2. Theoretical Model
2.1. A Metaphor of Internet Technologies
2.1.3. Accelerate (Spread)
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2.1.3. Accelerate (Spread)
The competing values of actors, and the choices about which values will be given precedence among them are political. Code is no longer only a question of engineering; it codifies these values. In this account, the architecture of cyberspace is then power. Politics is the process by which people collectively reason about how things ought to be, how that power is exercised, and by whom. So far, it has been argued here the way which code regulates, who the code writers are, and who controls the code writers reveal how cyberspace is regulated, so too does it reveal who has the power. This research considers the state as a power what has a domestic authority structure, and is subject to a shift with the increasing expansion of networked ICTs. But how does the state regulate code?
As mentioned under the section of the Net and the state that the role of the state as the power of the regulators -laws, norms, the market, and the design- is the decision of which regulator is the most effective on the desired constraint, perhaps not necessarily the most efficient (Vig, 1988). The code is regulated by the sum of these constraints imposed by the regulators. To simplify this, Lessig (2006) gives the example that the constraints faced by someone wanting to smoke, and the factors regulate someone’s decision to smoke, or not. The first constraint that comes to mind would probably be that the legality of that action; the law regulates smoking through age limit, and location, aiming to regulate smoking behavior (Lessig, 2006). But the law is the sole constraint on smoking, it is quite rare to encounter smoking police or a court specific to the violation of smoking rules. More significant constraints here would be by norms which require the permission of others to smoke in a given location thereby regulating smoking behavior (Lessig, 2006). However, none of these are more significant than the constraint created by the market through its price, quality, or its technology, such as with smokeless cigarettes the constraint gets less effective because it removes prohibitive location barrier. So, the point is no different than the one mentioned above: constraints faced by someone who wants to smoke are affected by how the cigarette is, how it was designed before, how it is built, in other words, by its code (Lessig, 2006).
This can be applied to cyberspace, the regulation of networked ICTs in which state and regulators serve as the external force, and constraint as the sum of the forces applied on the code of a given ICT. Constraints are interdependently functioning regulators; they work together as much as they may function differently. The law regulates code through punishment
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it threatens such as copyright law; it enacts, threatens, convicts (Lessig, 2006). Norms through stigma that a community imposes control the design (Lessig, 2006). There are sets of behavior just as there are in real-space. Markets create constraints access through price just like some Web services may charge for access (Lessig, 2006). Lastly, the design is another way of constraint, as it has been explained above a number of times that some cyber-places might or might not allow what other places allow (Lessig, 2006). The code-writers set the constraints to a given cyber-place and its inhabitants.
Technology is supple, as are these regulators. The state can pick between direct and indirect regulation. To explain with an example, once again, as Lessig (2006) demonstrates with the seatbelt instance, government can pass a law that requires citizens to wear seatbelts, which is directly regulating behavior (Lessig, 2006). Or a stigma can be created through public education against those who do not wear seatbelts, which is regulating social norms through law to regulate behavior (Lessig, 2006). Subsidizing insurance companies can be another way to sanction those who don’t use seatbelts through reducing rates, which is how the law regulates the market (Lessig, 2006). It can be forced through technological advancement too, such as dominating automatic seatbelts by changing the code of its technology as a way to regulate behavior (Lessig, 2006). Each and every action mentioned has an impact and a cost. Here is where states engage with the code of the technology; they weigh the costs against the benefits and choose the one that regulates most efficiently, and the one has the most effective return in the desired values (Nye 2002; Lessig, 2006).
It has been mentioned that state perceptions and other actors’ (individuals/norms, non-state actors/market) choices can act complimentarily or contradictorily. For instance, the government’s ability to regulate it increases, as code writing becomes commercial (Keohane, and Nye, 1998). The point is that the government is a player in the market for software. It affects the market both by creating rules and by purchasing products. Either way, it influences the supply of commercial software providers who exist to provide what the market demands (Keohane, and Nye, 1998; Nye 2002; Diamond, 2010). Here is a perfect dance between market and state perceptions. Google can build the technology the Chinese need in order to make China’s regulation more perfectly enabled, and China can extract that talent from Google by mandating it as a condition of being in China’s market. The value of that market is thus worth more to Google than the value of its “neutral search” principle. Commerce has a purpose, and government can exploit that to its own end, and when it does, the character of the technology will change (Lessig, 2006). These changes could push the network from being a difficult-to-regulate space to the perfectly regulable space, although these changes are not being designed
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by government, but rather being demanded by users and deployed by commerce/market (Lessig, 2006; Diamond, 2010; Carr, 2016).
One instance to that end could be the one that occurs between individuals (norms) and states perception. Government threatens punishment with intention to create the incentive for individuals to obey the government’s rule (Nye, 2002). The changes in the effective architecture of cyberspace that as described earlier would simply make it easier for the state to make good on its threat, like aiming to operate traceability through decrypting the identity of actors on the network (Hachigian, 2002; Nye, 2002). If not politically impossible, the state can do that by requiring providers of network to disable the actions of individuals who are not displaying their identity card (Lessig, 2006). However, this might not be possible in all cases, depending on the characteristics of the users who are inhabiting that cyberspace (Lessig, 2006).
Even though, in some cases, government becomes unable to force citizens to carry virtual identity, it still can create those incentives for individuals to carry one. Just as in the instance that an individual might not have to carry passport on a daily basis, if that individual wants to fly to somewhere, then he/she must carry it (Lessig, 2006). The point is by making users to do whatever government demand is so strong that supersedes the basics of the interaction within the network. Another instance would be how government creates incentive to enable their needs by regulating intermediaries, as they have done with requiring gambling websites to impose conditions like checking the age and residency of the users (Lessig, 2006). This does not mean the state is selfish in claiming their needs, instead there is an obvious mutual benefit through building confidence between users and the entities (Nye 2002; Lessig 2006).
To sum, government can attain the level of controllability to Internet technology: it can use direct (by making change on the code) or indirect (by making actions more traceable) ways to transform the technology from not-so-controllable to controllable. In this sense, the controllability that the ICT allows its users and the rivalry between its users to regulate the ICT leads not only the major interest of this paper which also employed explicitly in the reverse saliency model, also shapes the hypotheses that the case study is derived from in the following chapter.
Hypotheses
Reverse saliency model is formulated in the following hypotheses:
1. The more the controllability a technology has a function of its design, or the more a technology allows users to control its design/code, the less a state perceives risk (reverse salient found) from the said technology.
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2. The more a state perceives risks (a reverse salient appears therein) in an adopted technology, the more likely is to control the technology and to intervene in its design.
First hypothesis tests if ICT motivates the control or freedom in its nature by analyzing both the state actor level and the interaction between state actor and other actors (individual non-state actor). Second hypothesis controls the perceived risks and concerns behind the state actors’ urge to regulate the ICT: either by taking over the design, or by turning it into less controllable for others. Reverse saliency model helps to observe these, thus makes it easier to track the hypotheses within the case study by providing a lens through which to examine the dynamic behind specifically the Chinese perception of risks inherent in Internet technologies.
Notably, the case is analyzed to determine which qualities of Internet technologies China perceive as a threat to Chinese power in the pursuit of an answer to what is unique about China for this research and why China is trying so hard to preserve its own way in adopting and designing the technology (to be discussed more fully in the following section).
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Chapter IV 1. China: People’s Tough Love
The contribution of the section, the controllability dilemma, is first to demonstrate how dual dynamic of the Internet technologies that is consider both empowering and undermining the actor’s power, and how the control of the key empowering legislature, ownership and management of physical infrastructure of the Internet lead the Chinese government to be able to stay in charge of its internet governance. A unique evolution of dynamic relationship between power and ICTs, where governments’ perceptions towards a technology shapes the technology to its end.
The following section, data security, lays out some of the key events, actors and policies which demonstrates the integral role of political decisions of the Chinese government that have played in ICT development. The second contribution of this chapter is that the more efficient oversight is provided in order to give a better illustration of interconnected nature of the Chinese case. There is substantial amount of technical background to the ICT technologies mentioned in the case studies but rather than regard this technical knowledge as isolation from political context, it is important to observe that the cohesive narrative which runs through the combination of political and technical context. It is aimed to avoid narrow sight to oversee the interconnection between them that has long been done by dealing with these two individually in the IR and other related literature. A cohesive look that built on this chapter is receptive to catch the changes, dynamics and continuity of the theoretical framework built upon the reverse salient in ICT development process.
The long- held assumption that technology has universal implications for power, regardless of social or political context are interrupted by having shown the unique features in Chinese ICT development process. It also allows us to contemplate the international relations (IR) implications of China following a leadership position to substantially shape this technology in the near future. By setting the scope for how the ICT would develop, expand, be managed and engaged with, the Peoples’ Republic of China was able to establish a kind of national network
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of values and norms, and given its prescient projects, it seems to have big goals, perhaps global goals in this regard. The last section illustrates how much breadth and depth there can be in the long-term expression of the algorithmic authority.
Each section is analyzed through testing the hypotheses and the reverse saliency model.
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1.1. Controllability dilemma
The Chinese government was in the middle of a reform process where the integration into the global economic system was supported when the Internet was first introduced in China.
Following the introduction of the Internet to China in the 1990s, for a while a more or less laissez faire attitude was adopted because the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had not yet developed a well-organized strategy for dealing with the matter of new and emerging technology, including the Internet, so that different groups and regions were able to pursue their own individual strategies to some extent (Damm and Thomas, 2006). Currently, of these groups, some essential actor can be distinguished as the following: the government, which itself is divided not only into central and local levels, but also into different responsible authorities;
the national and international businesses and enterprises; the administration at different levels;
the news media; the citizens and, finally, the technologically enabled users who might now act within the newly formed virtual groups. Over the past decade the relationships between these key players have become more complicated.
This relatively open stance towards the emerging technology started fading after the introduction of the World Wide Web with its user-friendly interface that made the Internet potentially accessible to a mass audience in the PRC. To a great extent, the Chinese government deserves praise for rapidly building the data network and seeing that access is being granted to a quickly expanding number of the country’s population (Harwit and Clark, 2001). The struggle for control of cyberspace information, physical data pipelines, and network revenue, however, have a significant effect on the growth of Internet technology in the coming decade.
Such comprehensive control of physical network is where the unique narrative begins in the case of China. Thus, asking who built the actual data pipelines through which information flows, and who now regulates and profits from these systems is essential to lay out the actors in the reverse saliency framework.
There are a number of cases in which there found lacking components of the system, or some imbalanced areas in which the technology was found insufficient to serve actors’
interests during the adoption of Internet technologies, in other words, reverse salient is found but none were more threatening for China than the fact that the Internet technology allows control by all users. Networked-ICT, in this sense, does not meet the expectations of the first hypothesis of this research which presumes the more the controllability that a technology
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haven’t come to an end, it rather intensified. The unique development of infrastructure, network operators, content providers, demographics and end-to-end principle in China are all evident to this end which are individually argued in this chapter through looking into the dynamic of relationship between ICT governance, authority and power. In other words, there pursued to reveal how the unique feature of the Internet required such need for the comprehensive control of infrastructure, and it is also pursued to reveal who the actors are in this rival for the control, how the power relations between these actors; private actors (the non-state actors and individuals) and the government (the state actor) dynamics shaped the way of networked- ICT governance in China today.The technology that emerged in response to new communication technology requirements was the TCP/IP, also described earlier in this chapter under the title of Force that was developed by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn (1974). The fundamental elements of TCP/IP involve flexibility and redundancy as well as openness, in other words, no reliance on the center/IP which was necessary in order to connect all users with different and incompatible operating systems. Security of the network and the ability to accurately identify those connecting to the Net (factors which would have considerable implications for national security concerns in the next step) appeared to have been low priorities in the TCP/IP principle. This can be partly explained by the fact that access to the first network was originally restricted to a small group of researchers in academia. Thus, the perception towards the qualities of flexibility, redundancy and openness was challenging the Chinese values and concerns which required a more comprehensive hand in adopting the technology mainly started from its infrastructure. This is an illustration of how certain norms, values and expectations shapes technology adoption in particular. But the structural change in design left to happen later mainly because the open and flexible architecture ultimately provided a rich environment for both innovation and collaboration (Cerf, and Kahn, 1974) similarly to the case of Chinese technological advancement.
The experiences of Chinese netizens with the peer to peer technology -also known as end-to-end technologies, and in response, how the peer to peer principle impact the balance of power between the Chinese government and netizens have been breathtaking, and often interested in dissident activities (Chase, Hachigian, Mulvenon, 2006). It obviously changed the government’s perception of the ICT technology, and the methods used in the balance of information control to counter the growing potential political impacts. It created a forever
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dilemma of which the Chinese government left to evaluate outcomes and measure each and every step they take in adopting a design that is made by the previous actor, the US, with different set of concerns and values: pursuing economic growth versus preserving its legitimacy.
While in the first data networks were developed as a defense-focused communication system in the US, and become an academic tool with public deployment, in China the first efforts at creating a data network mainly arose through educational networks and were funded by the state telecommunications regulator, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT). The very first major network control and development followed as the product of MPT-owned network, ChinaNET, was established (Harwit and Clark, 2001). China gave considerably low priority to maintain to be the only power of the network infrastructure in the beginning because the benefit of competition was needed. Such that MPT was not alone in the field of infrastructure development, there was a competition between private providers and MPT for the control of Chinese data network. The major player in running China’s network in particular worked mainly as a wholesale network manager and leased its lines to provincial and other regional providers in cities across the country (APPENDIX B). Having effectively used their greater financial resources and pricing structure to maintain control over the Internet’s physical network, central and local providers made a good use of this competition with private providers in terms of financial benefits and efficiency by selling access to the control of direct sales of Internet service of commercial Internet users (Harwit and Clark, 2001).
However, this balance of economic benefits from technology adoption and political stability was once again disrupted. As of 1994, there were only around 5,000 users in the entire PRC, the Internet population passed 22.5 million at the end of 2000, and as of June 2019 China had somewhere around 854 million netizens (IMF Working Paper, 2019). This tremendous growth in number of netizens resulted in the allowance for independent Internet service
However, this balance of economic benefits from technology adoption and political stability was once again disrupted. As of 1994, there were only around 5,000 users in the entire PRC, the Internet population passed 22.5 million at the end of 2000, and as of June 2019 China had somewhere around 854 million netizens (IMF Working Paper, 2019). This tremendous growth in number of netizens resulted in the allowance for independent Internet service