[Infowarrior] - OpEd: What the government doesn’t understand about the Internet

[Richard Forno]

What the government doesn’t understand about the Internet, and what to  
do about it
By Tom Steinberg on Friday, May 29th, 2009

http://www.mysociety.org/2009/05/29/what-the-government-doesnt-understand-about-the-internet-and-what-to-do-about-it/

Current government policy in relation to the Internet can broadly be  
summarised as occupying three areas:

1. Getting people online (broadband access, and lessons for people who  
don’t have the skills or interest)
2. Protecting people from bad things done using the Internet  
(terrorism, child abuse, fraud, hacking, intellectual property  
infringement)
3. Building websites for departments and agencies.

The government does all these things primarily because it believes  
that the Internet boosts the economy of the UK, and that IT can reduce  
the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality. Together,  
these outweigh the dangers, meaning it doesn’t get banned. Gordon  
Brown’s recent speech at Google was an exemplar of this mainly  
economically driven celebration of the Internet’s virtues, telling  
audience members that your industry is driving the next stage of  
globalisation”.

The first challenge for the government is to understand that whilst  
these beliefs are true, they are only a minor part of the picture.  
Tellingly, Browns’ speech contained almost no language that couldn’t  
have been used to explain the positive impact of electrification or  
shipping containers.
The way in which the Internet Is not like Electrification or Shipping  
Containers

The Internet has been relentlessly undermining previous practices in  
the running of businesses, dating, parenting, spying, producing art  
and many other areas. So, however, did electrification and shipping  
containers. From cheaper raw materials, to cheaper cars to have sex in  
the back of, economic and social change has always been driven by  
technological change.

What is different is the way in which the Internet changes social and  
economic practices - the vector of attack. In the 20th century,  
advancement of human welfare went hand in hand with the rise of  
companies that used economies of scale to deliver better goods and  
services for customers. Technology effectively made it possible and  
much easier to be a big, highly productive company, to gather  
expertise and capital together and to target markets for maximum yields.

Now take a look for a moment at Wikipedia, MoneySavingExpert, Blogger  
or Match.com - all big websites, all doing different things. Each one,  
however, is in its own way is reducing the ability of large,  
previously well functioning institutions to function as easily.

These services are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge  
for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix  
marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business,  
newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional  
‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this  
isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a  
newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing,  
and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business.

This common pattern of more powerful tools for citizens making life  
harder for traditional institutions is, for me, a cause for  
celebration. However, I am not celebrating as a libertarian (which I  
am not) I celebrate it because it marks a historic increase in the  
freedom of people and groups of people, and a step-change in their  
ability to determine the direction of their own lives.
How the government can be on the side of the citizen in the midst of  
the great Internet disruption

Disruption like this is scary for any institution, which will tend to  
mean that as a public entity which interfaces with other institutions  
the temptation will be to hold back the sea, not swim with it.  
Government must swim with the tide, though, not just to help citizens  
more but to avoid the often ruinous tension of a citizenry going one  
way and a government going another. There are various things  
government can do to be on the right side.

1. Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the  
information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and  
frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they  
want with information about themselves, or about anything they care  
about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated  
identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than  
even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It  
means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who  
can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful  
train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help  
citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.”

2. Seize the opportunity to bring people together. Millions of people  
visit public sector websites every day, often trying to achieve  
similar or identical ends. It is time to start building systems to  
allow them to contact people in a similar situation, just as they’d be  
able to if queuing together in a job centre, but with far more reach  
and power. This does open the scary possibility that citizens might  
club together to protest about poor service or bad policies, but given  
recent news, if you were a minister would you rather know about what  
was wrong as soon as possible, or really late in the day (cf MPs‘  
expenses, festering for years)?

3. Get a new cohort of civil servants who understand both the Internet  
and public policy, and end the era of signing huge technology  
contracts when the negotiators on the government’s side have no idea  
how they systems they are paying for actually work. Coming up with new  
uses of technology, or perceiving how the Internet might be involved  
with undermining something in the future is an essential part of a  
responsible policy expert’s skill-set these days, no matter what  
policy area they work in. It should be considered just as impossible  
for a new fast-stream applicant without a reasonably sophisticated  
view of how the Internet works to get a job as if they were illiterate  
( a view more sophisticated than generated simply by using Facebook a  
lot, a view that is developed through tuition ). Unfashionably, this  
change almost certainly has to be driven from the center.

4. Resist calls from institutions of all sorts to change laws to give  
them back the advantages they previously had over citizens, and  
actively appoint a team to see where legislation is preventing  
possible Internet-enabled challenges to institutions that could do  
with shaking up. At the moment, this is mostly seen in the music and  
video fields, but doubtless it will occur in more fields in the next  
decade, many of them quite possibly less sexy but more economically  
and socially significant than a field containing so many celebrities.

5. Spend any money whatsoever on a centrally driven project to cherry  
pick the best opportunities to ‘be on the side of the citizen’ and  
drive them through recalcitrant and risk averse departments and  
agencies. Whilst UK government is spending £12-13bn a year on IT at  
the moment, almost none of that is being spent on projects which I  
would describe as fitting any of the objectives described above. And  
the good news, for a cash strapped era, is that almost anything  
meaningful that the government can do on the Internet will cost less  
than even the consulting fees for one large traditional IT project.

Conclusion

There are, obviously, more reasons why the Internet isn’t like  
electrification or shipping containers. But keeping the narrative  
simple is always valuable when proposing anything. The idea that a  
wave is coming that empowers citizens and threatens institutions makes  
government’s choice stark - who’s side do we take? History will not be  
kind to those that take the easy option.