Theorising the Net as a Universal Public Service

Gothenburg.
The final speaker at AoIR 2010 is Sebastian Deterding, who is interested in reframing Web 2.0 as a public service right to communicate. One example of the debates around this is the French HADOPI three-strikes law around filesharing, which would remove Net access from offending users; others have framed Google or Facebook as universal public services, and describe broadband access as just as important as water or electricity.

The Internet is now a core communicative backbone for various communication networks, then – but how might we think about the Net as a public service in a more systematic, technology-neutral manner? First, public services are generally seen as services of general public interest that are subject to specific obligations or regulations. While usually the market provides, these are essential services where public needs may not be fully satisfied by markets alone. Indeed, the Net even serves as a backbone for some of the more conventional public services now.

Such public services are governed by both national legislation as well as transnational or universal concepts. Public services are legitimated by natural law, state theory (the provision of services that support basic human existence), democratic theory (which sees the media as crucial for deliberative democracy, for example), and economics (which address public or common goods).

Current media as public service discourses deal especially with broadband connectivity, public service broadcasting services online, and freedom of information and open government data. This addresses both the physical layer of connectivity and access, and the content layer – but such focus is very limited, and misses the logical layer of protocols, softwares, and platforms, as well as continuing a mass media model of ‘passive’ media consumption which does not take into account the right of users to communicate (to read and to write). Across all three layers, then, we need to consider the right to read as well as the right to write – and on top of these three layers, there is a further layer of capacity, of receptive and productive new media literacies.

Current discourses do fill in some of these gaps through civil society activities – open source and foundation activities address the logical layer, for example, by developing open standards for information interchange, and the increasing ease of use of online tools and services makes it more easily possible for ordinary people to get involved both receptively as well as productively across the various layers.

However, rights are not safeguarded especially on commercial, private platforms – whether building on natural law, state theory, democracy theory, or economics. Freedom of speech needs to be safeguarded, as do critical infrastructure security and affordable universal access, and independent, unbiased deliberation, while monopolies must be avoided. Additionally, where the Internet touches on other public services beyond media and communication, theoretical and regulatory models must also be further exampled.