer to move content it has invested in with one online supplier, to the detriment of competition. (He also spoke very convincingly about the “consensus hallucination of the distinction between streaming and downloading”).

2. Being famous won’t make you rich, but no one will give you money unless they’ve heard of you.

Doctorow said the counter-piracy measures insisted on by the entertainment industry has only served to reinforce the domination of the internet platforms, raising barriers to entry and thus stopping competition. Doctorow used the example of Google Music which first negotiated with the four major labels, then forced that deal on the independents to make this point.

3. Information doesn’t want to be free

Very true, information doesn’t have any wishes, it does not get disappointed if it doesn’t get what it wants. In Doctorow’s words “information is an abstraction”. It is people who want to be free. Doctorow used this to make a point about the surveillance and censorship being unacceptable and though there may be bigger problems in the world (gender inequality, climate change, corruption etc), he said the battles on these issues will be fought on the internet.

In all, a very eloquent and emotional keynote, in fact one of the best I’ve seen in conferences like these (and I have been to quite a few, for better or worse). There are more aspects to some of these points of course. DRM may not be the only or most important factor in niche dominant players, rather the logic of the network implies that a single Ebay or Wikipedia work better than two separate. Competition comes not in the form of a similar offer but a different use pattern (Google sees Facebook as a bigger threat than Bing).

For all his insight, Doctorow’s conclusion is surprisingly vague. He says he would be happy to give up his income as a writer if that means the internet can be without surveillance or censorship. But why should that be the sacrifice he has to make? In what way would giving up his livelihood stop tech companies from collecting big data on their users or dictators to demand network operators track down dissidents or stop hardware makers from locking content to its devices? From a science fiction writer, I would have expected the power of imagination to create a vision of a future where he would not be faced with such a choice.