African Preparatory Meeting on Internet governance forum

18-22 September, Cairo, Egypt

Critical Issues in Free Flow of Information in Africa within the context of the Internet Governance

Pierre Dandjinou

Talking points

• Africa and the Free flow of Information

• From data to knowledge and Wisdom

• The Economics of data and information

• Emerging concepts and behaviours

• Key instruments/mechanisms preventing FFI

• Sustaining FFI : What to Do?

Africa and free flow of Information

• Reference to AISI and recommandations and actions plans on Free flow of information

• Tunis Agenda (paragraphs 42, 46, 90)• challenges to technical interoperability and the

free flow of information on the Internet• the needs of online libraries to provide access to

knowledge and encourage development (e.g. Bibliotheca Alexandria)

• A few Privacy Act and Information Act in Africa (examples//)

From data to Knowledge and wisdom

• A quantum shift has occurred as a result of the emergence of the first substantial information infrastructure, the Internet.

• The concepts of 'data', 'information', 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' need to be outlined.

• Note the subsequent representations of data, such as documents, databases and directories.

• Data now exists in different forms: • In a very short time, a great deal of copyrightable

material has leapt from the physical to the electronic, or, as Negroponte (1995) preferred to put it, has migrated from atoms to bits

Questioning the notions of Freedom of information(FOI) and free Flow of

information(FFI)in The Information or Digital Era

• The notion of 'freedom of information' is becoming vague and the so called Free flow of information needs to be put within a context.

• At the turn of the century, any discussion of 'freedom of information' has to reflect the characteristics of information in the digital era.

• it's important to examine the technical features of information production and reticulation, and then to build from that an understanding of the political economy of the current era.

The Economics of data and information

• A succession of technologies have made it possible to express ideas in patterns that can be stored on digital media, can be easily, cheaply and rapidly reproduced and disseminated, and can be manipulated by machines as well as people.

• During the last half-millennium, successive waves of information technologies have increased the accessibility of data, and changed its economics

• all forms of data now have similarities with speech, and hence freedoms that have long applied to speech are being credibly claimed to apply to other forms of data as well. The expression ceases to be differentiable, because digitisation has "detached information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition" Barlow (1994).

Free Flow of Information : Emerging Concepts

• Open standards• Free/Libre Open Source• Open Access• Free Culture (cf. Lawrence Lessig : Free Culture

: how Big media uses Technology and the Law to lock down Culture and control Creativity)

• Net Neutrality• Web2.0 (Collaborative tools such as You Tube

and MySpace)

Impacts , new behaviours and Implications

• Face to the moving situations, new behaviours have arisen, and new theories of economics and political economy have emerged : Governments and big corporations catch up with different reactions. (China, Europe, US; also Google, Yahoo..)

• Less apparent are the second-order implications that are arising from the new information technologies. In fact the conventional expectation that the Internet is delivering greater freedom of access to information may be seriously misguided, and that instead it may result in loss of some of our existing freedoms.

• Online challenges to freedom of expression and access to knowledge.

The Political Playing Field

• There are various justifications for access to information. There is also a wide range of justifications for the denial of access to information. These include many narrow interests, but also some of broader concern, such as privacy, and the assurance of some degree of order in the processes of economic development.

• The exercise of political choice is primarily dependent on interplay between institutions that have political power, and that exercise it. Thus, Government agencies have a litany of excuses available, in the form of exemptions with wide applicability. Moreover, there are increasingly frequent refusals by agencies and Ministers to provide information to the Parliament and Parliamentary Committees, and Auditors-General are currently submitting to a trend towards gentler audits and audit reports.

Key Instruments

• Legal protection regimes• Copyrights and licensing regimes (Extension of the

power of Copyright Owners) The major publishing interests have been able to significantly extend the scope of copyright, and hence protect their revenues, profits and empires

• The exercise of power that the copyright-owner gains from technological innovations and legislative amendments represents a very substantial negative effect on equitable public access to information

• Technical protections

Technologies that preclude access to information to the general public

• Powerful organisations have a variety of interests in preventing the exposure of data they control.

• security technology (by using cryptography-based scrambling of content while it is in transit and stored on the client);

• 'watermarking' technology (to uniquely identify the publication); and • 'fingerprinting' technology (to uniquely identify the copy downloaded

to the particular user).• Alternatively, the open, public Internet could be circumvented by the

emergence of a new architecture, developed and promulgated by an alliance of corporations and governments, much more suited to their needs rather than those of consumers and citizens.(Internet 3??)

• A variety of tools is available, many based on cryptographic methods, which enable individuals to protect their identity.

Technologies (C’tinued)

• There has been speculation that the largest uses of these tools may be by governments and by businesses dealing in particular kinds of data, such as pornography.

• Similar tools can also be used to access documents without leaving an identified trail as to who has viewed which documents (e.g. 'anonymous Web surfing').

• Such tools are valuable not only to individuals, but also to governments and businesses conducting covert operations of various kinds. (so called anti terrorism measures)

The Dark Side of the Information Revolution

• A great deal of the information that has become available on the Internet is a result of amateurs playing author, editor, publisher and marketer, and in some cases doing them in a manner significantly less professional than was achieved by conventional publishers.

• 'information asymmetries', i.e. inequality of information among the participants in decision-making processes, and hence imbalance of bargaining power, and inequities.

The Counter-Reformation

• Content providers who depended on their customers paying full value for access to it are seeing their business model undermined by the digital revolution .

• corporations that are dependent for their survival on the exploitation of rights to information are taking action to defend their positions. The risk is that these defensive stances may be economically and culturally very harmful .

FFI in the Digital area : conclusions

• The implications of these developments is that governments and corporations are in a position to enhance the restrictions on access to information.

• The golden era of information accessibility e.g. free flow of information is under threat : governments have successfully resisted Freedom of information and now have additional weapons available to them.

• Major corporations are wielding their power to protect their own interests.

Sustaining FFI: What to do?

• What is needed is a legal right to access data, in any form on any medium, i.e. irrespective of the nature of the data object. (Information Act, ICT or Digital bills.)

• Fighting legal protectionism more vigorously;• Revamping the copyright regimes• Efforts to standardize legal rights to access and use

information between consumers in the developed and developing world.

• Information and networking technologies need to be carefully designed to avoid protectionism becoming entrenched within information infrastructure