The Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Research Publication Series
Full Text (155 pages)here
The Internet Monitor project’s second annual report —Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World— is a collection of roughly three dozen short contributions that highlight and discuss some of the most compelling events and trends in the digitally networked environment over the past year. The report focuses on the interplay between technological platforms and policy; growing tensions between protecting personal privacy and using big data for social good; the implications of digital communications tools for public discourse and collective action; and current debates around the future of Internet governance.
This year we are especially excited to share our “Year in Review” interactive timeline, which highlights the year’s most fascinating Internet-related news stories, from censorship to Heartbleed to the Pirate Bay raid just last week.
We’ve also included a “By the Numbers” section that is slightly tongue-in-cheek and offers a look at the year’s “important” digital statistics such as the number of tweets per minute in 2014 (up 155,000 from last year) and the number of the top 100 accounts on Twitter that belong to Bollywood stars.
This publication is the second annual report of the Internet Monitor project at the Berkman Centerfor Internet & Society at Harvard University. As with the inaugural report, this year’s edition is a collaborative effort of the extended Berkman community. Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World includes nearly three dozen contributions from friends and colleagues around the world that highlight and discuss some of the most compelling events and trends in the digitally networked environment over the past year.
The result, intended for a general interest audience, brings together reflection and analysis on a broad range of issues and regions—from an examination of Europe’s “right to be forgotten” to a review of the current state of mobile security to an exploration of a new wave of movements attempting to counter hate speech online—and offers it up for debate and discussion. Our goal remains not to provide a definitive assessment of the “state of the Internet” but rather to provide a rich compendium of commentary on the year’s developments with respect to the online space.
Last year’s report examined the dynamics of Internet controls and online activity through the actions of government, corporations, and civil society. We focus this year on the interplay between technological platforms and policy; growing tensions between protecting personal privacy and using big data for social good; the implications of digital communications tools for public discourse and collective action; and current debates around the future of Internet governance.
The report reflects the diversity of ideas and input the Internet Monitor project seeks to invite. Some of the contributions are descriptive; others prescriptive. Some contain purely factual observations; others offer personal opinion. In addition to those in traditional essay format, contributions this year include a speculative fiction story exploring what our increasingly data-driven world might bring, a selection of “visual thinking” illustrations that accompany a number of essays, a “Year in Review” timeline that highlights many of the year’s most fascinating Internet-related news stories (and an interactive version of which is available at thenetmonitor.org), and a slightly tongue-in-cheek “By the Numbers” section that offers a look at the year’s important digital statistics. We believe that each contribution offers insights, and hope they provoke further reflection, conversation, and debate in both offline and online settings around the globe.
Table of Contents
By the Numbers
Year in Review
Adrienne Debigare, Rebekah Heacock Jones, and Jiou Park
Platforms and Policy
Robert Faris and Rebekah Heacock Jones
- SOPA Lives: Copyright’s Existing Power to Block Websites and “Break the Internet”
Andrew Sellars - ABC v. Aereo, Innovation, and the Cloud
Christopher T. Bavitz - The Spanish Origins of the European “Right to be Forgotten”: The Mario Costeja and Les Alfacs Cases
Ana Azurmendi - Troubling Solution to a Real Problem
Jonathan Zittrain - Community Mesh Networks: The Tradeoff Between Privacy, Openness, and Security
Primavera De Filippi - Warrant Canaries Beyond the First Amendment
Jonathon W. Penney - Net Neutrality and Intermediary Liability in Argentina
Eduardo Bertoni - Sexting, Minors, and US Legislation: When Laws Intended to Protect Have Unintended Consequences
Monica Bulger - Devices, Design, and Digital News for India’s Next Billion Internet Users
Hasit Shah - Dispute Resolution in the Sharing Economy
Ethan Katsh and Orna Rabinovich-Einy
Data and Privacy
Robert Faris and Rebekah Heacock Jones
- Data Revolutions: Bottom-Up Participation or Top-Down Control?
Tim Davies - Everything is Data. Yes, Even Development
Malavika Jayaram - Mapping the Data Ecosystem
Sara M. Watson - Mapping the Next Frontier of Open Data: Corporate Data Sharing
Stefaan G. Verhulst and David Sangokoya - The Social and Technical Tribulations of Data Privacy in a Mobile Society
Adrienne Debigare and Nathan Freitas - The Future of the Internet—and How to Secure It
Andy Ellis - Data Protection and Privacy Law: Where Regulators Are King?
Neal Cohen - Toward a New Approach to Data Protection in the Big Data Era
Alessandro Mantelero - In the Age of the Web, What Does “Public” Mean?
David R. O’Brien - Code is Law, But Law is Increasingly Determining the Ethics of Code
Jonathon W. Penney - Dada Data and the Internet of Paternalistic Things
Sara M. Watson
Public Discourse
Robert Faris
- Flower Speech: New Responses to Hatred Online
Susan Benesch - Facing Unthinkable Threats to Online Speech: Extreme Violence in Mexico and the Middle East
Ellery Biddle - The Use of the Internet to Enforce Religious Hegemony in Saudi Arabia
Helmi Noman - #BBUM and New Media Blacktivism
Clarence Wardell - How Activism and the Internet Can Change Policy
James Losey - Narratives of Conflict: What the 2014 Gaza War Can Tell Us About Discourse on the Internet
Sands Fish and Dalia Othman - Who Do We Trust When Talking About Digital News in Spain?
Charo Sádaba - Why Blogs Still Matter to the Young
Alison J. Head - The Podemos Phenomenon
Jordi Rodriguez Virgili
International Issues: Transnational Legal Tensions and Internet Governance
Robert Faris and Rebekah Heacock Jones
- The Rise of Information Sovereignty
Shawn Powers - Boundless Courts and a Borderless Internet
Vivek Krishnamurthy - The Great Firewall Welcomes You!
Nathan Freitas - Toward an Enhanced Role of Academia in the Debates About the Future of Internet Governance—From Vision to Practice
Urs Gasser - Proliferation of “Internet Governance”
Rolf H. Weber
Looking Forward
Robert Faris
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