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The Internet is a mess. We all know that. Plagued by trolls, full of fake news, under constant surveillance by governments and politically manipulated by all kinds of malevolent forces – as well as being in the hands of unaccountable, tax-avoiding, opaque corporations making billions from invading our privacy and exploiting our personal data. It’s all a disaster, and it must be cleaned up, made accountable, and a safe place for everyone. Right? Wrong. Cleaning it up may be the worst thing we can try to do. In my new book, The Internet, Warts and All: Free Speech, Privacy and Truth, I suggest that rather than go all-out to clean it up, exterminate the trolls, expunge the fake news and so forth, we need to embrace the mess, and learn to accept the internet. The mess is what makes the internet work. The mess is what makes it dynamic – and to clamp down on it is likely to be ineffective at best, and more often than not actually counterproductive.
One of the things that motivated me to write The Internet, Warts and All was the realisation that though we understand that the internet itself is all about connecting things together, we often don’t understand that this is not just about connecting the technology, or indeed about connecting people, but that about connecting issues. The subtitle to the book, Free Speech, Privacy and Truth gives a clue to the contention that underpins it: free speech, privacy and truth are not separate issues but are intrinsically and inextricably connected. Anything that has an impact on privacy will have repercussions for free speech and for ‘truth,’ for example. Measures we make to try to protect ‘truth’ generally involved invasions of privacy and restrictions on free speech. Some of those most protective of free speech often end up interfering with privacy and obscuring the truth. This is not an accident: it is about how the internet works, about how we use the internet, how the tech companies make money and perhaps even deeper. The result is an internet that is messy, confused and paradoxical – full of contradictions and complexities that cannot be easily untangled. This, however, is a feature of the internet, not a bug. It is part of what makes the internet work, what makes it a creative and dynamic environment. It is what gives it its power – and though it is uncomfortable to face up to, face up to it we must. We need to see the internet as it really is, warts and all, if we are to find better ways to deal with it.
The first part of the book deals with some of the persistent myths about the internet that make many of our decisions about how to deal with it so bad. The idea that everything on the internet is permanent is one – ‘everyone knows’ that once something is on the net, it’s there forever. The confusion we have over the perfection of the net – sometimes we treat the computer as oracle, and get upset about any suggestion that the record needs correcting – is another. Perhaps the most important is the myth of neutrality – one pushed by those who benefit from it, from Google and Facebook to Wikipedia – which still has a huge amount of traction. It moves on to look at the related myths about free speech and privacy – so many people, companies and groups claim to be champions of freedom of speech, for example, though their claims fall apart under scrutiny. The number of misunderstandings of privacy – what it means, when it comes into play, what the impact of failure to protect it can be – might be even greater.
The Internet, Warts and All explores these issues using many of the most popular and successful parts of the internet – from the aforementioned Google, Facebook and Wikipedia onwards. Some of the most topical issues of the day come into play – surveillance, trolling and fake news each have their own chapters. This, again, is no accident. Surveillance is an issue because it comes naturally to the internet – and it impacts upon all three of the themes of the book. It chills free speech by invading privacy, and both stops people ‘speaking’ the truth and seeking out the truth. Trolls can be fiercely protective of their own privacy and their right to free speech, even as they invade others’ privacy and shout down their free speech, whilst spreading fake news to make it harder to discern the truth. That fake news itself is created via invasions of privacy – data mining to identify issues that can trigger people, profiling to identify victims and then targeting – and uses free speech rights to protect its freedom to mess with the truth.
This may all seem like a mess. Indeed, it is all a mess. What is more, as the book explores, many of the methods applied and suggested by governments and internet companies to ‘clean up’ the mess will actually make it worse. Tools to fight trolls end up being weapons used by trolls against their victims. Measures to counter fake news end up promoting that fake news and making it more likely that people will read and believe it. Surveillance measures intended to make us more secure – backdoors to encryption are just one example – actually create new vulnerabilities and put us in more danger.
So what can we do? The argument made in The Internet, Warts and All is that these problems are inherent in the nature of the internet – but that doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can do. We need, however, to be more intelligent, more nuanced, more flexible and more willing to own up to mistakes. The final chapter of the book includes a set of rules of thumb that should guide us. Not being afraid to face up to the internet giants is one of these – and the recent failure of Mark Zuckerberg to appear before the international panel convened by the UK Parliament’s DCMS committee is just one example of the way in which the internet giants have so far seemed all-but-untouchable. Our regular failure to listen to expert opinion is another – sadly not restricted to the internet.
These rules of thumb are not, of course, recipes for success. Indeed, the key point of the book is that there are no recipes for success, just guidelines to keep going, to deal with the extreme problems and find ways forward that work. That work messily, untidily, confusingly and paradoxically, but at least to an extent do work. And, more importantly, that we can avoid making the worst and most counterproductive errors. Right now, those errors abound, from the continuing efforts by governments such as Australia’s to mandate weaknesses in encryption to the EU’s latest copyright directive which, though well-meaning, is almost certain to cause deep messes over uploads, restrict freedom of speech and invade privacy whilst conspicuously failing to achieve its intended aims. These are just two of many examples – more appear on an almost daily basis.
The various attempts made to regulate fake news have so far all looked likely to be similarly counterproductive – but this is very much a current issue. Like many of these areas, the field is moving so fast that it is hard to keep up – particularly for academic books that take a long time to go from thought to page. Indeed, even since the book was published in August this year, things have moved on – and I have a newer paper concerning Facebook’s specific role in the spreading of Fake News, that has just been published in Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly. The internet is not just messy, but the nature of that mess is changing all the time. We need to pay attention to this. The Internet, Warts and All is intended as a way to help us to do just that.