Internet governance as joint effort: (Re)ordering search engines at the intersection of global and local cultures

Abstract

In this article, I investigate internet governance in practice by focusing on search engines, Google in particular. Building on STS-grounded internet governance research, I ask how different stakeholders interpret governing by algorithms, the governing of algorithms, and the limits of various governing modes when considering local specificities. To answer these questions, I conducted 18 qualitative interviews with key experts involved in search engine governance from four distinct societal domains: policy, law, civil society and the IT sector (from Austria and/ or the European level). In this analysis, I show that perceptions of search engine governance are shaped in specific cultural contexts, but also within particular social groups and their situated knowledges. I further elaborate how joint efforts are imagined as a means to challenge powerful search engines and their governing abilities cutting through different societal arenas and areas of expertise. Finally, I discuss implications of this analysis regarding the complex relationship between global technology and local cultures.

“Outside the industry, nobody knows what we do” SEO as seen by search engine optimizers and content providers

“…This influence of the algorithms (governance by algorithms) was associated by the interviewees with various regulatory proposals (governance of algorithms). Mager (2018) concludes that joint efforts are needed to achieve a redistribution of power that challenges central actors such as Google and the dominant roles they play.…”

Future imaginaries in the making and governing of digital technology: Multiple, contested, commodified

“…This restricted focus on state actors has become an object of critique recently. Scholars have highlighted that imaginaries are also articulated and enacted by corporate actors, civil society, research communities, and other organized groups in processes much more complex and non-linear than envisaged in the original concept (Felt and Öchsner, 2019; Jasanoff and Kim, 2015; Lehtiniemi and Ruckenstein, 2019; Mager, 2018; Olbrich and Witjes, 2016). In turn, Jasanoff (2015a) herself has argued that the concept needs to be “refined and extended in order to do justice to the myriad ways in which scientific and technological visions enter into the assemblages of materiality, meaning, and morality that constitute robust forms of social life” (p. 4).…”

“…While the widely referenced study on visions of nuclear energy in the United States and South Korea seemed to indicate that there is a single imaginary in each country that changes and adapts (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009), numerous studies on SIs demonstrate that the circulation of single imaginaries is the exception, not the rule. For example, scholars who have analyzed SIs in EU digital policy have identified different imaginaries in the context of search engines (Mager, 2017) and big data solutions (Rieder, 2018) and showed how these imaginaries travel into and transform in national sociopolitical contexts and communities of practice (Mager, 2018). In the context of European search engine policy and data protection, Mager (2017: 256) concludes “sociotechnical imaginaries should not be seen as monolithic or stabilized, but rather as multi-faceted and dynamic.” Studying visions of digital technologies thus also implies tracking the trajectories of multiple imaginaries and their relation to one another.…”

“…Annette Markham pinpoints this pervasive influence with the notion of “inevitability.” This indicates that technology companies not only take over the imaginative power of shaping future society from state actors, but partly also their ability to govern these very futures with their rhetoric, technologies, and business models. In this sense, this special issue may also be seen as extending research on the ongoing privatization of Internet governance through modes of private ordering, lobby attempts, and mundane practices (Gillespie, 2018; Hofmann et al, 2017; Klonick, 2018; Mager, 2018). As it appears, the making and governing of digital technology are not two separate spaces and sets of practices, as we meant to reference in the title of this special issue.…”

“…Cohen (2013: 1913) argues that networked information technologies “mediate our experiences of the world in ways directly related to both the practice of citizenship and the capacity for citizenship, and so they configure citizens as directly or even more directly than institutions do.” At the same time, these companies have neither been elected, nor are they democratically legitimized, as a member of the European Parliament argued. This EP member frames Silicon Valley companies like Google as “exterritorial agency shaping future developments without any democratic legitimacy, without any accountability to citizens” (anonymized interview quoted in Mager, 2018: 3666). Since networked information technologies have the capacity to contribute to or prevent “citizens’ capacity for democratic self-government” (Cohen, 2013: 1912), Cohen concludes that ownership, transparency, and accountability of networked technologies are necessary ingredients for democratic societies.…”