Net.Politics Glossary

Access

Access defines the opportunity for people to 'go on-line' and make use of the Net. For this one needs an 'Internet connection', which can be at home, in the office, in a 'Cybercafe' or other places.

Many people have no such opportunity and thus zero access. But the quality of access, and the costs it carries are also very unequally distributed the world over, both geographically and socially.

Access has been widely, but erroneously, described as 'no longer a problem'. It still is a problem, and very much a political one. One can ask why Internet access should not be an entitlement, just like the provision of other public services (water, sanitation, transport, electricity etc.)

Bandwidth and Broadband

Bandwidth indicates the capacity of your Internet access, both in-coming and out-going. Depending on your method of connecting, it can vary between 14,4 K (or even less) if you 'dial-up' through a modem and a telephone line, and several Megabytes, if you have a cable, DSL or fibre link. While the latter is more and more available in the global North, the global South is often still limited to the former. This is one aspect of the so-called 'digital divide'.

The increase in available bandwidth has much to do with commercial access and content providers wanting to 'push' more and more products and services (e.g. video on demand) requiring 'broadband': fast, high capacity links (and by the say more expensive home computers). But they are much less interested in enabling in 'pulling' any content produced by their customers - that is allowing people to be content publishers. Hence the bandwidth they provide is most often asymmetric (the A in ADSL), providing more downstream bandwidth (for consumption) than upstream bandwidth (for publishing), or have other barriers to providing content such as dynamic internet addressing.

Technological and legal developments may encourage providers to squeeze their customers even further, by controlling the content they are able to access and by monitoring their network habits and behavior. Here again, political decision-making or even awareness is mostly conspicuous by its absence.

Digital Divide

A controversial phrase supposed to express the gap between those who have access to electronic networks (living mostly in the North and/or rich and/or white and/or male etc.) and those who are not (read: South/ poor/ non-white/ non/male etc.)

As Frederick Noronha explains later in this book, the term has become a catch-phrase and raises more questions than it answers. Rather than a clear gap, it should be seen more as a continuum, in order to emphasise the very great distance between the extremes, even between those who are somehow 'connected'.

'Bridging the Digital Divide' has become a full-fledged industry in itself. One should be very sceptical of the 'solutions' that are brought forward, and ask whether they truly will benefit the people they are meant for.

Privacy

The right to Privacy, that is, the protection of the individual and of associations against unreasonable scrutiny by third parties, private or governmental, is an enshrined constitutional right in many countries, even if adherence to it may differ.

With the advent of the 'digital age' new and vast opportunities have arisen, both to enhance and to restrict privacy. There is now a vast, but largely invisible, industry in data-mining - the gathering of personal data for commercial marketing or security purposes. There are also new tools to anonymise internet users and confuse data collection. Especially after September 11, 2001, governments the world over have tended to restrict the right to privacy, while corporate bodies are souping up their marketing tools.

The German hackers' Chaos Computer Club coined the phrase "Distribute Public Data Freely, Protect Private Data Strongly" back in the late 80s and would still appear valid…

Encryption

Encryption is the process of making 'plain information' (texts, pictures, data) unintelligible for others than authorized parties. Related terms: code, cipher. Modern computers with unprecedented amounts of processing power have enabled virtually unbreakable encryption, while at the same time making older methods of encoding useless.

Governments and corporations are happy to see the confidentiality of their communications and information enhanced, but cringe at the realisation that private individuals can do the same. Thus, governments would very much like to restrict our 'rights to encrypt', while corporations would like to deny us any 'right to decrypt' (their trade secrets, software, DVDs, etc).

Here too, politics will decide whether the digital age means empowerment or subjection.

Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS)

FLOSS is a generic name given to software development and distribution that is not following the commercial model in which proprietary knowledge enables profit through monopoly rent. "Open Source" indicates that the underlying software code of a programme is public, not kept secret, and available for inspection, copying and further development - under the same conditions of 'openness'.

Despite the fact that there are non-trivial differences between Free/Libre and Open Source Software, both are eminently threatening to the current mainstream format of software development - and indeed to production in general. Robust protection of Copyright and Intellectual Property is favored by the dominant corporate entities and their governmental backers, being the most obvious route to dominance over competitors and profit.

The (near) future will reveal - or more importantly the actions of the public at large will decide - whether we will end up in a regime of grimly enforced proprietary rights, or whether we will see the right to create and to communicate as we please, prevail.

Intellectual Property

A much touted term these days which basically describes the non-tangible, usually non-material part, of products and services that are traded in the economy. These 'intangibles' constitute an ever larger part of our current production system and are characterized by high development and very low, or even zero, reproduction costs.

Corporations face many, sometimes insuperable, difficulties in their aim to max out the advantages without suffering the consequences of this situation. They increasingly have to resort to extra-economic measures to do so, thereby transforming a marketing problem into a law-and-order issue. The term 'Intellectual Property' is itself being promoted as an ideological prop for protecting what has been much better termed 'proprietary knowledge'.

Intellectual Property and Copyright Protection Law has evolved over the past ten years into a fully-fledged war machine that is used to oppress the people and crush commercial initiatives of smaller companies by the powerful corporate interests and the governments that support them, foremost of the United States of America and the European Union.

Public Domain and Digital Commons

In the old days, 'the commons' was land that was owned by no farmer in particular and available for all to use for grazing and subsistence cultivation. Many agricultural communities did not even feature individual, private property of land. Later on, the Public Domain came to define what is open for use by all people, for instance roads and public places in the 'real' world, but also information whose access and use was not restricted by copyright (government papers, literary works of older authors, etc.) Nowadays, the tendency of the economy is to 'privatize' ('corporatize' may be a better word) all resources, be it in the real or in the 'virtual' world, and the digital realm is largely where the current emphasis on 'Intellectual Property' and Copyright Law lies. But we also increasingly witness the privatisation of previously public 'real' spaces, as exemplified by shopping malls and gated communities.

Resistance is growing and often succesfully, against this trend. Developers of Free/Open Source Software make their work available with the only restriction that people must do the same. Many other 'knowledge workers' are now choosing to free their intellectual products from the shackles of IP and copyright, choosing 'copyleft' instead, and let their work too become part of the "digital commons". More and more resources are available on the Net making it difficult, if not impossible, to justify privatisation.

Hackers

Also, more or less accurately, referred to as 'geeks', 'nerds' or 'techies', may be best described for our purposes as 'IT experts' who think - though not necessarily always operate - independently from government or corporate institutions.

The hackers' independence and knowledge are deeply threatening to vested interests at the same time as they are a boon to the general public whose liberties are menaced by the unfettered technological superiority that would otherwise be enjoyed by nation-states and corporations. Hackers are by definition staunch supporters of the idea of digital commons as it reflects their own method of knowledge generation and sharing.

What hackers have to offer in terms of software development and 'consumer protection' however, can easily be undone by the 'FUD' (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) tactics actively deployed by the mainstream media to portray them as threats to wealth and security.

Wi-Fi, or Wireless Fidelity

Wi-Fi is the term for electronic connectivity using the radio spectrum, that is, across the air. At first glance, it looks like a technological 'fix' - and a very simple and cheap one - in cases where landlines are not available, applicable both to 'luxury problems' such as business people on the move as to the desperate needs of cash-starved developing countries.

Wi-Fi has provided a new impetus for various kinds of community networkers who wish to find no- or low cost ways of sharing content and internet connections, without having to rely on the infrastructure of telecommunication giants. These independent projects use parts of the radio spectrum that can be used unlicensed at low power.

Wi-Fi however has also become the battleground between corporate interests that want to annex, commoditize, and therefore 'scarcitize' (render scarce, and hence valuable) something that is potentially a free good (the radio spectrum), and the endeavors of voluntary, non-commercial entities to distribute connectivity and community content at low or no costs.

Just as was the case with DVDs, MP3 and other easily reproducible and transmissible media, it looks like as if the 'market' is going to look for extra-economic, coercive measures (for instance, making free WiFi illegal) to enforce its 'business model'.