Towards an Entrepreneurial Form of Regulation of the Web

Athens.
The next speaker here at WebSci '09 is Wolf Richter, who shifts our attention to the 'dark side' of the Web. He links back to John Perry Barlow's 1996 declaration of the independence of cyberspace, and points out how much in spite of such rhetoric the regulation of online spaces has continued - but at the same time, anti-'piracy' and anti-spam measures have had only a very limited effect. There is also a thriving culture of self-regulation online, of course, with a number of organisations (some with government involvement) having emerged to drive this.

But what if people are not interested in self-regulation - if there is no motivation among the key actors (e.g. spammers, ISPs) to get involved in regulatory efforts? What we see arise instead in such cases is a form of 'regulatory entrepreneurialism': this does not rely on the power of national legislators to impose their regulations, but competes with other options, and is not legitimised by institutional processes but instead aims to gain effectiveness and legiticimacy by other means.

Such regulators are effective by providing benefits for their users and partner with key gatekeepers; they achieve legitimacy in various ways. The digital media exchange (read: filesharing) framework Noank Media, for example, provides ISPs with the infrastructure for legal filesharing networks, strikes licencing deals with music labels, provides ISPs as gatekeepers with the tools to monitor media traffic, and distributes rolayties to copyright holders. The project becomes legitimate by providing a transparent distribution of profits and by providing artists with remuneration, and also by associating with Harvard University and the Berkman Center.

StopBadWare provides a catalogue of Websites determined to be 'badware', disseminates warning messages through a partnership with Google, and operates a clearinghouse to remove badware warnings. It becomes effective by cooperating with Google to display warning messages, and Google thus avoids allegations of censorship. It becomes legitimate by being immediately effective, providing a transparent clearing process, and fighting the good cause against badware.

Herdict is a project which monitors successful and failed accesses to Websites and maps aggregated views on blocked sites per country and per ISP, to identify Net censorship as well as technical outages. It becomes effective through real-time aggregation of data, by supporting a good cause, and by not acting as a central gatekeeper. It becomes legitimate in part by operating on a 'many eyeballs' principle.

Finally, the Switzerland project provides experienced users with the tools to measure the performance of their network connection. Again, it uses no central gatekeeper, supports a good cause, and provides analysis of traffic data by Electronic Frontiers Foundation experts which allows users to assess their ISPs' service filtering practices.

Such initiatives can be assessed for their effectiveness (benefits, gatekeeper) and legitimacy (pragmatic, structural, normative, and cognitive). They show that it is possible to move from regulatory behaviour to acting like an entrepreneurial regulator, or a regulatory entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial spirit can provide the impetus for effective Web regulation, and such would-be regulators can learn a great deal from the established literature on social entrepreneurship.

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