Could the Internet End Up Killing the Public Sphere?
A few weeks ago, the French Journal Le Débat published a compelling piece by Benjamin Loveluck entitled « Internet: Toward a Radical Democracy?« . The author, who is writing a Ph.D thesis on « the hypermodern individual and the genealogy of contemporary media regime__s” (sic), successfully locates the recent developments of the internet within the history of liberal-democracies. He demonstrates...
Facing the Crisis, the European Union Should Imitate Obama’s Reliance on New Technologies to Bring About Change
Determined to act swiftly to pass an $825 billion stimulus package, US President Barack Obama used his weekly address (on a revamped whitehouse.gov website) to give more details about this recovery plan. As it stands now, the proposal includes public spending programs in three high-tech areas : computerization of medical records; creation of smarter, high-tech enhanced electrical grids; expansion...
Regulation : The Internet is not TV
As some telecommunication companies slowly turn themselves into producers and distributors of media content, new issues arise for competition regulators. Public officials have hinted at several ways of dealing with this issue. On the one hand, market regulators are keen on maintaining a clear differentiation between these two sectors. On the other hand, some government officials seem willing to...
Copyright Gone Wrong
At the beginning of this year, the head of the European Commission’s Internal Market and Services Directorate General Charlie McCreevy announced his plan to extend copyright terms for performers and phonogram producers from 50 years today to 95 years (1). The Commission advances the argument that many works from ageing musicians dating back to the 1950’s are about to fall into the public domain....
The Freedom to Digitalize Revolutionary Powers
In On Liberty (1859), philosopher John Stuart Mill reflects on the potential coercion that could result from democracy and more especially from what Alexi De Tocqueville called the “tyranny of the majority”. In this work, Mill formulates a very convincing plea in favor of free speech. According to him, only by discussion can we test the validity of people’s beliefs and only by dialectic can we...
European Parliament Rejects France’s Graduated Response
The French legislative bill aimed at granting a public agency the right to suspend people’s internet connection if they are suspected of copyright infringement has been turned down by the European Parliament, which resumed session earlier this week. Voting on the telecom package – a piece of legislation that regulates the EU electronic communication sector – the Parliament adopted by an...
If We Could Free Our Culture
I just finished Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture (2004) and it has made me angry. A law professor specialized in intellectual property, Lessig demonstrates that we are caught in a dangerous, reactionary discourse about intellectual property in the Net era. His sincere advocacy for a freer society deconstructs the key elements of the debate on copyright and gives a desirable sense of perspective...
Taylorism vs. Googlism
I talked about Nicholas Carr’s article a few days ago. According to his piece (Is Google Making Us Stupid?) the web is affecting our cognitive abilities. We are now fed with tons information but seldom sit and reflect about them; we google things but rarely research or memorize them anymore. Carr argues that this constant flipping through is dispossessing us from complex reasoning. He then draws a...
How the Web Is Changing Us
A few weeks ago, American writer Nicholas Carr wrote a controversial article in the Atlantic Monthly. In his piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he elaborated on an interesting hypothesis regarding the cognitive consequences of the web. Carr, a well-known critic of technological utopianism asked whether it could be that using the web slowly rewired people’s neuronal circuitry. He explains: For...
Regulating Privacy in the Online World
Things are moving forward on the privacy front. In April, the so-called “Group 29”, an advisory body to the European Commission on privacy and public liberties matters, issued a memo in which it analyzed the activity of data-mining internet companies. More specifically, it sought to establish whether they respected the European regulatory framework which is composed of two directives: – the data...