“This is not how we imagined it”: Technological affordances, economic drivers, and the Internet architecture imaginary

Oever, Niels ten

doi:10.1177/1461444820929320

Cited by 22 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 47 publications

(40 reference statements)

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“…Especially in the phase of developing digital tools and infrastructures, constant advice and public scrutiny are needed with regard to legal requirements, ethical and governance issues, as well as social implications. This supports research showing that ex-post auditing of profiling systems in public sectors (Allhutter et al, 2020) or of human rights protocols (ten Oever, 2021; Ermoshina and Musiani, 2022) is often too late and that new institutions would be needed with enough resources and interdisciplinary expertise, including those from civil society actors, to accompany sociotechnical development processes right from the start. Opening up data? : Finally, data was mentioned as a necessary ingredient for growing European infrastructures.…”

Section: Empirical Analysis: Counter-imagining and Counteracting Hege...supporting

confidence: 69%

European Search? How to counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search with European search engine projects

Mager

2023

Big Data & Society

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This article investigates how developers of alternative search engines challenge increasingly corporate imaginaries of digital futures by building out counter-imaginaries of search engines devoted to social values instead of mere profit maximization. Drawing on three in-depth case studies of European search engines, it analyzes how search engine developers counter-imagine hegemonic search, what social values support their imaginaries, and how they are intertwined with their sociotechnical practices. This analysis shows that notions like privacy, independence, and openness appear to be fluid, context-dependent, and changing over time, leading to a certain “value pragmatics” that allows the projects to scale beyond their own communities of practice. It further shows how European values, and broader notions of Europe as “unified or pluralistic,” are constructed and co-produced with developers’ attempts to counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search. To conclude, I suggest three points of intervention that may help alternative search engine projects, and digital technologies more generally, to not only make their counter-imaginaries more powerful, but also acquire the necessary resources to build their technologies and infrastructures accordingly. I finally discuss how “European values,” in all their richness and diversity, can contribute to this undertaking.

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Section: Empirical Analysis: Counter-imagining and Counteracting Hege...supporting

confidence: 69%

European Search? How to counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search with European search engine projects

Mager

2023

Big Data & Society

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“…If they could set the framing and the tone of the discussion, how different would this conversation look? Bringing it all together, when considering the impact of AI governance initiatives, we would do well to keep in mind the key question raised by critical scholars of international political economy like Susan Strange (Sell 2016, Strange 1998): Cui bono? Who really benefits?…”

Section: Conclusion: Power In the Global Governance Of Aimentioning

confidence: 99%

AI and Global Governance: Modalities, Rationales, Tensions

Veale

Matus

Gorwa

2023

Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is a salient but polarizing issue of recent times. Actors around the world are engaged in building a governance regime around it. What exactly the “it” is that is being governed, how, by who, and why—these are all less clear. In this review, we attempt to shine some light on those questions, considering literature on AI, the governance of computing, and regulation and governance more broadly. We take critical stock of the different modalities of the global governance of AI that have been emerging, such as ethical councils, industry governance, contracts and licensing, standards, international agreements, and domestic legislation with extraterritorial impact. Considering these, we examine selected rationales and tensions that underpin them, drawing attention to the interests and ideas driving these different modalities. As these regimes become clearer and more stable, we urge those engaging with or studying the global governance of AI to constantly ask the important question of all global governance regimes: Who benefits? Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 19 is October 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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“…This concentration of power has repercussions for the structures of the Internet as a network. Regarding the infrastructure level of the Internet, companies from the United States as well as from China are seeking to secure their central position by investing heavily in the development of technical standards (ten Oever, 2021, p. 346) and in the construction of their own physical infrastructures—from data centres to underwater cables (Lehr et al, 2019; Mauldin, 2017; Winseck, 2017, p. 262). On this infrastructure level, these companies hold power over the global Internet on a level that exceeds that of most of the countries in the world.…”

Section: The Duality Of Global Decentralisation and Local Concentrati...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Centrality and power. The struggle over the techno‐political configuration of the Internet and the global digital order

Pohle

Voelsen

2022

Policy & Internet

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In recent years, various governments have been trying to subordinate the Internet to the system of the Westphalian state order. This article seeks to add a new layer to the analysis of this conflict over state sovereignty and the global digital order. It draws on network theory as an alternative analytical lens to study the reconfiguration of power relations that define the Internet as a technical, social and economic network, and its governance. We review key conflicts and developments that shaped the Internet's history, from the Internet exceptionalists' visions in the 1990s to states' recent pursuits of digital sovereignty and trace how states, as well as private companies, seek to fundamentally reconfigure the dominant logic of the Internet and its sub‐networks to expand and institutionalise their power position. We thus highlight a deeper layer of conflict: the current struggles over the techno‐political configuration of the Internet are not only influenced by the conflict between liberal and authoritarian visions of the Internet; they are also the result of continuous tensions between processes of centralisation and decentralisation of the Internet's technical foundations and its governance. As an effect of these dynamics, we currently witness a pluralisation of power while, at the same time, new points of centralised control emerge.

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“This is not how we imagined it”: Technological affordances, economic drivers, and the Internet architecture imaginary

Cited by 22 publications

References 47 publications

European Search? How to counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search with European search engine projects

European Search? How to counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search with European search engine projects

AI and Global Governance: Modalities, Rationales, Tensions

Centrality and power. The struggle over the techno‐political configuration of the Internet and the global digital order

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