Social Media Regulation In African Countries Will Require More Than International Human Rights Law

Infrastructure Moderation

from the isps-and-human-rights dept

There has been a lot of focus on moderation as carried out by platforms—the rules social media companies base their decision on what content remains online. There has however been limited attention on how actors other than social media platforms, in this case governments, seek to regulate these platforms. 

Focusing more on African governments, they carry out this regulation primarily through laws. These laws can be broadly divided into two: direct and indirect regulatory laws. The direct regulatory laws can be seen in countries like Ethiopia and more recently in Nigeria. They are similar to Germany’s Network Enforcement Act and France’s Online Hate Speech Law that directly place responsibilities on platforms and require them to remove online hate speech within a specific time and failure of which attracts heavy sanctions. 

Section 8 of Ethiopia’s Hate Speech and Disinformation Prevention and Suppression Proclamation 1185/2020 provides for various responsibilities for social media platforms and actors. These responsibilities include the suppression and prevention of disinformation and hate speech content by social media platforms and a twenty-four window within which such content must be removed from their platforms. It also provides that they should bring their policies in line with the first two responsibilities. 

The Proclamation further vests the reporting and public awareness responsibilities on the compliance of social media platforms in the Ethiopian Broadcasting Authority—a body empowered by law to regulate broadcasting services. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Ethiopia’s National Human Rights Institution (NHRI), also has responsibilities on public awareness. But it is the Council of Ministers that’s responsible for implementing laws in Ethiopia that may give further guidance on the responsibilities of social media platforms and other private actors.

In Nigeria, the legislative proposal, the Protection from Internet Falsehoods, Manipulation and Other Related Matters bill, is yet to become law. The bill seeks to regulate disinformation and coordinated inauthentic behaviour online. The law is similar to that of Singapore which has been criticised by the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression for the threats it poses to online expression and online rights in general. 

Major criticisms against these laws include how they are opaque and pose threats to online expression. For example, the Ethiopian law defines hate speech broadly and does not include the contextual factors that must be considered in categorising online speech as hateful. With respect to the Nigerian bill, there are no clear oversight, accountability or transparency systems in place to check the government’s unlimited powers to decide what constitutes disinformation. 

The indirect regulatory laws are those used by governments through their telecommunications regulatory agencies to compel Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block social media platforms. This type of regulation requires ISPs to block social media platforms based on public emergencies or national interests. What constitutes these emergencies or interests are vague and in many instances are examples of voices or platforms critical of government policies. 

In January 2021, the Ugandan government ordered ISPs to block Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Signal and Fiber. The order was issued through the communications regulator. The order came a day after Facebook’s announcement that it will close pro-government accounts sharing disinformation. 

In June 2021, the Nigerian government ordered ISPs to block access to Twitter stating that the latter’s activities constituted threats to Nigeria’s corporate existence. However, there have been contrary views that the order was as a result of both remote and immediate causes. The remote cause was the role Twitter played in connecting and rallying publics during the #EndSARS protests against police brutality while the immediate cause was attributed to Twitter’s deletion of President Muhammadu Buhari’s tweet which referred to the country’s civil war, contained veiled threats of violence, and violated Twitter’s abusive policies. 

In May 2021, Ethiopia had just lifted the block on social media platforms in six locations in the country. Routine shutdowns like these have become a thing for African governments and this often occurs during elections or a major political development. 

On a closer look, the cross-cutting challenge posed by both forms of regulation is the lack of accountability and transparency especially on the part of governments on how they enforce these provisions. Social media platforms are also complicit as there is little or no information on the nature of pressure they face from these government actors. 

Alongside the mainstream debates on how to govern social media platforms, it is time to also consider wider forms of regulation especially on how they manifest outside Western systems and the threats such regulation poses to online expression. 

One solution that has been suggested but also severely criticised is the application of international human rights standards to social media regulation. This standard has been argued to be the most preferred because of its customary application across contexts. However, its biggest strength also seems to be its biggest weakness—how does this standard apply in local contexts given the complexity of governing online speech and the myriad of actors involved?

In order to work towards effective solutions, we will need to re-imagine and re-purpose traditional governance roles of not only governments and social media platforms, but also ISPs, civil society, and NHRIs. For example, the unchecked powers of most governments to determine what constitutes online harms must be revisited to ensure that there are judicial reviews and human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) of proposed government social media bans. 

ISPs must also be encouraged to jump into the fray, choose human rights, and not to roll over each time governments make such problematic demands to block social media platforms. For example, they should begin to join other actors like the civil society and the academia to lobby for laws and policies that make judicial reviews and HRIAs requirements before entertaining governments request for blocking of platforms or even content. 

The application of international human rights standards to social media regulation is not where the work stops, but is where it begins. For a start, proximate actors involved in social media regulation like governments, social media platforms, private actors, local and international civil society bodies, and treaty-making bodies like the United Nations and the African Union, NHRIs must come up with a typology of harms as well as actors actively involved in such regulation. In order to ensure that these addresses the challenges posed by these kinds of regulation, the responsibilities of such actors must be anchored on international human rights standards but in such a way that these actors actively communicate and collaborate.

Tomiwa Ilori is currently a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. He also works as a Researcher for the Expression, Information and Digital Rights Unit of the Centre.

Techdirt and EFF are collaborating on this Techdirt Greenhouse discussion. On October 6th from 9am to noon PT, we’ll have many of this series’ authors discussing and debating their pieces in front of a live virtual audience (register to attend here).

Filed Under: africa, content moderation, ethiopia, human rights, isps, nigeria, uganda

The Vital Role Intermediary Protections Play for Infrastructure Providers

Infrastructure Moderation

from the a-necessary-component dept

More than ever, the Internet powers much of our daily life. From staying in touch with friends and family to our work, healthcare, banking, and education, we rely on it and we take for granted that it will always be there.

But the way that the Internet was built and how it functions were never a fait accompli. An obscure statute—Section 230, a law enacted more than twenty-five years ago—is core to the Internet as we know it today. It’s also frequently misunderstood. In recent years, many critics of Big Tech from across the political spectrum point to Section 230 as the enabling force for a litany of harmful online content and abuses, some of whom contend that its abolition would immediately lead to a better Internet. 

In reality, Section 230 provides a wide range of non-Big Tech actors, including Internet intermediaries, limited immunity allowing them to operate without worrying about liability stemming from content created by others. This legal protection catalyzes and supports the growth of an amazing, vast array of innovative companies that make the Internet what it is today.

There has been ample discussion already of the fundamentals of Section 230, some of it right here in the pages of Techdirt, so it would not be useful for me to go through it all once more. I think it is essential first to clearly identify and describe the key elements of what we collectively call “the Internet,” explaining where and how infrastructure companies fit in. before quickly touching on what Section 230 is and debunking 3 pernicious and persistent myths about it. I will close by giving you 6 real examples of activities that are actually protected by Section 230 and demonstrate why this law is so vital.

The Internet and its infrastructure

The Internet as we know it can be broken down into three sectors: the transmission sector, the infrastructure sector, and the content sector. 

• The transmission sector encompasses all the physical telecommunications pipelines used to deliver content to the end user. For example, Verizon and Comcast are companies whose business historically has been primarily in this sector. 

• The infrastructure sector includes small, medium, and large businesses that exist between the telecommunications transmission providers and the companies that create the content. Infrastructure companies do not create content or transmit it directly to end-users. Rather, they provide the “backbone” services that support storage, security, and other operations necessary for reliable and robust global access to the Internet. A data center–where content is stored and then accessed—is a good example of an Internet infrastructure provider, and there are many more. The Internet Infrastructure Coalition, where I am Executive Director, represents the companies that are squarely in this sector, like VPNs, web hosting companies, data centers, domain name providers, and cloud services.

• The content sector is made up of the people and companies that create content–the words, images, and sounds you experience every time you go online. 

The content sector alone is often understood to be “the Internet,” and the transmission sector usually is seen as the hardware powering “the Internet.” However, these two sectors by themselves are not enough to “make the Internet.” The middle segment, which is the infrastructure sector—is an indispensable, if “unseen,” part of the Internet. 

It is easy to understand why. Can you imagine what the business landscape would have looked like during the COVID-19 pandemic without Internet infrastructure companies reliably connecting professionals to proprietary content via VPNs, or storing and displaying content to students worldwide via data centers? We provide critical services that work without the end user ever realizing we exist. Our services are necessary because of the way the Internet and its governance have evolved at home and abroad. 

The members of the i2Coalition are passionate about ensuring that policymakers understand the vital role of the infrastructure provider sector in maintaining a robust, secure, and competitive Internet ecosystem. Our mission focuses on educating legislators and policymakers about the negative, often unintended ripple effects on our members of poorly crafted, overbroad Internet regulations.

Many independent businesses create unique pieces of software that collectively comprise the Internet’s infrastructure. These “many hands” make for increased innovation and a vibrant, interdependent ecosystem that exists within a globally competitive industry. It is one thing to seek regulatory changes appropriately applicable to all Internet players, but it is highly problematic and counterproductive inadvertently to bring the entire market within the scope of a new rule when the true aim of the regulations is a small number of companies in a separate industry. This is particularly misplaced given the vital role the Internet’s infrastructure has played in the economic recovery from the global pandemic.

What is Section 230?

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, enacted in 1996, is the federal law that gives Internet companies protection from liability for user-generated content disseminated on their platforms. 

It is not hyperbole to say that Section 230 is one of the foundational laws upon which the Internet was built. It shaped the Internet by doing something that few regulations do: rather than restricting companies from meeting the statutory definition of an “interactive computer service” it protects them from unfair legal action. The concept of interactive computer service was drafted broadly in the statute to encompass any and all companies that might eventually emerge and be part of the ecosystem of the Internet. 

Since its inception, Section 230 has been instrumental in allowing Internet companies to innovate and moderate content and in helping to promote freedom of expression online. Even more, Section 230 has enabled online businesses to offer products, services, and features that users expect.

Certainly, no law or policy is perfect, and legitimate discussions of improving Internet regulation can be useful. But much of the current harsh and inflammatory rhetoric about Section 230 is sustained by myths rather than an accurate understanding of the full nature of its scope and intent.

The i2Coalition believes it is imperative to call out and address these misperceptions, as the range and number of Section 230 reform proposals pose significant liability risks for all Internet infrastructure service providers. 

3 Myths about Section 230 

The first myth is that 230 was a sweetheart deal in Congress for the largest social media companies. Reality easily topples this myth. Section 230 was enacted in1996, six years before Friendster was launched, and eight years before Facebook debuted. Section 230 had in fact been actively leveraged in beneficial ways by Internet infrastructure companies, libraries, and educational institutions long before our current concept of social media became a policy concern.

A second interconnected myth is that even if it was not built specifically for social media, it is still a set of special rules for Internet companies. The truth is that Section 230’s application goes well beyond “Internet companies.” Indeed, companies in the Internet stack meeting the “interactive computer service” statutory definition are covered by Section 230, but its protections also extend to all online intermediaries, which include libraries, archives, and museums, educational institutions, clubs and civic associations, newspapers, magazines, and many more. 

Subsequently, the third myth usually goes like this: Section 230 is too broad because it provides blanket immunity. In fact, Section 230 was never written to provide unlimited liability protection and has a series of exceptions including for federal criminal law and intellectual property law.

6 Truths about Section 230

How Section 230’s protections support a competitive, efficient, and safer Internet ecosystem rarely gets enough public attention. Here are six truths about how Section 230 helps us as Internet infrastructure intermediaries run successful businesses that serve the needs and interests of our customers and other Internet users: 

• Spam filters: When we implement spam filters, we are setting up systems that make judgments on what content is junk mail and what is legitimate mail. Section 230 protects us from being liable for those judgments.

• Setting up keyword blocklists: One way we ensure our networks stay clean and safe is through the use of blacklists, blocklists, and deny lists, which require content-level decisions that Section 230 empowers us to do.

• Anti-malware software: Malware detection software makes content-level systems changes. We can employ those tools that keep us safe because of Section 230 protections.

• Parental control filters: We touch content when we try to keep sensitive content out of the hands of minors in ways that Section 230 allows us to do.

• Reducing drive space: When we change the configuration of a user’s account, we are leveraging the protections that Section 230 provides.

• Allowing web hosting clients to have web forums: Cloud providers could not take on the liability of allowing forums to exist on their networks without Section 230 protections.

Conclusion

Section 230 protections support everyday, foundational work performed by Internet intermediaries, and especially infrastructure companies, to make the Internet work. Its limited liability provisions allow Internet intermediaries to touch content without being considered the publisher of that content for legitimate reasons that are central to making the Internet reliable, efficient, and safe. 

Taking that protection away from millions of companies and other intermediaries in the infrastructure segment of the Internet to address content moderation concerns stemming from a handful of Big Tech social media platforms would be misguided and overbroad, and unjustifiably inflict significant economic harm on multitudes of other responsible providers in the Internet ecosystem.

Christian Dawson is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) where he is a staunch advocate for Internet freedom as a tool for social and economic growth by fostering the growth and expansion of the Internet economy.

Techdirt and EFF are collaborating on this Techdirt Greenhouse discussion. On October 6th from 9am to noon PT, we’ll have many of this series’ authors discussing and debating their pieces in front of a live virtual audience (register to attend here). On October 7th, we’ll be hosting a smaller workshop focused on coming up with concrete steps we can take to make sure providers, policymakers, and others understand the risks and challenges of infrastructure moderation, and how to respond to those risks.

Filed Under: infrastructure moderation, intermediary liability, internet, section 230

Should Information Flows Be Controlled By The Internet Plumbers?

Infrastructure Moderation

from the let-the-plumbers-focus-on-plumbing dept

Content moderation is a can of worms. For Internet infrastructure intermediaries, it’s a can of worms that they are particularly poorly positioned to tackle. And yet Internet infrastructure elements are increasingly being called on to moderate content—content they may have very little insight into as it passes through their systems. 

The vast majority of all content moderation happens on the “top” layer of the internet—such as social media and websites, places online that are the most visible to an average user. Platforms and applications moderate the content that gets posted on their platforms every day. If a post violates a platform’s terms of service, the post is usually blocked or taken down. If a user continues to post content that violates a platform’s terms, then the user’s account is often suspended. These types of content moderation practices are increasingly understood by average Internet users. 

Less often discussed or understood are the types of services facilitated via actors in the Internet ecosystem that both support and exist under the upper content layers of the Internet. 

Many of these companies host content, supply cloud services, register domain names, provide web security, and many more features of what could be described as the plumbing services of the Internet. But instead of water and sewage, the Internet deals in digital information. In theory, these “infrastructure intermediaries” could moderate content, but for reasons of convention, legitimacy, and practicality they don’t usually do it on purpose. 

However, some notable recent exemptions may be setting precedent.

Amazon Web Services removed Wikileaks from their system in 2010. Cloudflare kicked off the Daily Stormer. An Italian court ordered Cloudflare to remove a copyright infringing site. Amazon suspended hosting for Parler.

What does all this mean? Infrastructure may have the means to perform “content moderation,” but it is critical to consider the effects of this trend to prevent harming the Internet’s underlying architecture.

In principle, Internet service providers, registries, cloud providers and other infrastructure intermediaries should be agnostic to the content which passes over their systems. Their business models have nothing to do with whether one is sending text, audio or video. Instead, they are meant to act as neutral intermediaries, providing a reliable service. In a sense, they operate the plumbing system that delivers the water. While we might engage a plumber to inspect and repair our pumps, do we feel comfortable relying on the plumber to check the quality of the water every minute of every day? Should the plumber be able to shut off water access indefinitely with no oversight? 

Despite this, big companies have made decisions to moderate content that is clearly out of their scope as infrastructure intermediaries. It begs the question: why? Were these actions to uphold some sort of moral authority or primarily on the business grounds of public perception? How comfortable are we with these types of companies “regulating” content in the absence of—or even at the behest of—governmental regulation? 

If these companies add content moderation to their responsibilities, it takes away the time and resources they can dedicate to security, reliability, and new features, some of which may even help fight reasons for wanting to moderate content. And while large companies may have the means, it adds an additional role outside of their original purview or mission that would be costly or unattainable for most startups or smaller companies. 

As pressure mounts from public opinion, regulators, and courts, we should recognize what is happening and properly understand where problems can be best addressed and what problems we don’t know enough about to warrant messing with the plumbing of the Internet just yet. Moreover, we should be wary of any regulation which may turn to infrastructure intermediaries explicitly to moderate content. 

Asking an infrastructure intermediary to moderate content would be like asking the waiter to cook the meal, the pilot to repair the plane, or the police officer to serve as the judge. Even if it were possible, we must ask whether it is truly an acceptable approach. 

The Internet is often referred to as a layered architecture because it is comprised of different types of infrastructure and computer entities. Expecting them to each moderate content indiscriminately would be problematic. Who would they be accountable to? 

A core idea often proposed is that content moderation should occur at the highest available layer, closest to the user. Some even argue that content moderation below this, in the realm of infrastructure, is more problematic because these companies cannot easily moderate a single content item. Infrastructure needs to work at scale, and moderating a single piece of content may mean effectively turning off a water main to fix a dripping faucet. That is, infrastructure companies often have to paint with a broader brush by removing an entire user or an entity’s access to their service. 

These broad strokes of moderation are often deep and wide in their effect, and critics argue they go too far. Losing access to a system is clearly more final than having a single item removed from a system. 

Georgia Evans summarized the problem well, saying “the deeper into the stack a company is situated, the less precise and more extreme their actions against harmful content are.” For this reason, Corinne Cath refers to them as reluctant sheriffs and political gatekeepers. These are important complexities which must be woven into any understanding of deep-layer moderation by Internet infrastructure companies and policymakers. 

The tech community and policy makers must ensure that no policy proposals unintentionally require the plumber’s legal role to include quality assurance and access determination. In the realm of the Internet, certain actors have certain functions and things work in a modular, interoperable way by design. The beauty of the Internet is that no one company or entity must “do it all” to achieve a better Internet. But, we must also ensure that new demands for additional functionality—e.g., moderation—are situated at the right layer and target the party with the expertise and role most likely to do a careful job. 

Policymakers must consider the unintended impacts of content moderation proposals on infrastructure intermediaries. Legislating without due diligence to understand the impact on the unique role of these intermediaries could be detrimental to the success of the Internet, and an increasing portion of the global economy that relies on Internet infrastructure for daily life and work.

Conducting impact assessments prior to regulation is one way to mitigate the risks. The Internet Society created the Internet Impact Assessment Toolkit to help policymakers and communities assess the implications of change—whether those are policy interventions or new technologies. 

Policy changes that impact the different layers of the Internet are inevitable. But we must all ensure that these policies are well crafted and properly scoped to keep the Internet working and successful for everyone. 

Austin Ruckstuhl is a Project & Policy Advisor at the Internet Society where he works on Internet impact assessments, defending encryption and supporting Community Networks as access solutions.

Techdirt and EFF are collaborating on this Techdirt Greenhouse discussion. On October 6th from 9am to noon PT, we’ll have many of this series’ authors discussing and debating their pieces in front of a live virtual audience (register to attend here). On October 7th, we’ll be hosting a smaller workshop focused on coming up with concrete steps we can take to make sure providers, policymakers, and others understand the risks and challenges of infrastructure moderation, and how to respond to those risks.

Filed Under: content moderation, infrastructure, plumbers

Bankers As Content Moderators

Infrastructure Moderation

from the money-rules-everything dept

In August, porn-subscription platform OnlyFans announced that it would no longer permit pornography, blaming pressure from banks. The porn policy was rescinded after a backlash from platform users, but the incident illustrates how a handful of heavily regulated financial service providers can act as meta-moderators by shaping the content policies of platforms that rely on them. 

How did banks acquire such power over OnlyFans? Although people sometimes express themselves for free, they usually demand compensation. Polemicists, scientists, poets, and, yes, pornographers all need a paying audience to put food on their tables. Unless the audience is paying in cash, their money must move through payment processors, banks, and other financial intermediaries. If no payment is processed, no performance will be forthcoming. 

OnlyFans relies on financial intermediaries in several ways. It must be able to accept payments from users, send payments to content creators, and raise capital from investors. Each of these activities requires the services of a bank or payment processor. In an interview with the Financial Times, OnlyFans CEO Tim Stockey pointed to banks’ refusals to process payments to content creators as the pressure behind the proposed policy change.

“We pay over one million creators over $300m every month, and making sure that these funds get to creators involves using the banking sector,” he said, singling out Bank of New York Mellon as having “flagged and rejected” every wire connected to the company, “making it difficult to pay our creators.”

BNY Mellon processes a trillion dollars of transfers a day. At this scale, OnlyFans’ $300 million a month in creator payments could be lost in a rounding error. Like individual users on massive social media platforms, the patronage of any one website or business doesn’t matter to financial intermediaries. Banks often refuse service to the sex industry because of its association with illegal prostitution. In the face of bad press or potential regulatory scrutiny, it is usually easier, and in the long run, cheaper, to simply sever ties with the offending business. 

This leaves an excluded firm like OnlyFans with few options. OnlyFans cannot simply become a payment processor. Financial intermediaries are heavily regulated. OnlyFans is unlikely to clear the regulatory hurdles, and even if it could, compliance with anti-money laundering laws would strip its users of anonymity. 

Financial intermediaries are uniquely positioned to police speech because they are heavily regulated. While Section 230 keeps the costs of starting a speech platform low, banking regulation makes it difficult and expensive to enter the financial services market. There are hundreds of domain registrars, but only a handful of major payment processors. This disparity makes the denial of payment processing one of the most effective levers for controlling speech. 

Banks have the same rights of conscience as other firms, but regulation gives their decisions added weight. Financial intermediaries are in the business of making money, not curating for a particular audience, so they have less incentive to moderate than publishers. However, when financial intermediaries moderate, regulation prevents alternative service providers from entering the market. 

Peer-to-peer payment systems, such as cryptocurrency, offer a solution that circumvents intermediaries entirely. However, cryptocurrency has proven difficult to use as money at scale. OnlyFans was able to grow to its current size through access to the traditional banking system. At this stage, it cannot easily abandon it. OnlyFans would lose many users if it required buyers and sellers to maintain cryptocurrency wallets. The platform’s current investors would likely balk at issuing a token to raise additional capital. Decentralized alternatives are, for the moment, unworkably convoluted. 

While financial intermediaries’ power to moderate is not absolute, they can keep unwanted speech at the fringes of society and prevent it from being very profitable. This is not merely a problem for porn. Many sorts of legal but disfavored speech are vulnerable to financial deplatforming. Gab, a social media platform popular with the alt-right, has been barred from PayPal, Venmo, Square, and Stripe. It eventually found a home with Second Amendment Processing, an alternative payment processor originally created to serve gun stores. 

Commercial banks have faced pressure to cease serving gun stores from both activists and the government in Operation Choke Point. Operation Choke Point sought to discourage banks from serving porn actors, payday lenders, gun merchants, and a host of other “risky” customers. The FDIC threatened banks with “unsatisfactory Community Reinvestment Act ratings, compliance rating downgrades, restitution to consumers, and the pursuit of civil money penalties,” if they failed to follow the government’s risk guidance. Operation Choke Point officially ended in 2017, but it set the tone for banks’ treatment of covered businesses. Because the banking sector is highly regulated, it is very susceptible to informal government pressure—regulators have many ways to interfere with disobedient banks.

In 2011, when Wikileaks published a trove of leaked State Department cables, Senator Joe Lieberman pressured nearly every service Wikileaks used to ban the organization. Wikileaks was deplatformed by its web host, its domain name service, and even its data visualization software provider. Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, and Western Union all prohibited donations to Wikileaks. Wikileaks was able to quickly move to European web hosts and domain name services beyond the reach of Senator Lieberman. But even Swiss bank PostFinance refused Wikileaks’ business. Unlike foreign web hosting and domain registration services, foreign banks are still part of a global financial system for which America largely sets the rules.

Denied access to banking services, Wikileaks became an early adopter of Bitcoin. Simply sending money to a small organization was simple enough that even in 2011, Bitcoin could offer Wikileaks a viable alternative to the traditional financial system. It also probably helped that Wikileaks’ cause was popular with the sort of people already using Bitcoin in 2011.

While cryptocurrency has come a long way in the past decade, adoption is still limited, and alternatives to traditional methods of raising capital are still in their infancy. Bitcoin offered Wikileaks a way out, and some OnlyFans content creators may turn to decentralized alternatives. But as a business, OnlyFans remains at the mercy of the banking industry. Financial intermediaries cannot stamp out disfavored speech, but they can cap the size of platforms that host it. Sitting behind and above the commercial internet, payment processors and banks retain a unique capability to set rules for platforms, and, in turn, platform users.

Will Duffield is a Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute

Techdirt and EFF are collaborating on this Techdirt Greenhouse discussion. On October 6th from 9am to noon PT, we’ll have many of this series’ authors discussing and debating their pieces in front of a live virtual audience (register to attend here). On October 7th, we’ll be hosting a smaller workshop focused on coming up with concrete steps we can take to make sure providers, policymakers, and others understand the risks and challenges of infrastructure moderation, and how to respond to those risks.

Filed Under: banks, content moderation, infrastructure, money, payment processors
Companies: onlyfans, wikileaks

The Inexorable Push For Infrastructure Moderation

Infrastructure Moderation

from the it's-coming-whether-we-like-it-or-not dept

I’m grateful to Techdirt and the EFF for this series. There are so many legitimately difficult issues around content moderation at the application layer—that is, on (and usually by) platforms like Facebook and Twitter. And they can crowd out the problems around the corner that are at least as difficult: those of code and content moderation at the infrastructural level, such as the wholesale platforms (such as Amazon Web Services) that host websites; domain name registries that support the use of domain names; and app stores from Apple and Google that largely determine what applications users can choose to run.

To be sure, the line between infrastructure and application can be blurry. For example, text messaging via SMS is offered as a bundled service by providers of mobile phone services like AT&T and Verizon. These services are usually thought of as infrastructural—while users of iPhones experience iMessage as an application that supplants SMS for inter-iOS text exchanges with a fall back to SMS for participants who don’t use iOS.

Perhaps the distinction lies as much in the dominance of a service as it does in its position within a layered stack. Informally surveying students in courses on digital governance, I’ve found increasing appetite for content moderation by Facebook of users’ news feeds and within Facebook groups—say to remove blatant election disinformation such as asserting the polls will be available on the wrong day, to depress turnout—while largely refusing to countenance moderation by telecommunications companies if the same disinformation were sent by SMS. Facebook Messenger remains a tossup.

However fuzzy the definitions, infrastructural moderation is a natural follow-on to application-level moderation. Historically there hasn’t been much pressure for infrastructural moderation given that many critics and companies traditionally saw “mere” application-layer moderation as undesirable—or, at least, as a purely private matter for whoever runs the application to decide upon within its terms of service for its users. 

Part of that long-term reluctance for public authorities to pressure companies like Facebook for greater moderation has been a solicitude for how difficult it is to judge and deal with flows of user-submitted content at scale. When regulators thought they were choosing between a moderation requirement that causes a company to shut down its services, or abstention that allowed various harms to accrue, many opted for the second. 

For example, the “notice-and-takedown” provisions around the U.S.’ 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act—which have encouraged content aggregators like YouTube to take down allegedly copyright infringing videos and music after a claim has been lodged—are, for all the instances of wrongly-removed content, comparatively light touch. Major services eventually figured out that they could offer claimants a “monetize” button, so that content could stay up and some ad revenue from it could be directed to presumed copyright holders rather than, say, to whoever uploaded the video.

And, of course, the now widely-debated Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, of the same vintage as the DMCA, flatly foreclosed many avenues of potential legal liability for platforms for illegal content other than copyrighted material, such as defamatory statements offered up by some users about other users.

As the Internet entered the mainstream, aside from the acceptance of content moderation at scale as difficult, and the corresponding reluctance to impinge upon platforms’ businesses, there was a wide embrace of First Amendment values as articulated in Supreme Court jurisprudence of the 1960s and 70s. Simplifying a little, this view allows that, yes, there could be lots of bad speech, but it’s both difficult and dangerous to entrust government to sift out the bad from the good, and the general solution to bad speech is more speech. So when it came to online speech, a marketplace-of-ideas-grounded argument I call the “rights” framework dominated the landscape.

That framework has greatly eroded in the public consciousness since its use to minimize Internet companies’ liabilities in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It’s been eclipsed by what I call the “public health” framework. I used the label before it became a little too on the nose amidst a global pandemic, but the past eighteen months’ exigencies are a good example of this new framework. Rights to, say, bodily integrity, so hallowed as to allow people to deny the donation of their bodily organs when they die to save others’ lives, yield to a more open balancing test when it’s so clear that a “right” to avoid wearing a mask, or to take a vaccination, can have clear knock-on effects on others’ health.

In the Internet context, there’s been a recognition of the harms that flow from untrammeled speech—and the viral amplification of the same—made possible at scale by modern social media. 

It was, in retrospect, easy for the Supreme Court to extol the grim speech-affirming virtue of allowing hateful placards to be displayed on public sidewalks adjacent to a private funeral (as the Westboro Baptist Church has been known to do), or anonymous pamphlets to be distributed on a town common or at a public meeting, despite laws to the contrary. 

But the sheer volume and cacophony of speech from unknown sources that bear little risk of enforcement against them even if they should cross a line, challenges those easy cases. Whether it’s misinformation, for which the volume and scope can be so great as to have people either be persuaded by junk or, worse, wrongly skeptical of every single source they encounter, or harassment and abuse that silences the voices of others, it’s difficult to say that the marketplace of ideas is outing only the most compelling ones.

With a public health newly ascendant for moderation at the application layer, we see new efforts by platform operators to tighten up their terms of service if only on paper, choosing to forbid more speech over time. That includes speech that, if the government were to pursue it, would be protected by the First Amendment (a lot of, say, misinformation about COVID and vaccines would fit this category of “lawful but awful”). 

Not coincidentally, regulators have a new appetite for regulation, whether because they’re convinced that moderation at scale, with the help of machine learning tools and armies of moderators, is more possible than before, or that there’s a genuine shift in values or their application that militates towards interventionism in the name of public health, literally or metaphorically.

Once the value or necessity of moderation is accepted at the application layer, the inevitable leakiness of it will push the same kinds of decisions onto providers of infrastructure. One form of leakiness is that there will be social media upstarts who try to differentiate their services on the basis of moderating less, such as Parler. That, in turn, confronted Apple and Google, operating their respective app stores for iOS and Android, to consider whether to deny Parler access to those stores unless it committed to achieve minimum content moderation standards. The companies indeed removed the Parler app from their stores, while Amazon, which offers wholesale hosting services for many otherwise-unrelated web sites and online services, suspended its hosting of Parler in the wake of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.

Another form of leakiness of moderation is within applications themselves, as the line between publicly-available and private content becomes more blurred. Facebook aims to apply its terms of service not only to public posts, but also to those within private groups. To enforce its rules against the latter, Facebook either must peek at what’s going on within them—perhaps only through automated means—or field reports of rule violations from members of the groups themselves.

Beyond private groups are services shaped to appear more as private group messaging than as social networks at all. Whether Facebook’s own Messenger, with new options for encryption, or through other apps such as Telegram, Facebook’s Whatsapp, or the open-source Signal, there’s the prospect that strangers sharing a cause can meet one another on a social network and then migrate to large private messaging groups whose infrastructure is encrypted. 

Indeed, there’s nothing stopping people from choosing to gather and have a conversation within World of Warcraft, merely admiring the view of the game’s countryside as they chat about sports, politics, or alleged terrorist schemes. A Google Doc could serve the same function, if with less of a scenic backdrop. At that point content moderation either must be done through exceptions to any encryption that’s offered—so-called backdoors—or through bot-driven client-side analysis of what people are posting before it moves from, say, their smartphones onto the network.

That’s a rough description of what Apple has been proposing to do in order to monitor users’ private iCloud accounts for illegal images of child sexual abuse, using a combination of privileged acccess to data from the phone and data of existing abusive images collected by child protection agencies to ascertain matches. Apple has suspended plans to implement this scanning after an outcry from some members of the technical and civil liberties communities. Some of that pushback has been around implementation details and worries about misidentification of lawful content, and Apple has offered rejoinders to those worries. 

But more fundamentally, the civil liberties worry is that this form of scanning, once a commonplace for a narrow and compelling purpose, will find new purposes, perhaps against political dissidents, whose speech—and apps—can readily be deemed illegal by a government that does not embrace the rule of law. This happened recently when the Russian government prevailed on both Apple and Google to remove an app by opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s movement designed to encourage strategic voting against the ruling party.

We’ve seen worries about scope creep around the formation and development of ICANN, a non-profit that manages the allocation of certain Internet-wide identifiers, such as top-level domains like .com and .org. Through its ability to choose who operates domain registries like those, ICANN can require such registries to in turn compel domain name registrants to accept a dispute resolution process if someone else makes a trademark-like claim against a registration (that’s how, early on, the holder of madonna.com was dispossessed of the name after a complaint by Madonna). 

The logical concern was that the ability for registries to yank domain names under pressure from regulators would go beyond trademark-like disputes over the names themselves, and into the activities and content of the sites and services those names point to. For the most part that hasn’t happened—at least not through ICANN. Hence the still surprisingly common operation of domains that operate command-and-control networks for botnets or host copyright-infringing materials.

Nonetheless, if content moderation is important to do, the fact is that it will be difficult to keep it to the application layer alone. And today there is more of a sense that there isn’t such a thing as the neutral provision of services. Before, makers of products ranging from guns to VCRs offered arguments like those of early Internet platforms: to have them liable for what their customers do would put them out of business. They disclaimed responsibility for the use of their products for physical assault or copyright infringement respectively since those took place long after they left the makers’ factories and thus control, and there weren’t plausible ways to shape the technologies themselves at the factory to carve away future bad uses while preserving the good ones.

As the Internet has allowed products to become services, constantly checking in with and being adapted by their makers, technology vendors don’t say goodbye to their work when it leaves a factory. Instead they are offering it anew every time people use it. For those with a public health perspective, the ability of vendors to monitor and shape their services continuously ought at times to be used for harm reduction in the world, especially when those harms are said to be uniquely made possible by the services themselves.

Consider a 2021 Texas law allowing anyone to sue anyone else for at least $10,000 for “aiding” in the provision of most abortions. An organization called Texas Right to Life created a web site soliciting “whistleblowers” to submit personal information of anyone thought to be a suitable target under the new law—a form of doxxing. The site was originally hosted by GoDaddy, which pulled the plug on the basis that it collected information about people without their consent.

Now consider the loose group of people calling themselves Sedition Hunters, attempting to identify rioters at the Capitol on January 6th. They too have a web site linking out to their work. Should they solicit tips from the public—which at the moment they don’t do—and should their site host treat them similarly?

Those identifying with a rights framework might tend to think that in both instances the sites should stay up. Those worrying about private doxxing of any kind might think they should be taken down. And others might draw distinctions between a site facilitating application of a law that, without a future reversal by the Supreme Court, is clearly unconstitutional, and those uniting to present authorities with possible instances of wrongdoing for further investigation.

As the public health framework continues to gain legitimacy, and the ability of platforms to intervene in content at scale grows, blanket invocations of rights will not alone blunt the case for content moderation. And the novelty of regulating at the infrastructural level will not long hold back the pressures that will follow there, especially as application-layer interventions begin to show their limits. Following in the model of Facebook’s move towards encryption, there could come to be infrastructural services that are offered in a distributed or anonymized fashion to avoid the possibility of recruitment for regulation. But as hard as these problems are, they seem best solved through reflective consensus rather than technical fiat in either direction.

Jonathan Zittrain is George Bemis Professor of Law and Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, and a co-founder of its Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

Techdirt and EFF are collaborating on this Techdirt Greenhouse discussion. On October 6th from 9am to noon PT, we’ll have many of this series’ authors discussing and debating their pieces in front of a live virtual audience (register to attend here). On October 7th, we’ll be hosting a smaller workshop focused on coming up with concrete steps we can take to make sure providers, policymakers, and others understand the risks and challenges of infrastructure moderation, and how to respond to those risks.

Filed Under: balancing test, content moderation, governance, infrastructure, public health, rights framework, takedowns

Content Moderation Beyond Platforms: A Rubric

Infrastructure Moderation

from the guiding-questions dept

For decades, EFF and others have been documenting the monumental failures of content moderation at the platform level—inconsistent policies, inconsistently applied, with dangerous consequences for online expression and access to information. Yet despite mounting evidence that those consequences are inevitable, service providers at other levels are increasingly choosing to follow suit.

The full infrastructure of the internet, or the “full stack,” is made up of a range of entities, from consumer-facing platforms like Facebook or Pinterest, to ISPs like Comcast or AT&T. Somewhere in the middle are a wide array of intermediaries, such as upstream hosts like Amazon Web Services (AWS), domain name registrars, certificate authorities (such as Let’s Encrypt), content delivery networks (CDNs), payment processors, and email services.

For most of us, most of the stack is invisible. We send email, tweet, post, upload photos and read blog posts without thinking about all the services that help get content from the original creator onto the internet and in front of users’ eyeballs all over the world. We may think about our ISP when it gets slow or breaks, but day-to-day, most of us don’t think about intermediaries like AWS at all—until AWS decides to deny service to speech it doesn’t like, as it did with the social media site Parler, and that decision gets press attention.

Invisible or not, these intermediaries are potential speech “chokepoints” and their choices can significantly influence the future of online expression. Simply put, platform-level moderation is broken and infrastructure-level moderation is likely to be worse. That said, the pitfalls and risks for free expression and privacy may play out differently depending on what kind of provider is doing the moderating. To help companies, policymakers and users think through the relative dangers of infrastructure moderation at various levels of the stack, here’s a set of guiding questions.

1. Is meaningful transparency, notice, and appeal possible? Given the inevitability of mistakes, human rights standards demand that service providers notify users that their speech has been, or will be, taken offline, and offer users an opportunity to seek redress. Unfortunately, many services do not have a direct relationship with either the speaker or the audience for the expression at issue, making all of these steps challenging. But without them, users will be held not only to their host’s terms and conditions but also those of every service in the chain from speaker to audience, even though they may not know what those services are or how to contact them. Given the potential consequences of violations, and the difficulty of navigating the appeals processes of previously invisible services (assuming such a process even exists), many users will simply avoid sharing controversial opinions altogether. Relatedly, where a service provider has no relationship to the speaker or audience, takedowns will be much easier and cheaper than a nuanced analysis of a given user’s speech.
2. Do viable competitive alternatives exist? One of the reasons net neutrality rules for ISPs are necessary is that users have so few options for high-quality internet access. If your ISP decides to shut down your account based on your expression (or that of someone else using the account), in much of the world, including the U.S., you can’t go to another provider. At other layers of the stack, such as the domain name system, there are multiple providers from which to choose, so a speaker who has their domain name frozen can take their website elsewhere. But the existing of alternatives alone is not enough; answering this question also requires evaluating the costs of switching and whether it calls for technical savvy beyond the skill set of most users.
3. Is it technologically possible for the service to tailor its moderation practices to target only the specific offensive expression? At the infrastructure level, many services cannot target their response with the necessary precision human rights standards demand. Twitter can block specific tweets; Amazon Web Services can only deny service to an entire site, which means they inevitably affect far more than the objectionable speech that motivated the action. We can take a lesson here from the copyright context, where we have seen domain name registrars and hosting providers shut down entire sites in response to infringement notices targeting a single document. It may be possible for some services to communicate directly with customers where they are concerned about a specific piece of content, and request that it be taken down. But if that request is rejected, the service has only the blunt instrument of complete removal at its disposal. 
4. Is moderation an effective remedy? The U.S. experience with online sex trafficking teaches that removing distasteful speech may not have the hoped-for impact. In 2017, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation special agent Russ Winkler explained that online platforms were the most important tool in his arsenal for catching sex traffickers. Today, legislation designed to prevent the use of online platforms for sex trafficking has made it harder for law enforcement to find traffickers. Indeed, several law enforcement agencies report that without these platforms, their work finding and arresting traffickers has hit a wall.
5. Will collateral damage, such as the stifling of lawful expression, disproportionally affect less powerful groups? Moderation choices may reflect and reinforce bias against marginalized communities. Take, for example, Facebook’s decision, in the midst of the #MeToo movement’s rise, that the statement “men are trash” constitutes hateful speech. Or Twitter’s decision to use harassment provisions to shut down the verified account of a prominent Egyptian anti-torture activist. Or the content moderation decisions that have prevented women of color from sharing the harassment they receive with their friends and followers. Or the decision by Twitter to mark tweets containing the word “queer” as offensive, regardless of context. As with the competition inquiry, this analysis should consider whether the impacted speakers and audiences will have the ability to respond and/or find effective alternative venues.
6. Is there a user and speech friendly alternative to central moderation? Could there be? One of the key problems of content moderation at the social media level is that the moderator substitutes its policy preferences for those of its users. When infrastructure providers enter the game, with generally less accountability, users have even less ability to make their own choices about their own internet experience. If there are tools that allow users themselves to express and implement their own preferences, infrastructure providers should return to the business of servicing their customers — and policymakers have a weaker argument for imposing new requirements.
7. Will governments seek to hijack any moderation pathway? We should be wary of moderation practices that will provide state and state-sponsored actors with additional tools for controlling public dialogue. Once processes and tools to takedown expression are developed or expanded, companies can expect a flood of demands to apply them to other speech. At the platform level, state and state-sponsored actors have weaponized flagging tools to silence dissent. In the U.S., the First Amendment and the safe harbor of Section 230 largely prevent moderation requirements. But policymakers have started to chip away at Section 230, and we expect to see more efforts along those lines. In other countries, such as Canada, the U.K., Turkey and Germany, policymakers are contemplating or have adopted draconian takedown rules for platforms and would doubtless like to extend them further. 

Companies should ask all of these questions when they are considering whether to moderate content (in general or as a specific instance). And policymakers should ask them before they either demand or prohibit content moderation at the infrastructure level. If more than two decades of social media content moderation has taught us anything, it is that we cannot “tech” our way out of political and social problems. Social media companies have tried and failed to do so; infrastructure companies should refuse to replicate those failures—beginning with thinking through the consequences in advance, deciding whether they can mitigate them and, if not, whether they should simply stay out of it.

Corynne McSherry is the Legal Director at EFF, specializing in copyright, intermediary liability, open access, and free expression issues.

Techdirt and EFF are collaborating on this Techdirt Greenhouse discussion. On October 6th from 9am to noon PT, we’ll have many of this series’ authors discussing and debating their pieces in front of a live virtual audience (register to attend here). On October 7th, we’ll be hosting a smaller workshop focused on coming up with concrete steps we can take to make sure providers, policymakers, and others understand the risks and challenges of infrastructure moderation, and how to respond to those risks.

Filed Under: collateral damage, competition, content moderation, free speech, infrastructure, privacy, transparency

Welcome To The New Techdirt Greenhouse Panel: Content Moderation At The Infrastructure Level

Infrastructure Moderation

from the it's-not-the-same dept

Today we’re launching our latest Techdirt Tech Policy Greenhouse discussion in which we bring in a bunch of actual experts to discuss and debate complex and nuanced subjects regarding tech policy — this time about content moderation at the infrastructure layer. We’re excited that we’re doing it in partnership with our friends over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)! Also, we’re going to conclude this new series of posts on Techdirt with two virtual events. On October 6th from 9am to noon PT, we’ll have many of this series’ authors discussing and debating their pieces in front of a live (though virtual!) audience (register to attend here). The following day, on October 7th, EFF and Techdirt will be hosting a smaller workshop event to take some of what we learned and discussed the previous day, and see if we can come up with more concrete steps and approaches to make sure providers, policymakers, and others understand the risks and challenges of infrastructure moderation, and how to respond to those risks.

As you may recall, in the past we’ve had such Greenhouse discussions on broadband in the age of COVID, content moderation, and privacy.

The latest edition will again dip into the content moderation well, but will focus on a part of the discussion that is all too often forgotten (leading to potentially damaging consequences). Specifically, we’ll be talking about content moderation not at the “edge” of the internet (i.e., the user-facing services like Google, Facebook, and Twitter), but at the infrastructure layers deeper in the stack. This could include content moderation via hosting companies, domain registrars, ad networks, payment processors, app stores, and much, much more. Since so much of the discussion (and anger) around content moderation focuses on those edge providers that everyone is familiar with, it seems that nearly all proposals tend to just focus on correcting perceived content moderation ills for end users. But, at the same time, it seems that most of the policy proposals we see would apply equally (if not more so) to infrastructure providers.

Some of this is by design.

The “original” content moderation debate on the internet revolved around copyright — with the record labels (mainly) demanding ever more draconian regulations and standards to force content offline. However, as the technology evolved, we increasingly saw the legacy entertainment companies recognize that they could get more bang for the buck by targeting infrastructure intermediaries. They started to threaten ad networks and domain registrars for infringement that happened on websites that neither of those entities had power over.

Indeed, the biggest concern with moving moderation decisions down the stack is that most infrastructure players only have a sledge hammer to deal with these questions, rather than a scalpel. They can’t remove just the “bad” content. They can only remove (or, at least threaten to remove) all service, which can wreak havoc on a site. And we’ve seen how that pressure can be used to extreme ends. People focus on more recent examples, but over a decade ago, caving to pressure from US government officials, Amazon and others dumped Wikileaks.

That said, the infrastructure companies are still private entities, and do (for the most part, with a few exceptions) retain the power to run their businesses how they wish — including the right to refuse service to certain customers. And there are reasons why infrastructure providers may not just want, but actually need, the ability to do some amount of moderation — for example ISPs have good reason to run spam filters for their customers, and there have been cases where serving companies have (understandably) wanted to pull down malware bot networks using their infrastructure.

In other words, there are a lot of nuances here, and plenty to discuss and debate and explore better paths forward.

Finally, we should note that, beyond partnering with EFF for this project, we are also supported by the grant we received last year from the Knight Foundation to explore this very topic, as well as sponsorships from Cloudflare, Internet Society, and Golden Frog.

Filed Under: advertising, content moderation, dns, greenhouse, infrastructure, infrastructure moderation, paymets

That's A Wrap: Techdirt Greenhouse, Broadband In The Covid Era

Broadband & COVID

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Over the last few months a wide variety of activists, experts, engineers, and academics provided their insights into broadband access (or a lack thereof) in the COVID era. We’d like to thank all of the participants for their insights during a difficult and complicated time, and hope readers gleaned something useful from the exercise. You can peruse all of the contributions here if you missed any of them during the busy holiday season.

Our first two Techdirt Greenhouse panels, focusing on content moderation and privacy, saw no shortage of elaborate solutions for extremely complicated subjects. While broadband access can certainly be complicated (especially when it comes to policy, legislation, and network management), in many ways it’s the simplest subject we’ve tackled so far.

42 million Americans still lack access to any broadband whatsoever, double official FCC estimates. Millions more can’t afford access (given US broadband pricing is some of the highest in the developed world). The primary reason why: 83 million Americans can only obtain broadband access through a single provider (aka a monopoly). Hand-in-hand with regulatory capture, the result has been decades of high prices, slow speeds, stifled competitive potential, and abysmal customer service.

The reason isn’t that complicated: We’ve let natural telecom monopolies dominate the market and (with the occasional exception) dictate state and federal policy. These politically-powerful monopolies have then cultivated an environment of apathy or outright denial. And instead of driving more, creative solutions to market, the US solution to this problem has (again with the occasional exception) been to downplay or deny there’s a problem, or to use flawed data and sloppy policy to throw millions in subsidies at giant companies for networks routinely left half deployed. Often with zero penalty.

The one-two punch of monopolized access and apathetic/corrupt regulators/lawmakers has calcified a problem that should have been solved a decade ago. That’s left a discordant chorus of folks, usually on the state or local level, scrambling to fix the problem using limited funds and bad data, usually without adequate federal support. All while being undermined at every step of the way by powerful entrenched monopolies whose top priority is to deny there’s a problem, unfairly demonize creative solutions to said nonexistent problem, and keep the broken status quo intact.

Peggy Schaffer, in charge of expanding broadband access in Maine, discussed how federal data is so lacking, states have been forced to crowdsource their own home-grown solution simply to identify US broadband gaps. As Pew’s Anna Read confirmed, there’s a lot the federal government can learn from watching state efforts to bridge this persistent digital divide.

For years the internet saw ample debates over whether broadband was a luxury or an essential utility; the latter generally opposed by industry because it creates greater urgency to actually address monopolization. With COVID making it clear broadband is essential for survival, opportunity, health care, education, and employment, experts like Consumer Reports’ Jonathan Schwantes argue that it’s time to treat broadband as the essential service it is.

Experts like Gigi Sohn say the federal response during the COVID era has been a profound disappointment. And, as Francella Ochillo and Andrea Kelemen noted, the most vulnerable among us are usually the first punished by our collective failure.

Fortunately, this is all fixable, and COVID could finally provide the impetus to break through decades of policy dysfunction.

Most of our experts agree the first step is better data and better maps to accurately identify the scope of the problem (Blair Levin), something we’ve only just begun with the recent passage of the DATA Act. From there, the solution involves supporting local, creative efforts to drive more competition to market, whether that comes in the form of innovative mesh networks (Terique Boyce), or local community broadband builds (Christopher Mitchell). It also involves giving regulators at the FCC the authority and resources to actually do their jobs (Dana Floberg), and applying antitrust enforcement consistently.

Again, the solutions are difficult but not impossible, though they all start with challenging entrenched, politically-powerful monopolies, which has never been America’s strong suit. But while COVID has taken much from us, our COVID-era educational failures (Brandon Forester, Deb Socia, and Geoff Millener) could finally provide the motivation we need to take America’s broadband affordability and availability problem seriously.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, covid, digital divide

Could The Digital Divide Unite Us?

Broadband & COVID

from the the-game-has-changed dept

The digital divide is not only a rural problem. The digital divide is a problem that unites us across rural, urban, suburban and tribal lands. It is a bipartisan problem. The solution must be multi-pronged: affordable ubiquitous broadband with the appropriate devices and trusted digital literacy and technical support.

Last March, as the pandemic forced all kinds of essential activities online, communities across the U.S. woke to the reality that large numbers of their residents couldn’t access the internet because they lacked the necessary broadband connections, equipment and/or skills. Schoolchildren and college students couldn’t participate in online classes; patients with chronic illnesses couldn’t visit their doctors via telemedicine; seniors living alone were cut off from service programs, faith, and even family support. Companies found that many employees lacked the connectivity to work where they lived. Whole families found themselves in library parking lots, using Wi-Fi for online tasks they couldn’t perform at home.

Suddenly there was a widespread realization that the digital divide is everywhere — not just out in the country, but in the biggest cities and many of their suburbs as well.

Yes, there were (and are) many families in rural communities struggling to deal with online learning, work and social life because the available internet services where they live are far too slow to support them. But there are also millions of American households whose communities have excellent access to high-speed broadband service from one, two or three providers — but at a monthly cost that those households just can’t afford. Many of those same households don’t have computers — for the same reason, i.e. affordability — or have never had a chance to develop the basic digital skills to use the technology.  

Enter the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, the $2.3 trillion COVID relief and government funding package, which includes several provisions that address broadband deployment and digital inclusion, particularly broadband affordability. The new law allocates $3.2 billion for an Emergency Broadband Benefit program, which will reimburse internet service providers for providing broadband service and devices to low-income households. Additionally, the Act lists digital inclusion and broadband adoption as activities eligible for funding within “Tribal Connectivity” and the “Office of Minority Broadband Initiatives.”

While there are still many questions as to how the broadband sections will be implemented, one thing is certain – we now have Congressional recognition that the affordability barrier to digital equity must be addressed.

For years, the conversation and advocacy around the digital divide was itself divided. In part, due to the inconsistency of what is meant by “digital divide.” According to the 2019 U.S. Census, 36 million households do not subscribe to a wireline broadband service. 26 million of these households are in urban areas. 10 million are in rural areas. The lower a household’s income, the less likely they are to consistently subscribe to a wireline broadband service.

In addition to rural deployment solutions, we must:

• establish a permanent broadband benefit

• increase access to affordable computers

• increase access to digital literacy and technical support

• improve broadband mapping including residential cost data, and

• support local/state digital inclusion planning

It has been over a decade since the federal government has supported broadband access and use for disadvantaged communities. The current emergency support for digital inclusion is temporary. This pandemic has resulted in local innovative and collaborative solutions addressing the digital divide. Now is the time for innovation and collaboration at the federal level.

Might the digital divide unite us?

Angela Siefer is the Executive Director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. She has been working in the field we now call digital inclusion since 1997. She has helped physically set up computer labs in underserved areas, managed broadband conferences, conducted research, managed digital inclusion programs, assisted with the Department of Commerce’s Broadband Adoption Toolkit, testified before Congress and more. Government Technology Magazine named Angela one of their Top 25 Doers, Dreams, and Drivers of 2019.

Bill Callahan is the Research and Policy Advisor for the National Digital Inclusion Alliance while also directing the Cleveland-based Connect Your Community. He has been active in local and national efforts to promote digital empowerment for low income people and communities since 1996, when he organized Cleveland’s first neighborhood technology center and home computer ownership program.

Sean Davis is a graduate of George Washington Law and Manager of Research and Policy for the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. Prior to joining NDIA, Sean worked with the Wikimedia Foundation where he researched content moderation laws and the national Consumers League where he advocated for a federal privacy bill.

Filed Under: broadband, digital divide