Abstract
Over the past decades, the Internet has become a main infrastructure of society, one that is indispensable to the operations of business, government, healthcare, socializing, transportation, and so on. In these operations, trust is a central matter of concern: we expect that the infrastructure is secure so we can safely carry out financial transactions, that our personal electronic health records are kept from snooping eyes; we expect the information we access is trustworthy, that the bit trails we leave when using the Internet are not used to harm us. But with data leaks, malware attacks, privacy violations and so forth, our trust in the Internet is being undermined. In an academic and public landscape where critical concerns about the political economy of the Internet, datafication, algorithmic discrimination and bias, automation and commodification processes are voiced forcefully, this book is a timely contribution that addresses such issues from the perspective of Internet regulation and governance. It does so with the aim of laying out the complex dynamics of trust in Internet infrastructures and uses, and informing the reader of the tricky trade-offs of regulation in support of general trust in the Internet. All of this is done with a view to how enhancing trust will condition innovation and economic growth on a global scale in ways that are respectful, equal, just and valuable for all. Writing about these matters in a way accessible to a broader audience is a daunting task. The authors must be lauded for the success of this undertaking.
Throughout, the book makes use of illustrative examples, which serve to make matters concrete, engaging, and presumably relatable to the general reader. But its main empirical attraction is the careful analysis and discussion of results from two iterations of a global survey on Internet security and trust carried out in 2014 and 2016, which develops across the book’s nine chapters. The survey was conducted by the global market research and consulting firm IPSOS, for the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Canada – an independent, non-partisan think tank with which both authors are affiliated. It spans 24 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey and the United States, and encompasses roughly 1000 respondents in each country. The revised edition of the book furthermore reports initial findings from a similar survey run in 2017 in an ‘afterword’, thus corroborating the book’s argument and discussing developments since the first edition was published.
Chapter 1 presents the authors’ central argument. Trust online is eroding. The sources of this erosion are multiple: government surveillance programmes, cybercrime, tech companies’ commodification of user data and so on. When users lose trust, they tend to change behaviour: they start using the Internet less and they start refraining from particular online activities and sites. These developments have implications for the Internet as a vehicle for innovation as well as social, political and first and foremost economic growth. The authors flesh this out as the key concern for the book. On this basis, they explore the sources and effects of the erosion of trust online and suggest ways forward at the level of technology and policy to ensure the future ‘operation and effectiveness of the internet’ (p. 12).
Chapter 2 lays out the basic technical descriptions of the Internet as infrastructure and the conceptual landscape upon which the authors build their analyses. In a mapping of the Internet ecosystem, using the telling metaphor of the tropical rainforest, or the jungle, readers are walked through some of the main building blocks that make the network of networks, which we know as the Internet, work as a key infrastructure of everyday life. The authors argue that trust is ‘the glue that holds the whole system together, determining both how and how much the Internet is used’ (p. 28), and move on to develop the concept of trust as composed of five interrelated dimensions. Correctness refers to the expectation that the user is routed to the right content – when I search for flight tickets from Copenhagen to Paris or for Oscar-winning movies to stream, I expect that search results will reflect my need for this particular information. Reliability is almost self-explanatory: if the Internet is a societal backbone, we count on stable and constant connection. The notion of security ‘captures the idea that people want to use the Internet without undue risk that their personal and financial information will be compromised’ (p. 33). Privacy, the perhaps most widely debated and theorized aspect of trust online, addresses trust through the expectation not to have all our activities and communications tracked, monitored and perhaps shared with or sold to others online for monetization or intelligence purposes. Finally, the authors consider safety as a component of trust, tapping into expectations that the Internet itself will not cause harm on people and property – elusively and scarily unpacked by the example of airplanes and the severe risks associated with the possible hacking of in-flight WIFI. These dimensions are pulled into the argument in diverse combinations in the remainder of the book. The conceptual work is simple – a sensible choice given the authors’ aim to invite the general reader into the discussion about trust and governance. Yet academics looking for genuine, theoretical contributions to understanding online trust, privacy, governance and so forth will have to look elsewhere.
Chapter 3 makes the case for the importance of the Internet in fostering wealthy societies, disruptive innovation, knowledge production and better opportunities for all, thus setting the scene for the analysis of eroding trust as a threat to the future Internet in the following five chapters. These chapters are thematically organized and can be read as stand-alone contributions to specific discussions of surveillance and privacy, regulation and the risk of fragmentation of the Internet, cybercrime and the Dark Web, cyberwarfare and digital divides.
Each analytical chapter expounds on the survey results to document mostly negative developments regarding users’ attitudes, behaviours and sensibilities towards the overriding issue of trust. We learn, perhaps not surprisingly, that people care about privacy and freedom of expression. But the authors further demonstrate that these concerns are greater in the so-called mixed regimes – those that are neither liberal-democratic nor autocratic and repressive (i.e. Mexico, South Korea, India etc.). They suggest that the combination of some freedom of speech and a half-hearted commitment to the protection of human rights creates ideal conditions for a high level of concern about online censorship. We learn that there are global inequalities in the awareness of the kinds of personal data collection and use that companies and governments engage in, and the strategies employed to circumvent this monitoring. We are carefully led through insightful analyses of regulatory conundrums, where policy measures taken to enhance trust may be counterproductive and have unintended consequences. For instance, the authors offer a compelling discussion of how attempts to enhance privacy protection through data localization regulation in fact complicate the security dimension of trust and therefore do not offer a plausible and adequate response to the erosion of trust. Moreover, they take geo-political interests into account when reflecting on how privacy may be weighted differently against security in countries and territories such as South Korea and Hong Kong, when compared with countries in Europe. We are presented with rich and troubling data on user behaviours on the Tor network, which allows anonymous communication online by routing traffic through an overlay network of computers volunteered by others, thus concealing the browsing user. Much Tor traffic is generated concerning illegal trade and child pornography. Tor nonetheless also enables citizens in repressive regimes to act under the radar by accessing censored information, thus making it difficult to shut down Tor altogether. The chapters gauge such a wide range of issues relevant to Internet governance that only a few can be mentioned here. The discussions are knowledgeable, insightful and move smoothly between close analysis of the empirical survey results, geopolitical and cultural explanations and current regulatory dilemmas to craft a complex narrative about the erosion of trust in the Internet. Recurrent themes are how novel measures to enhance trust may in fact undermine it, and how trust online is crucial for economic growth, innovation and global justice. The reader is certainly left with the sense that something needs to be done – the evidence is compelling.
In their final chapter, the authors sketch a palette of possible models for restoring trust. While they suggest playing on different strings supporting new technological developments (such as blockchain), and helping users and organizations perform better ‘digital hygiene’, the main way out of the muddle is new models for international, multi-stakeholder governance that bring state, commercial and civil society actors from across the globe together to formulate and harmonize standards and policies for the future Internet. Recent developments in the European Union (EU), such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR; which was implemented after the revised edition of the book was published), promote more legally based regulations of technology, data and digital markets as complementary to the self-regulation proposed by the authors. In that light, I do miss a discussion of the relative merits and weaknesses of leaving the important issue of ensuring trust in the Internet and its stakeholders up to self-regulation.
Still, the book is an important and diligently written intervention in debates about trust and the Internet, solidly grounding in a mapping of overall trends and national differences in the development of Internet infrastructures, its uses by state, commercial and civil society actors, and the concerns these uses raise for people. A particular merit is its comparative outlook, drawing data from populations across the globe. It is educative for the general reader, and it may indeed work as a conversation opener about an issue we should all care about: developing good, safe and prosperous Internet futures.