Authors: Jeremy Rifkin
The protests led to over 600 arrests and marked a turning point in the headlong rush to globalization. Now, there was an identifiable public opposition.
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The street demonstrations were notable in another respect. Many of the activists were computer hackers who helped organize the logistics of the demonstrations. This was one of the first protests to use e-mail, chat rooms, live Internet broadcasts, virtual sit-ins, and cell phones to coordinate the mobilization leading up to the event. The synchronization of logistics using IT and Internet media during the street demonstrations was a preview of what would unfold on the streets of Cairo and other Middle Eastern hot spots 12 years later in the Arab Spring.
The hackers had good reason to join with the environmentalists, trade unionists, and fair-trade activists. A year earlier, the U.S. Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
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The act extended copyright protection to an author’s work for 70 years after his or her death. That same year, the U.S. Senate ratified and Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), implementing two treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
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The treaties and national law made it illegal to use technologies and other means to circumvent practices that secure copyright protection. These practices are referred to as digital rights management (DRM).
The Free Culture Movement arose out of these two landmark pieces of legislation, whose sole purpose was to prevent the free distribution of copyrighted material over the Internet. In 1999 Lessig challenged the Sonny Bono Act, taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
The protestors who came together in Seattle were clear about what they opposed—the privatization of human knowledge and Earth’s resources. The anti globalization banner cry was a repudiation of an existing paradigm. But the question it raised internally and to the general public was, what are they for? If not for globalization via privatization, what? It was around this time that the idea of reversing enclosures and reinstating the Commons across every facet of human life ascended from an academic whisper to a public roar. There were calls for opening up the public square Commons, the land Commons, the knowledge Commons,
the virtual Commons, the energy Commons, the electromagnetic spectrum Commons, the Communications Commons, the ocean Commons, the fresh water Commons, the atmosphere Commons, the nonprofit Commons, and the biosphere Commons. Virtually every Commons that had been enclosed, privatized, and commodified in the market during the 200-year reign of capitalism suddenly came under scrutiny and review. NGOs were formed and initiatives were launched to champion the reopening of the many Commons that embed the human race in the biosphere. Globalization had met its nemesis in the form of a diverse movement committed to reversing the great enclosures and reestablishing the global Commons.
Lord Harold Samuel, a British real estate magnate, once remarked that “there are three things that matter in property: location, location, location.” This now well-worn cliché is particularly apt when it comes to understanding the wave of spontaneous public demonstrations over the past 14 years that have snaked their way around the world since activists first took to the streets in Seattle. Mass demonstrations have erupted—
seemingly out of nowhere—toppling governments and triggering social upheavals on every continent. Although the protests speak to a range of social issues, they share a common profile. The demonstrations are more like swarms than orchestrated protests, are largely leaderless, and are informal and networked in nature. In every case, the participants flood into the central squares of the world’s great cities, where they set up camp, confront the powers that be, and create an alternative community designed to celebrate the social Commons.
Jay Walljasper, an author and early leader in the global movement to reclaim the public Commons, observed that while the media was devoting a great deal of attention to young people’s use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media on the virtual Commons to organize the protests across the Middle East in 2011, “the importance of a much older form of commons in these revolts has earned scant attention—the public spaces where citizens rally to voice their discontent, show their power and ultimately articulate a new vision for their homelands.”
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Walljasper makes the important point “that the exercise of democracy depends on having a literal commons where people can gather as citizens—a square, main street, park, or other public space that is open to all.”
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The activists support many agendas but are united around a shared symbolism—their determination to reclaim the public square and, by so doing, reopen the many other Commons that have been expropriated, commodified, politicized, and enclosed by special interests and a privileged minority. The alienated youth at Tahrir Square in the Arab Spring, the Occupiers on Wall Street, the demonstrators at Gezi Park in Istanbul, and the angry underclass on the streets of São Paulo are on the front line of an unfolding cultural phenomenon whose underlying theme centers around countering enclosures in all their various forms and establishing a
transparent, nonhierarchical, and collaborative culture. These are the new commoners.
The late Jonathan Rowe, one of the visionaries of the new networked Commons, best explained the idea of what a Commons is all about. He wrote:
To say “the commons” is to evoke a puzzled pause. . . . Yet the commons is more basic than both government and market. It is the vast realm that is the shared heritage of all of us that we typically use without toll or price. The atmosphere and oceans, languages and cultures, the stores of human knowledge and wisdom, the informal support systems of community, the peace and quiet that we crave, the genetic building blocks of life—these are all aspects of the commons.
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I am particularly fond of a quip by a naturalist, Mike Bergan, about the nature of a Commons that goes to the heart of the current struggle between the capitalists and the collaboratists. He warned,
Don’t trust anyone who wants to take something that we all share and profit from equally and give it to someone else to profit from exclusively.
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Charlotte Hess, a protégé of the late Elinor Ostrom and associate dean at the Bird Library at Syracuse University, has cataloged the many branches of the Commons tree. She is quick to differentiate the “new Commons” from the old, noting the similarities, while highlighting the differences.
The Commons, old and new, define the way human beings manage Earth’s bounty. To say something is a Commons is to mean that it is held in common and collectively managed. The term
Commons
describes a form of governance. Hess reminds us that something can’t become a Commons until the technological means are available to manage it. Forager/hunters enjoyed the bounty of nature, but did not manage it. The Commons begins with agriculture and pastoralism. The oceans didn’t become a Commons until the invention of vessels to travel on them.
The modern era brought with it a spate of new technologies that allowed for the management of new parts of Earth’s biosphere that were previously not subject to supervision. The printed word, the discovery of electricity (and later the electromagnetic spectrum), flight in the atmosphere, and the discovery of the gene and nanotechnology all opened up previously unknown or unexplored realms for management. These new realms can be managed by government, by the private marketplace, or by way of a Commons.
As described in chapter 3, the communication/energy matrices of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions required huge influxes of financial capital and relied on vertically integrated enterprises and centralized command and control mechanisms to achieve economies of scale, all of which
put the economy in the lap of capitalism, aided by government. The communication/energy matrix of the Third Industrial Revolution—the Internet of Things—is facilitated more by social capital than by market capital, scales laterally, and is organized in a distributed and collaborative fashion, making Commons management with government engagement the better governing model.
Yochai Benkler says that while an inordinate amount of attention is being placed on free software,
it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “Commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based modes of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.
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Expectations notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to believe that a Commons model will invariably govern the next chapter in the human journey. While the collaboratists are ascendant, the capitalists are split. The global energy companies, the telecommunications giants, and the entertainment industry—with a few notable exceptions—are entrenched in the Second Industrial Revolution and have the gravitas of the existing paradigm and political narrative to back them up. However, the electricity transmission companies, the construction industry, the IT, electronics, Internet, and transport sectors are all quickly creating new products and services and changing their business models to gain market share in the emerging Third Industrial Revolution hybrid of market and Commons arrangements, aided in various ways by government.
In my social enterprise, the TIR Consulting Group, we experience this new hybrid governing reality every day in our development of Third Industrial Revolution Master Plans for cities, regions, and countries. The new initiatives we are engaged in to help communities build out IoT infrastructure are collaborative arrangements in which markets and Commons operate on parallel tracks, provision each other, or collaborate in joint management structures, generally with government involved in establishing regulatory standards, codes, and financial incentives. Peter Barnes, in his book
Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons
, envisions a future that mirrors our day-to-day work on the ground in countries around the world. He explains that
the key difference between versions 2.0 and 3.0 is the inclusion in the latter of a set of institutions I call the
Commons sector.
Instead of having only one engine—that is, the corporate-dominated private sector—our
improved economic system would run on two: one geared to managing private profit, the other to preserving and enhancing common wealth.
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I can also tell you with near certainty that in the real world, the struggle to define the economic future pivots on the kind of infrastructure that will be put in place to serve the coming era. While both the capitalist market and the Collaborative Commons will coexist—sometimes synergistically, and at other times competitively or even adversarily—which of the two management models ultimately prevails as the dominant form and which as the niche player will depend largely on the infrastructure society erects.
Chapter Twelve
The Struggle to Define and Control the Intelligent Infrastructure
Y
ochai Benkler is one of the most ardent and articulate advocates of the Commons approach. He also realizes that a Communications Commons will remain elusive if tied to a proprietary infrastructure. In the last few pages of his eloquent book
The Wealth of Networks
, Benkler argues that if future generations are to enjoy the immense benefits that come with a networked information economy, it will be necessary to create a common infrastructure. He writes:
To flourish, a networked information economy rich in social production practices requires a core common infrastructure, a set of resources necessary for information production and exchange that are open for all to use. This requires physical, logical, and content resources from which to make new statements, encode them for communication, and then render and receive them.
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No disagreement here. But a key element is missing from Benkler’s analysis. Brett M. Frischmann, whose own book
Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources
is equally meaty and dovetails with Benkler’s analysis and prescriptions, hits on the lapse. He says that “Benkler does not fully examine what constitutes core common infrastructure or
the challenges to ensuring sustainable public access to common infrastructure.”
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Frischmann goes on to explain that
core common infrastructure refers to those foundational infrastructural resources that should be available to all on a nondiscriminatory basis. . . . The first difficulty is in identifying which resources are truly foundational and explaining why this critical subset of infrastructure resources should be managed on a nondiscriminatory basis . . . once that obstacle is surmounted . . . by what institutional means should commons management be achieved?
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Frischmann notes that Benkler has championed open wireless networks and some forms of public provisioning of a communications infrastructure, but wonders whether that’s enough. To Benkler’s credit—and that of Eli Noam, David Bollier, Kevin Werbach, and others who have pushed for open wireless networks—the recent FCC proposal to create an unlicensed spectrum for a free nationwide Wi-Fi communications network is to no small extent a testimonial to their tireless determination and persuasive arguments in favor of an open Communications Commons.
If there is a failure of imagination here, it lies in a misunderstanding of the critical role energy plays in foundational infrastructure. As I mentioned at the very beginning of this book, the great economic revolutions in history are infrastructure revolutions, and what makes the great infrastructure revolutions transformational is the convergence of new communications media with new energy regimes. Every energy revolution in history has been accompanied by its own unique communications revolution. Energy revolutions change the temporal and spatial reach of society and make possible more complex living arrangements, all of which require new communication media to manage and coordinate the new opportunities. Try to imagine organizing the production and distribution complexities of a steam-powered urban industrial revolution without cheap and quick steam-powered printing and the telegraph, or organizing the managerial complexities of an oil, auto, and suburban mass-consumer culture without centralized electricity and especially telephone communication, radio, and television.
Or, to bring it up to the moment, consider this. Benkler and others argue that the new Internet communications favors a networked Commons form of management because the nature of the media is distributed and collaborative and makes possible peer-to-peer production and the lateral scaling of economic activity. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the United States remains yoked to a vertically integrated and highly centralized fossil fuel energy regime that requires ever greater infusions of finance capital to operate. As long as fossil fuel energies underlie every aspect of the global economy, every other commercial enterprise that relies on these fuels for its materials, power generation, and logistics will be forced by
necessity to continue using a vertically integrated business model and centralized management to achieve its own economies of scale and stay alive.
Can the advocates of a networked infrastructure Commons imagine how a distributed, collaborative, peer-to-peer, laterally scaled communications revolution might prosper in a highly capitalized and centralized fossil fuel-based energy regime? To put it another way, is it likely that a highly capitalized and centralized fossil fuel energy regime would welcome a communications revolution that offers the potential of open-source, peer-to-peer management of renewable energies, 3D printing, and the like with the aim of pushing ever closer to a near zero marginal cost society and the diminution of the capitalist system?
On the other hand, a distributed, collaborative, peer-to-peer, laterally scaled communications medium is ideally suited to manage renewable energies that are distributed in nature, are best organized collaboratively, favor peer-to-peer production, and scale laterally across society. Together, Internet communications and renewable energies form the inseparable matrix for a foundational infrastructure whose operating logic is best served by Commons management. As outlined in chapter 1, that intelligent foundational infrastructure is comprised of three interlocking Internets: a Communications Internet, an Energy Internet, and a Logistics Internet. When linked together in a single interactive system—the Internet of Things—these three Internets provide a stream of Big Data on the comings and goings of society that can be accessed and shared collaboratively on an open global Commons by the whole of humanity in the pursuit of “extreme productivity” and a zero marginal cost society.
The struggle over governance of the three interlocking Internets that make up the Internet of Things is being aggressively waged among governments, capitalist enterprises, and champions of the nascent social economy on the Commons, each with ambitions to define the coming era.
The Communications Commons
Let’s start with the Communications Internet of the new Commons infrastructure. The Internet is a hybrid infrastructure made up of three primary stakeholders—the government, the private sector, and civil society. Up until now, the Internet has been managed as a global Commons with all three of the primary stakeholders playing a collaborative role in its governance.
Technological governance of the Internet, which includes establishing standards and management protocols, has been handed off to nonprofit organizations, including the Internet Engineering Task Force, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Although ICANN was initially a creature of the U.S. government and nominally under its jurisdiction, in 2009 the United States gave up its oversight function. ICANN is currently governed by an international board made up of academics, businesses, and civil society
interests.
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All the above organizations are, at least in theory, open for anyone to take part in, yet because of their highly technical nature, it is generally people with technical expertise who make decisions about management operations by consensus.
Still, governance of the Internet is a bit more thorny and less clear-cut than one might suspect. In 2003, representatives of the three primary stakeholder groups convened a World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva to discuss Internet governance, followed by a second meeting in June 2005 in Tunis. A working group on Internet governance was established by the U.N. secretary general to “investigate and make proposals for action, as appropriate, on the governance of the Internet.”
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The working group came up with an agreed-upon governing framework that was subsequently adopted by 174 member countries. It states,
Internet governance is the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programs that shape the evolution of the Internet.
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This three-stakeholder model is deeply significant. In the past, the parties at the table in global-governance issues were limited to government and the private sector—with civil society given, at best, observer status and unofficial representation. With the Internet, however, there was an understanding that excluding civil society would have been indefensible since many of the players and participants who engage in peer-to-peer production on the new medium are drawn from the third sector.
Having agreed on tripartite governance, a multi stakeholder body was set up under a United Nations umbrella group, called the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), to deliberate on governance policies. The IGF meets regularly to ensure that policy deliberations reflect the distributed, collaborative, laterally scaled nature of the Internet. Regional and national IGF bodies have been created in countries all over the world, providing a networked approach, rather than a top-down governing model, for collective self-management of this sprawling new communications medium.
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The United Nations, however—which is, after all, a body representing the governments of the world—slipped an article into the formal document that was agreed to at the Tunis meeting of the World Summit on the Information Society that gave the Secretary General the authority to begin a process of “enhanced cooperation” that would
enable governments, on an equal footing, to carry out their roles and responsibilities, in international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet, but not in the day-to-day technical and operational matters, that do not impact on international public policy issues.
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National governments, concerned over a spate of Internet-related policy issues that affect their general welfare and sovereign interests, including taxing commercial activity in virtual space, protecting intellectual property, maintaining security against cyberattacks, and stifling political dissent, are enacting national legislation, some of which is threatening an essential feature of the medium—its open, universal, and transparent nature. Not surprisingly, the nations pushing for new forms of government control over the Internet include Russia, Iran, China, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia, as well as India and Brazil.
In 2011, Russia, China, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan submitted a proposal to the U.N. General Assembly calling for an international code of conduct for the information society. The proposal, which has no provisions for a multistakeholders approach, would have the effect of increasing government control of the Internet.
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The preamble to the proposal states unequivocally that the “policy authority for Internet-related public issues is the sovereign right of States.”
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The private sector is also beginning to stray from the three-party stakeholder alliance, seeking increased income and profits by way of price discrimination—a move that threatens to undermine one of the guiding principles of the Internet: network neutrality, a principle that assures a nondiscriminatory, open, universal Communications Commons in which every participant enjoys equal access and inclusion.
The concept of network neutrality grew out of the end-to-end design structure of the Internet, which favors the users rather than the network providers. While users pay for Internet connection, and the price they pay can depend on the speed or quality provided by their Internet service provider, once they’re connected, their transmitted packets are treated the same way as everyone else’s by the network providers.
Network providers—the major telecom and cable companies—would now like to change the rules of the game and secure control of information exchanged over the Internet for commercial gain. That control would allow them to charge different prices for access to specific information or to prioritize transmissions, putting time-sensitive packets at the front of the line for a higher price, or charge application fees, or block specific applications from their networks in favor of others, again based on exacting discriminatory payments.
Proponents of network neutrality argue that the network should remain “stupid,” thereby allowing millions of end users to collaborate and innovate by developing their own applications. It’s this kind of “distributed intelligence” that makes the Internet such a unique communications medium. If network providers were to gain centralized control over access to content and how it is delivered, it would disempower end users and undermine the creativity that comes with distributed collaboration and laterally scaled intelligence.
Network providers feel differently, of course. In the United States, AT&T, Verizon, and cable TV companies argue that they are being unfairly limited in their pursuit of new profit-generating schemes. Ed Whitacre, former CEO of AT&T, vented his frustration in an interview with
BusinessWeek
:
Now what they would like to do is use my pipes [for] free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it.
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In fact, AT&T is paid for the transmission of information packets by either Internet service providers who are using their lines or by their own customers. Still, AT&T and other network providers would like to use various discriminatory mechanisms to squeeze additional money out of the process.
Deutsche Telekom, the giant German communications company that controls 60 percent of the country’s Internet connections, created an uproar in May 2013 when it announced that it would impose download limits on all the customers that use its home Internet service. The company said it was imposing the restriction because of escalating data traffic, which is expected to quadruple by 2016. More controversial still, the company said it would sell upgrades to those customers that wanted to increase their limits. Even more troubling, it announced it would be accepting the traffic from its own Internet-television service but not from its competitors, which include Google, YouTube, and Apple.
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