The World Wide Web grew out of the need to share information openly and easily, but there have always been tensions between sharing information freely and the control of information for political and commercial reasons.
In the 1960s the US Army envisioned a military communication network that could withstand a nuclear attack. This was realized with a network with no central hub; instead information passed from any point of the network to another through many decentralized switching stations or routers. Destroy any part of the Internet and information could still flow through the surviving parts of the network.
A culture of sharing information has had commercial and political impact. Successful companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook were formed during the in the early 2000s and are based entirely on Internet communication. In 2011, after analyzing millions of Tweets, YouTube content and blog posts, Phil Howard of the University of Washington found that large scale producing, sharing, and accessing political information by citizens played a role in Tunisia and Egypt's revolutions.
Splinternet, refers to the splintering of global connected Internet into smaller isolated pieces with barriers to communication among networks. Other terms used are the Balkanization of the Internet and Cyberbalkanization. Threats of splintering from authoritarian governments are to be expected, but they also come from companies associated with the Internet's success as they attempt to fragment the Internet to strengthen their own market share. According to Rogier Creemers, a professor of law and governance at Leiden University in the Netherlands, “The Internet is as much a tool for control, surveillance and commercial considerations as it is for empowerment.”
In 2015, China's president Xi Jinping reasserted that each state has a sovereign right to control it own cyberspace. This view is also supported by the governments of North Korea and Russia. China has declared "Internet sovereignty" and uses a combination of censorship and surveillance that blocks content not approved by the government, such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Instead it provides its own government sanctioned versions of Internet search engines and social media platforms. The European Union recently released a General Data Protection Regulation that will determine how non-EU companies can market to or monitor EU individuals. Copyright regulations in the United States, Canada, and other countries, often result in messages stating that online content is not available to users outside of their political boundaries. The map of the political world is rapidly becoming the map of cyberspace.
"Consider how often you rely not just on search engines to find information, but also on blogs, online newspapers, and other intermediaries that point you in the direction of useful information. It is one thing for government to crack down openly on forbidden information. But it can be harder to notice that information has become more difficult to find. It is hard, in other words, to know what you don't know" (Goldsmith & Wu, 2006, pp. 75-76).
The Internet was designed with standardized protocols to facilitate the sharing of information. In the 1990s and early 2000s the World Wide Web was accessed with an Internet browser on a personal computer or laptop. The number of platforms and devices that can now access the Internet has become more diverse with smartphones, tablets and gaming consoles and even kitchen appliances. More importantly, each company brand employs its own operating system and specialized technology. A person's experience of information on the Internet differs not only whether they are accessing the information from a laptop or a smartphone, but also depends on the brand of smartphone and which apps they are using to find the information. According to Ananthaswamy (2011), "as millions of people buy into Apple's world of iPads and iPhones, they are also buying into Apple's restricted vision of the internet. The company tightly controls the technologies users are allowed to put on those devices". Google is currently under investigation US Federal Trade Commission to determine if its search results unfairly promotes traffic to sites it is affiliated with at the cost of its competitors' sites and services. Facebook is also contributing to the splintering of the Internet with increasing agreements with news agencies to place content within Facebook accessible only to those with a Facebook account, by which users have agreed to the privacy conditions set by Facebook.
The disadvantages of this commercially driven splintering are two-fold. First, it gives rise to the personalization of the Internet at the expense of communication among communities. Secondly, without commonly shared technological standards and protocols, the individual networks are vulnerable to failure in the precise way that the original Internet was designed to avoid.
References:
Ananthaswamy, A. (2011, July 16). Age of the splinternet. New Scientist, 42-45. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.
Goldsmith, J, & Wu, T. (2006). Who controls the Internet? Illusions of a borderless world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Malcomson, S. (2015, December 21). Welcome to the splinternet. World Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-malcomson/welcome-to-the-splinterne_b_8855212.html
In this video Eli Pariser explains how Google personalizes your results and how this affects your Google searches.
Note: Most web browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) will have an Incognito or Private Browsing mode, which can be used to prevent your browsing history, location, and previous searches from influencing your results when using tools like Google. Private browsing does not save your search history locally on your computer, but it often can still be accessed through other means, like the server or your IP address.
TED. (2011, May 2). Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles" [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVtgb153S6I
The American Library Association defines censorship as "the suppression of ideas and information that certain persons—individuals, groups or government officials—find objectionable or dangerous. It is no more complicated than someone saying, “Don’t let anyone read this book, or buy that magazine, or view that film, because I object to it! ” Censors try to use the power of the state to impose their view of what is truthful and appropriate, or offensive and objectionable, on everyone else. Censors pressure public institutions, like libraries, to suppress and remove from public access information they judge inappropriate or dangerous, so that no one else has the chance to read or view the material and make up their own minds about it. The censor wants to prejudge materials for everyone" (American Library Association, 2016, para. 4).
"In most instances, a censor is a sincerely concerned individual who believes that censorship can improve society, protect children, and restore what the censor sees as lost moral values. But each of us has the right to read, view, listen to, and disseminate constitutionally protected ideas, even if a censor finds those ideas offensive" (American Library Association, 2016, para. 6).
"[T]he most significant form of censorship, historically, has been economic censorship, where it is simply not profitable to publish something because there is no market for it" (Assange, 2014, p. 69).
But publishers and intermediaries like Facebook do censor based on criteria other than profit.
Similarly, Halavais (2006) argues that search engines themselves censor not because of what they include but because of what they exclude in their results - and their lack of transparency about that ranking. "If we accept that some things should not be indexed, and other things may not belong at the top of the rankings, there should be some way for the public to learn that these decisions are being made, and how they are made, at the very least" (p. 124).
References:
American Library Association. (2016). Intellectual freedom and censorship Q&A. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/censorshipfirstamendmentissues/ifcensorshipqanda
Assange, J. (2014). When Google met WikiLeaks: New York: OR Books.
Halavais, A. (2009). Search engine society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
China
With an estimated 700 million Internet users, Chinas has declared "Internet sovereignty" and uses a combination of censorship and surveillance that blocks content not approved by the government, such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Instead it provides its own government sanctioned versions of Internet search engines and social media platforms. The Washington Post reports that "China’s Firewall is far more sophisticated and multi-tiered than a simple on-off switch: It is an attempt to bridge one of the country’s most fundamental contradictions — to have an economy intricately connected to the outside world but a political culture closed off from such “Western values”. (Denyer, 2016)"
In his forward-looking book Search Engine Society, in a fascinating chapter entitled "Attention," professor Alexander Halavais describes the problems of media concentration within the Internet:
"The successful search engine does this: it is a technology as much of ignoring as it is of presenting. Who gets to affect that process of selection and who benefits from that process remain open questions" (Halavais, 2009, p. 57).
Halavais goes on to say that while the Internet has the potential to be flat (non-hierarchical, with attention to all pages equally distributed), if it were so it would be "entirely unnavigable" (2009, p. 59). The sheer volume of websites would make this impractical today.
So some sites must get priority, and others must not, in order for the Internet to be usable. Who gets to set that priority?
Enter page rank. "Ranking is inherent to the functioning of most (though not all) search engines, and anywhere there is a ranking, there are those who wish to move upward." (Halavais, 2009, pp. 71-75).
Search engine optimization focuses on web analytics, behavioral tracking, keywords and linking to improve a site's visibility. By "tracking how people search for and find information online, both search engine designers and marketers are attempting to meet the practices and evolving needs of a diverse group of users" (Halavais, 2009, p. 81).
This ultimately leads to, really must lead to, the commercialization of the web. "Both search engine designers and marketers aim to present information in a more effective way. It should not be surprising that the two are converging, and there are opportunities for changing how people buy and sell things, and what role large corporations play in this process" (Halavais, 2009, p. 81).
Large corporations can afford to pay for advertising that will boost their rankings in search results. The most obvious example is sponsored links which always appear at the top of the results, with the "organic" search results below.
Another example is Pay Per Click (PPC), an advertising model "used to direct traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked" ("Pay per click," 2016, para. 1).
"With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market...Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have also adopted pay-per-click as one of their advertising models" ("Pay per click," 2016, para. 2, emphasis added).
So a question to ask ourselves - when those large corporations merge, does the concentration of ownership in the media, and thus in the web, become problematic? How do small companies and alternative voices get represented in a search-engine-optimized world paid for by massive multi-national media companies?
Seeker Daily. (2016, March 21). Who owns the media? [Video file]. Retrieved June 30, 2016 from https://youtu.be/awRRPPE3V5Q
Halavais, A. (2009). Search engine society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pay per click. (2016, June 13). In Wikipedia. Retrieved July 4, 2016 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_per_click
A transcript of the video is not available, but a summary is available on the PBS NewsHour website (page opens in new window).