Feudalizing the Internet: Enclosures and Erasures from Digital Rights Management to the Digital Divide

Here's the newest from Sascha Meinrath & Victor Pickard -- look for the full paper in coming months:

Feudalizing the Internet: Enclosures and Erasures from Digital Rights Management to the Digital Divide

As new media production and social networking capabilities flourish within the so-called Web 2.0 to empower users and transform politics and everyday life, less visible structural changes threaten to foreclose the Internet’s democratic possibilities. While recent research heralds the brave new world of digital networks (Benkler, 2006), others suggest more cautionary tales (Chester, 2007; Wu, 2006). Bringing this core tension into focus, this paper examines a number of recent and ongoing Internet policy battles, ranging from net neutrality to intellectual property rights, which will help determine the fundamental structures of the Internet. These fights come at a critical juncture in Internet development when multiple trajectories are possible. It is not hyperbolic to assume that the outcomes of these crucial debates will help shape the contours of the Internet for decades to come.

Despite the general excitement around the popularity and political power of You Tube, My Space, and other innovations in user-run media, recent digital rights management (DRM) issues criminalizing lawful behavior on the web, threats to net neutrality, and worsening digital divides complicate optimistic assessments. If these recent negative trends continue, we argue, the Internet might become, in effect, a feudalized space—one that limits democratic potential while enriching a relative handful of corporate interests, such as the phone, cable and software companies that stand to gain from various enclosures. Our paper seeks to both bring to light the specific policy debates connected to these problems, while uncovering normative understandings about the role of the Internet in a democratic society.

While earlier work examined fundamental Internet tensions between structure and agency, and between encroaching commercialization and democratic possibilities (Pickard, In Press), more recent work has focused specifically on the net neutrality debate, linking it to a larger set of normative criteria for democratizing the Internet (Meinrath & Pickard, 2006). What is still lacking from the scholarship is a comprehensive analysis of the key policy debates, both U.S. and global, around multiple layers of the Internet. By cataloguing current threats to a democratic Internet and closely examining the linkages between intersecting policy battles, this paper illuminates both what is at stake and what policy provisions should be implemented to prevent the feudalizing of the Internet.