1. Y490 Politics of the
Internet
March 7, 2012

2. Governance
 Governance is a service that
governments and other authoritative
bodies perform
 Defined by Oran Young as “The
establishment and operation of social
institutions…capable of resolving
conflicts, facilitating cooperation, or, more
generally, alleviating collective action
problems.”

3. International Intergovernmental
Regimes
 Defined as systems of rules, norms,
procedures, and informal practices that
constrain the behavior of governments of
nation-states.
 International governance and international
intergovernmental regimes are not the same
because some international governance can
occur with only minimal involvement of
governments.

4. International Regimes for ICTs
 The Domain Name System
 E-Commerce
 Intellectual Property Rights and Digital
Rights Management (DRM)
 Bridging the Digital Divide (e.g. the DOT
Force)
 WSIS and the Internet Governance
Forum

5. The Domain Name System
 Origins in the system administered by
Jon Postel
 Postel regime generalized into the Internet
Assigned Numbers Association (IANA) by the
Internet Society
 IANA establishes ICANN in collusion with the
US Department of Commerce
 ICANN comes under strong criticism for
Commerce veto (EU; Milton Mueller)

6. DNS-Specific Issues
 Integrity of root server system
 Global Top-level domains vs. country domains
 Need to regulate registrar monopolies
(Network Solutions/Verisign) or make registry
industry more competitive
 Cyber squatting vs. trademark and brand-name
protection of large firms (UDRP)
 .xxx domain dispute
The Internet is for Porn video

7. E-Commerce Governance
Issues
 Should there be policies to promote
migration from bricks and mortar to
bricks and clicks or just clicks?
 How is e-commerce to be regulated?
 Is there a geographic location where the
transaction takes place (for taxation
purposes) and if so what tax is to be
charged?

8. Increased Focus on Protecting
Intellectual Property
 RIAA, MPAA attacks on file sharing
 Counterarguments by scholars about the
negative aspects of overly ambitious
“digital rights management”

10. Jar Jar Binks: The Phantom
Edit
 Wikipedia story on it
 2001 story in Salon.com
 Jay and Silent Bob on the Phantom Edit
 Initially George
Lucas supported the
phantom edit but
then reversed
himself

11. History of Copyright Act
1790 Congress passes copyright act
1830 Act expanded to published music
1856 Act extended to published plays
1870 Act extended to works of art. Library of
Congress become clearing house.
1897 Act extended to public performances
1909 Act extended to reproductions (piano rolls)
1912 Motion pictures added
1976 Sound recordings and unpublished works
1980 Computer programs
1992 Audio Home Recording Act
1998 Copyright Term Extension Act

12. Copyright Term Extension Act of
1988
 The Copyright Act of 1976 set the term of copy as
the life of the author plus 50 years for individuals
and for the life of the author plus 70 years for
corporations or 95 years after publication.
 The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1988
(sponsored by Sonny Bono) extended copyright
terms in the US by 20 years to 95 years after
publication.
 Also called “The Mickey Mouse Protection Act.”
Rep. Sonny Bono (of Sonny and Cher fame)

13. Increasing Length of
Copyrights

14. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and
Steamboat Willie
 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit 1927
 Steamboat Willie 1928
 Disney worked on Oswald the Rabbit for
Charles Mintz of Universal Studios. When he
asked for more production money in 1928, Mintz
reminded Disney that Universal owned the rights
to Oswald the Rabbit. Disney quit and formed
his own studio and never again lost control of his
intellectual property.

15. More Recent Intellectual
Property Rights Legislation
 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
of 1998
 Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of
2004

16. DMCA authorized methods for
digital rights management
 Licensing
 Watermarking
 Registerware
 Tethering
 Privacy tax

17. Other DMCA provisions
 Limits on caching
 Prohibits links to DMCA-illegal material
 ISPs told to act expeditiously to block
illegal content or activity
 Special leeway for libraries
 Compulsory licensing to webcasters with
terms regulated by Library of Congress

18. File Sharing and Piracy
 Digital files unlike analog content suffers
no loss in quality when copied
 Recording Industry and Movie Industry
both worried about illegal copying of
copyrighted content (which they call
piracy)
 MP3s for audio files more vulnerable
than video files because smaller in size,
but video file sharing is already
happening

19. Napster Shawn Fanning
Sean Parker
 Founded in June 1999, Napster was one of the
first systems to utilize a large- scale the peer to
peer model of sharing files.
 Peer to peer (P2P) sharing occurs when
computer networks when one Internet node
shares files with another node
 The earliest peer to peer networks (e.g
Napster) were client-server based: a central
server tends to provide access to files that can
be shared.

20. Metallica Suit against Napster
 Metallica discovered that a demo of their song ‘I
Disappear’ had been circulating across the
Napster network, even before it was released.
This eventually led to the song being played on
several radio stations across America, and also
brought to Metallica’s attention, was that their
entire back catalogue of studio material was also
available. The band responded in 2000 by filing a
lawsuit against Napster.
Napster Bad video

21. Napster shuts down
 In November 1999, the RIAA filed suit against
Napster for copyright infringement.
 The RIAA’s suit was successful and Napster had to
close down in July 2001.
 By 2001, Napster had 26.4 Million users.
 British icons Radiohead alluded to Napster as helping
their album “Kid A” debut at number 1 in America on
the Billboard charts its debut week, something the
English rockers had never come close to doing in
America, for they had never even been in the top
twenty.

22. Gnutella Networks
 New P2P client software that did not rely
on a single server.
 Examples: Grokster, Kazaa, LimeWire,
Morpheus, eDonkey and BearShare
 By June 2005, 1.8 million nodes
 By January 2006, 3 million nodes
 MGM filed suit against Grokster in 2003
 Grokster shut down in Nov. 2005.

23. How BitTorrents Work
BitTorrent networks were even
more decentralized than gnutella
networks. Rather than
downloading a file from a single
source server, the BitTorrent
protocol allowed users to join a
"swarm" of hosts to download
and upload from each other
simultaneously.

24. Bit Torrents Explained (continued)
As you are downloading this
Led Zeppelin song, or
whatever you would like to
download, other users can
simultaneously download what
you have completed of the Led
Zeppelin file even if it is not
fully completed. When another
user is downloading a piece of
one of your files, you become
a seeder, essentially the place
where the original file exists, or
the seed. Seeing as this is an
important concept, another
diagram illustrating a user’s
dual nature within each
network is necessary.
Azureus, now called Vuze : Bittorrent Client

25. Recent Actions against BitTorrents
 By 2009, BitTorrent traffic accounted for 43-70
percent of all Internet traffic.
 Comcast throttles BitTorrent traffic on its
network in 2008 (FCC intervenes to stop this).
 October 2010: U.S. District Count judge files an
Injunction against Lime Wire, the company that
operated LimeWire file sharing software.
 November 2010: Dept. of Homeland Security
crackdown on Torrent-Finder.

26. The Pirate Bay and the Pirate
Party
 Founders of The Pirate Bay in
Sweden found guilty of assisting
with the violation of copyrights
and sentenced to serve prison
terms in 2009.
 The Pirate Party was founded in
Sweden in 2006. It has become a
model for the global
International Pirate Movement.
The party’s main goal is to reform
patent and copyright laws.

27. Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreem
(ACTA)
 Supported by the RIAA and the MPAA
 Would exist outside the WTO, WIPO and
the UN
 Begun in 2006
 Secret negotiations criticized
 Agreement signed October 2011 (by US)
and in January 2012 (by EU)
Video by Harold Feld
European protests

28. Three Guiding Questions
 To what extent does the Internet media sector
mimic the long-established patters of
concentrated ownership in the broader print
and broadcast media?
 To what extent has it altered the processes
shaping a central area of media content: news
production and distribution?
 What has been the effect of the phenomenon
of file sharing, the rise of open-source
software, and other intellectual property
disputes? Chadwick, chap. 12, p. 289.

29. Concentration of Control

30. The Big Seven
 General Electric
 Walt Disney
 News Corporation
 TimeWarner
 Viacom
 CBS
 Bertelsmann

31. Media Concentration

32. Film Studio Market Share,
2009

33. Key Scholarly Works on
Media Concentration
 Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly (6th
edn. 2000)
 Eli Noam, Media Ownership and
Concentration in America (2009)
 Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor
Democracy (2000)
 Robert McChesney, The Political
Economy of Media (2008)

34. Dealing with the Global
Digital Divide

35. Okinawa Charter
 G8 agree to it in June-July 2000 at the
Okinawa Summit
 Puts forth principal of inclusion:
 “..everyone everywhere should be enabled to
participate in and no one should be excluded from
the benefits of the global information society.”
 States G8 commitment to bridging the global
digital divide
 Establishes the Digital Opportunity Task Force
(DOTForce)

36. Four Areas of Action for DOTForce in
Okinawa Charter
 Fostering policy, regulatory, and network
readiness
 Improving connectivity, increasing
access, and lowering costs
 Building human capacity
 Encouraging participation in global e-
commerce and other e-Networks

37. 7 DOTForce Teams
 National e-strategies
 Access and connectivity
 Human capacity building
 Entrepreneurship
 ICTs for health
 Local content and applications
 Global policy participation

38. Distinctive Features of DOT Force
 Multi-stakeholder representation
 G8 governments
 Private firms
 Non-profit 0rganizations
 International organizations
 Constitutes a response to criticisms
voiced in Seattle and elsewhere (G8 led
by Japan and Canada in 2000 and 2001)

39. DOT Force Results
 Final report,
Report Card: Digital Opportunities for All,
presented to the G8 in Canada at Kananaskis
summit in June 2002
 Variety of projects with a variety of funding
sources begun (see Appendix II in paper)
 DOT Force formally ceased operations after
the Kananaskis summit
 Hand off to UN ICT Task Force and the
World Summit on the Information Society in
2003

40. World Summit on the
Information Society (WSIS)
Direct follow-on to the DOT Force at
the United Nations Video about
WSIS 2010
in Geneva
Two big meetings
Geneva 2003

41. Internet Governance Forum
 a multi-stakeholder forum for policy
dialogue on issues of Internet
governance. The establishment of the
IGF was formally announced by the
United Nations Secretary-General in July
2006 and it was first convened in October
/November 2006.
Video on cloud computing
at IGF in Vilnius, 2010