NEWS
--- Internet for Economic Development Initiative
--- Indian Official Calls For Cyberlaws

ARTICLES
--- Will the Internet be Bad for Democracy? - Eli M. Noam

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NEWS

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Internet for Economic Development Initiative

Vice President Al Gore announced on June 21 a new initiative to increase

Internet access and use in developing countries. The ten targeted developing

countries include Guatemala, Jamaica, Bulgaria, Egypt, Morocco, Ghana,

Guinea, Uganda, South Africa, and Mozambique. The U.S. is actively

encouraging other interested countries to join in this initiative, which is

part of a broad effort by the U.S. to foster the information industry

worldwide.

Through the initiative, these countries will collaborate with the U.S.

government, the private sector, multilateral organizations, and non-profits

to help them use electronic-commerce and the Internet as tools for economic

development. Specific aims of the initiative include fostering the

deployment of specific Internet applications such as micro-e-commerce,

telemedicine, distance education, and improved access to government

services.

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Indian Official Calls For Cyberlaws

By A. Nair

InternetNews India Correspondent

[June 23, 1999--MUMBAI] Creation of an appropriate legal framework of cyber

laws for checking cyber and Net related crimes should have been the

precursor for extensive computerization in government offices, according to

Central Vigilance Commissioner N Vittal.

"Wide use of computers in government highlights the imperative need for

cyber laws so that computer generated documents can be acceptable for

purposes like production in court as evidence, proof for titles and other

legal claims," Mr Vittal said. He was speaking at a meeting in Mumbai after

launching an office management software system -- Micro Office Desk System

(MODS). "Even for India to become an information technology superpower,

legal recognition is necessary," he said adding computer-based signature

verification facility should also be incorporated in such a law. He pointed

out that the Indian Evidence Act, various tax laws and property acts also

needed to be amended for the purpose. Though computer penetration was low,

usage of the existing facilities was even lower, he said adding "focus is a

must for improving the productivity of the existing systems for deriving

greater national benefits."

The MODS software, used in monitoring correspondence, files, appointments of

heads of departments and printing appropriate reports for office management,

was developed by Micro Associates and Microsoft India. Computerization, he

pointed out, was the best solution to solve the problems of office

management in government offices such as slow moving files, missing files

and handling of voluminous information. He added that productivity in

government offices could be enhanced with a system by which reminders would

be automatically generated and losing of important papers could be avoided

and traced. The Maharashtra government's Information

Technology Task Force chairman Prakash Javadekar, who was also present on

the occasion, said the government was planning to develop e-commerce in a

big way in Mumbai. Speaking about the product, Microsoft India director,

Rajiv Kaul said MODS provided dynamic solutions that could improve

efficiency of departments, deliver services to the citizens via the Net and

support business growth objectives of public sector undertakings.

Recently, a hacker had impersonated the chief of Videsh Sanchar Nigam

Limited and sent fake e-mail to Internet subscribers. At that point, several

ways to tackle the anticipated increase in cyber crimes was discussed.

"Hacking is not new in Mumbai, but it's not as common as it is in foreign

countries," says an information technology expert, adding that "the western

world has already devised ways to check computer-related crimes, while we

are yet to come up with a legal framework for this." Given Mumbai's status

as the country's financial capital, banks and financial institutions have

been constantly expanding their computer networks in the past few years.

According to S P Talwar, deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India,

"detection of such crimes is often difficult." The RBI is liaising with the

spheres of finance, commerce and law to evolve laws such as the Information

Technology Act and Cyber Laws. The apex bank has already made several

initiatives and framed a model Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) Act. It has

also framed rules suggesting amendments to the various acts such as the

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ARTICLES

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Taken from NETFUTURE #91 edited by Steve Talbot

WILL THE INTERNET BE BAD FOR DEMOCRACY?

Eli M. Noam (noam@columbia.edu)

[NETFUTURE reader Eli Noam is professor of finance and economics at Columbia

University. He is also director of the Columbia Institute for

Tele-Information at the university's Graduate School of Business and a

former Public Service Commissioner for the State of New York. This article

is an abridged version of a paper he read at the Heinz Nixdorf Computer

Museum Forum, Paderborn, Germany, in May, 1999. SLT]

------

Controversies abound on most aspects of the Internet. Yet when it comes to

its impact on the democratic process, the answer seems unanimous. The

Internet is good for democracy. It creates digital citizens (Wired, 1997)

active in the vibrant teledemocracy (Etzioni, 1997) of the Electronic

Republic (Grossman, 1995) in the Digital Nation (Katz, 1992). Is there no

other side to this question? Is the answer so positively positive?

The reasons why the Internet is supposed to strengthen democracy include the

following.

* The Internet lowers the entry barriers to political participation.

* It strengthens political dialogue.

* It creates community.

* It cannot be controlled by government.

* It increases voting participation.

* It permits closer communication with officials.

* It spreads democracy world-wide.

My skepticism about the Internet as a pro-democracy force is not based on

its uneven distribution. This will solve itself soon, in rich countries. It

is more systemic. The problem is that most analysts commit a so-called error

of composition. That is, they confuse micro behavior with macro results.

They think that if something is helpful to an individual, it is also helpful

to society at large, when everybody uses it.

Suppose we had asked, a century ago, whether the automobile would reduce

pollution. The answer would have been easy and positive: no horses, no waste

on the roads, no smell, no use of agricultural land to grow oats. But we now

recognize that in the aggregate, mass motorization has been bad for the

environment. It created emissions, dispersed the population, and put more

demand on land.

The second error is that of inference. Just because the Internet is good for

democracy in places like North Korea, Iran, or Sudan does not mean that it

is better for Germany, Denmark, or the United States. Just because three TV

channels offer more diversity of information than one does not mean that

30,000 are better than 300.

So here are several reasons why the Internet will not be good for democracy,

corresponding to the pro-democracy arguments described above.

The Internet will make politics more expensive and raise entry barriers

------

The hope has been that online public space will be an electronic version of

a New England or Swiss town meeting, open and ongoing. The Internet will

permit easy and cheap political participation and political campaigns. But

is that true?

Easy entry exists indeed for an Internet based on narrowband transmission,

which is largely text-based. But the emerging broadband Internet will permit

fancy video and multimedia information resources. Inevitably, audience

expectations will rise. When everyone can speak, who will be listened to? If

the history of mass media means anything, it will not be everyone. It cannot

be everyone. Nor will the wisest or those with the most compelling case or

cause be heard, but the best produced and the best promoted. And that is

expensive.

Secondly, because of the increasing glut and clutter of information, those

with messages will have to devise strategies to draw attention. Political

attention, just like commercial attention, will have to be created.

Ideology, self-interest, and public spirit are some factors. But in many

cases, attention needs to be bought, by providing entertainment, gifts,

games, lotteries, coupons, and so on. That, too, is expensive. The basic

cost of information is rarely the problem in politics; it's the packaging

and distribution.

Thirdly, effective politics on the Internet will require elaborate and

costly data collection. The reason is that Internet media operate

differently from traditional mass media. They will not broadcast to all but

instead to specifically targeted individuals. Instead of the broad stroke of

political TV messages, "netcasted" politics will be customized to be most

effective. This requires extensive information about individuals' interests

and preferences. Data banks then become a key to political effectiveness.

Who would own and operate them? In some cases the political parties. But

they could not maintain control over the data banks in the case of primary

elections that are open to many candidates. There is also a privacy problem,

when semi-official political parties store information about the views,

fears, and habits of millions of individuals. For both of those reasons the

ability of parties to collect such data will be limited.

Other political data banks will be operated by advocacy and interest groups.

They would then donate data to the candidate instead of money. The

importance of such data banks would further weaken campaign finance laws and

further strengthen interest group pluralism over traditional political

parties.

But in particular, political data banks will be maintained through private

companies that are now known as political consultants. They will establish

permanent, proprietary data banks and become still bigger players in the

political environment and operate increasingly as ideology- free, for-profit

consultancies.

Even if the use of the Internet makes some political activity cheaper, it

does so for everyone, which means that all organizations will increase their

activities rather than spend less on them. Thus, any effectiveness of early

adopters will soon be matched by their rivals and will simply lead to an

accelerated, expensive, and mutually canceling political arms- race of

investment in activist techniques and new-media marketing technologies. The

early users of the Internet experienced a gain in their effectiveness, and

now they incorrectly extrapolate this to society at large. While such gain

is trumpeted as the empowerment of the individual over Big Government and

Big Business, much of it has simply been a relative strengthening of

individuals and groups with computer and online skills (who usually have

significantly above-average income and education) and a relative weakening

of those without such resources. Government did not become more responsive

due to online users; it just became more responsive to them.

The Internet will make reasoned political dialog more difficult

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True, the Internet is a more active and interactive medium than TV. But is

its use in politics a promise or a reality?

Just because the quantity of information increases does not mean that its

quality rises. To the contrary. As the Internet leads to more information

clutter, it will become necessary for any message to get louder. Political

information becomes distorted, shrill, and simplistic.

One of the characteristics of the Internet is disintermediation. In

politics, this leads to the decline of traditional news media and their

screening techniques. The acceleration of the news cycle by necessity leads

to less careful checking, while competition leads to more sensationalism.

Issues get attention if they are visually arresting and easily understood.

This leads to media events, to the fifteen minutes of fame, to the sound

bite, to infotainment. The Internet also permits anonymity, which leads to

last-minute political ambush. The Internet lends itself to dirty politics

more than the more accountable TV.

While the self-image of the tolerant digital citizen persists, empirical

studies of the content of several political usenet groups found much

intolerant behavior: domineering by a few, rude "flaming", and reliance on

unsupported assertions.

The Internet disconnects as much as it connects

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Democracy has historically been based on community. Traditionally, such

communities were territorial -- electoral districts, states, and towns.

"Community", "communicate" -- the terms are related: community is shaped by

the ability of its members to communicate with each other. If the underlying

communications system changes, the communities are affected. As one connects

in new ways, one also disconnects the old ways. As the Internet links with

new and far-away people, it also reduces relations with neighbors and

neighborhoods.

The long-term impact of cheap and convenient communication is a further

geographic dispersal of the population and thus greater physical isolation.

At the same time, the enormous increase in the number of information

channels leads to an individualization of mass media, and to fragmentation.

On the other hand, the Internet also creates electronically linked new types

of community. But these are different from traditional communities. They

have less of the averaging that characterizes physical communities --

throwing together the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Instead,

these new communities are more stratified along some common dimension, such

as business, politics, or hobbies. These groups will therefore tend to be

issue-driven, more narrow-minded, and sometimes more extreme, as like-minded

people reinforce each other's views.

Furthermore, many of these communities will be owned by someone. They are

like a shopping mall, a gated community, with private rights to expel, to

promote, and to censor. The creation of community has been perhaps the main

asset of Internet portals such as AOL. It is unlikely that they will dilute

the value of this asset by relinquishing control.

If it is easy to join such virtual communities, it also becomes easy to

leave, in a civic sense, one's physical community. Community becomes a

browsing experience.

Information does not necessarily weaken the state

------

Can the Internet reduce totalitarianism? Of course. Tyranny and mind control

become harder. But Internet romantics tend to underestimate the ability of

governments to control the Internet, to restrict it, and indeed to use it as

an instrument of surveillance. How quickly we forget. Only a few years ago,

the image of information technology was Big Brother and mind control. That

was extreme, of course, but the surveillance potential clearly exists.

Cookies can monitor usage. Wireless applications create locational fixes.

Identification requirements permit the creation of composites of peoples'

public and private activities and interests. Newsgroups can (and are)

monitored by those with stakes in an issue.

Free access to information is helpful to democracy. But the value of

information to democracy tends to get overblown. It may be a necessary

condition, but not a sufficient one. Civil war situations are not typically

based on a lack of information. Yet there is an undying belief that if

people "only knew", for example, by logging online, they would become more

tolerant of each other. That is a wishful and optimistic hope, but is it

based on history? Hitler came to power in a republic where political

information and communication were plentiful.

Democracy requires stability, and stability requires a bit of inertia. The

most stable democracies are characterized by a certain slowness of change.

Examples are Switzerland and England. The U.S. operates on the basis of a

210-year-old Constitution. Hence the acceleration of politics caused by the

Internet is a two-edged sword.

Electronic voting does not strengthen democracy

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The Internet enables electronic voting and hence may increase voter turnout.

But it also changes democracy from a representative model to one of direct

democracy.

Direct democracy puts a premium on resources of mobilization, favoring money

and organization. It disintermediates elected representatives. It favors

sensationalized issues over "boring" ones. Almost by definition, it limits

the ability to make unpopular decisions. It makes harder the building of

political coalition. The arguments against direct democracy were made

perhaps most eloquently in the classic arguments for the adoption of the

U.S. Constitution by James Madison in the *Federalist Papers* #10.

Electronic voting is not simply the same as traditional voting without the

inconvenience of waiting in line. When voting becomes like channel clicking

a remote control, it is left with little of the civic engagement of voting.

When voting becomes indistinguishable from a poll, polling and voting merge.

With the greater ease and anonymity of voting, a market for votes is

unavoidable. Participation declines if people know the expected result too

early, or where the legitimacy of the entire election is in question.

Direct access to public officials will be phony

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Yes, anybody can fire off email messages to public officials and perhaps

even get a reply, and this provides an illusion of access. But the limited

resource will still be scarce: the attention of those officials. By

necessity, only a few messages will get through. Replies are canned, like

answering machines. If anything, the greater flood of messages will make

gatekeepers more important than ever: power brokers who can provide access

to officials. As demand increases while the supply is static, the price of

access goes up, as does the commission to the middle-man. This does not help

the democratic process.

Indeed, public opinion can be manufactured. Email campaigns can substitute

technology and organization for people. Instead of grass roots one can

create what has been described as "Astroturf", that is, manufactured

expression of public opinion.

Ironically, the most effective means of communication (outside of a bank

check) becomes the lowest-tech: the handwritten letter.

If, in the words of a famous cartoon, on the Internet nobody knows that you

are a dog, then everyone may be treated as one.

The Internet facilitates international manipulation of domestic politics

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Cross-border interference in national politics becomes easier with the

Internet. Why negotiate with the U.S. ambassador if one can target a key

Congressional chairman by an email campaign, chat group interventions,

misinformation, and untraceable donations. People have started to worry

about computer attacks by terrorists. They should worry more about

state-sponsored interference in other countries' electronic politics.

Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to conduct national politics in a

globalized world where distance and borders are less important than in the

past, even if one does not share Negroponte's hyperbole of the "evaporation"

of the nation state. The difficulty of societies to control their own

affairs leads, inevitably, to backlash and regulatory intervention.

Conclusion

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It is easy to romanticize the past of democracy as Athenian debates in front

of an involved citizenry, and to believe that its return by electronic means

is nigh. A quick look in the rear-view mirror at radio and then TV is

sobering. Here, too, the new media were heralded as harbingers of a new and

improved political dialogue. But the reality of those media has been one of

cacophony, fragmentation, increasing cost, and declining value of "hard"

information.

The Internet makes it easier to gather and assemble information, to

deliberate and to express oneself, and to organize and coordinate action.

The Internet can mobilize hard-to-reach groups, and it has unleashed much

energy and creativity. Obviously there will be some shining success stories.

But it would be naive to cling to the image of the early Internet --

nonprofit, cooperative, and free -- and ignore that it is becoming a

commercial medium, like commercial broadcasting that replaced amateur ham

radio. If anything, the Internet will lead to less stability, more

fragmentation, less ability to fashion consensus, more interest-group

pluralism. High-capacity computers connected to high-speed networks are no

remedies for flaws in a political system. There is no quick techno-fix.

The Internet does not create a Jeffersonian democracy. It will not revive

Tocqueville's Jacksonian America. It is not Lincoln-Douglas. It is not

Athens, nor Appenzell. It is less of a democracy than those low-tech places.

But, of course, none of these places really existed either, except as a

goal, a concept, an inspiration. And in that sense, the hopes vested in the

Internet are a new link in a chain of hope. Maybe naive, but certainly

ennobling.

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Telematics for African Development Consortium

P.O. Box 31822

Braamfontein

2017

Johannesburg

South Africa

Tel: +27 +11 403-2813

Fax: +27 +11 403-2814

neilshel@icon.co.za

www.saide.org.za

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