NEXT GENERATION POLICY FOR THE E COMMUNI
NEXT GENERATION POLICY FOR THE E-COMMUNICATIONS SECTOR:
THE ROLE OF THE END USER AND TECHNOLOGY
J. Ubacht & J.L.M. Vrancken
Delft University of Technology, Faculty Technology, Policy & Management, Delft, the Netherlands
j.ubacht@tudelft.nl; j.l.m.vrancken@tudelft.nl
ABSTRACT
Recent
technological
developments
in
the
ecommunications sector have lowered the threshold for
users of information and communication technology (ICT)
to enter the virtual domains of the Internet and to start
playing other roles in society. ICT users have shifted their
role from passive receivers of information and media
content towards an active role in becoming producers, like
in user generated content, or owners of infrastructure
components, like in WiFi hotspots. The end user is not ‘just’
end user anymore. The trend in technological innovations
undoubtedly will encourage this role shifting even further.
This raises policy issues such as for the governance of
privately held components of publicly accessible
infrastructures and such as issues of privacy and security in
virtual worlds. These policy issues have a decentralized
character that escapes formerly successful central policy
arrangements. We claim that policy arrangements should
explicitly include a role for end user participation and take
the role for technology into account. Coordination
mechanisms in Open Software Development are presented
as a first starting point towards innovative policy
arrangements.
Key words NG-networks, user initiatives, ICT
innovation policy, self-coordination mechanisms
1. SETTING THE SCENE
After the liberalization of the telecommunications sector,
the e-communications landscape has changed drastically.
The innovation rate of new information and communication
technologies is high and the spread has become worldwide.
Likewise the adoption rate of end users is high due to ever
decreasing retail prices for software, hardware and Internet
access. These trends enable ICT users to shift their role
from the receiver of content and information at the end of a
value chain towards a proactive role in finding, providing
and creating information and content, for example by Web
2.0 applications as YouTube, Facebook, del.icio.us and
Second Life [1]. And the domain of designing eapplications is no longer restricted to classic market
players.
New technologies and applications that are now in the R&D
phase will broaden the end user innovation space even
further. Artificial intelligence, Web2.0, mobile television,
RFID, Peer to peer (P2P) networks and personal profiling
will, on the one hand, make communications life much
easier (commoditization of the end user level), and, on the
other hand, provide the ICT user with new tools for
creativity.
These new roles of the ICT user raise policy issues that
escape the formerly centralized form of governance and
regulation. One of the reasons is the fading of boundaries
between spaces and roles. For example who is the owner of
a network based on the WiFi protocol in which individual
citizens provide for the components that build a communal
WiFi network spanning a city? Likewise Internet telephony
via the software based Skype application obscures the
boundaries between citizens who allow their computers to
be used for this Internet telephony traffic and market
players such as the owners Skype Group and EBay. And
who can be held responsible for the breach of intellectual
property rights (IPR) in Peer to Peer networks like eMule
and Tribler?
On the one hand the end user activities will raise new
policy issues that bear a decentralized character. This
decentralized character should be taken into account and
invite policy makers to explore new arrangements to deal
with e-communications policy issues. On the other hand
the end user activities can be a new resource for dealing
with policy issues that escape formal central law and
regulation. We want to take a closer look at the
opportunities that these two aspects of end user activities
offer for new government arrangements.
In addition, we claim that technological innovation can also
provide answers to policy issues in the e-communications
sector. The governance capabilities of technology are often
neglected in the search for solutions for policy issues with a
decentralized character. If we are able to fully understand
coordination mechanisms that are already present in next
generation infrastructures, we can activate these to play a
role in governance arrangements. Especially in such cases
where masses of users that possess (technological) means,
can be activated to make a contribution to governance
solutions, as illustrated by masses of users that use tagging
to detect and identify sources of spamming.
2. LINE OF ARGUMENTATION
We will first explore the trends in technological innovation
that increasingly lead to new end user initiatives: how does
ICT further broaden the space for end user initiatives? Next
we present some examples of these user initiatives that
illustrate the shift from a passive towards a proactive role in
components of ICT infrastructures. These trends lead to
fading boundaries between formerly distinct categories of
market players, professional organizations and users. These
fading boundaries present diffuse policy issues that are
difficult to address with central policy arrangements; we
provide some examples of this statement.
In a search for alternative arrangements that are able to deal
with these decentralized policy issues, we will focus on the
potential of a role for end user in the regulatory arena and
the role of technology itself to deal with policy issues. We
conclude this paper with the statement that the centralized
policy approach of dealing with ICT-related policy issues
should be supplemented with decentralized policy
arrangements that take the role of the ICT user and the role
of technology explicitly into account. This statement is the
first stepping stone towards a broad study into alternative
arrangements for decentralized policy issues and an
exploration into an active role for end users in the
governance and regulatory arena, as well as for the role of
technology.
3. TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION
The changing role of the end user by technological
innovation is most obvious in the content arena, but is also
present in the applications and even in the infrastructure
arena. To start with the latter, the rise of wireless
networking technologies, such as WiFi and Bluetooth, has
led to the phenomenon of individuals creating networks and
Internet access on various scales. It happened town-wise,
for instance in the Dutch town of Leiden (Wireless Leiden)
but it can also be done worldwide, for instance by the FON
community. Wireless-Leiden applies WiFi to create free
Internet access all over the town. It was among the first and
is still among the largest community based WiFi-networks
in the world [2],[3],[4]. FON has a somewhat different
approach. FON is about a worldwide community of users of
the FON WiFi device that participants of FON install in
their homes. Close to a FON device, free Internet access is
offered to other FON participants and cheap access is
offered to non-participants [5],[6].
A second end user driven development in the infrastructure
arena are the peer to peer (P2P) virtual networks on top of
the physical infrastructure of the Internet. Such networks
are already available in several variants, such as Gnutella
(among the first fully distributed P2P networks), Bittorrent
and Tribler (specializing in video content) [7],[8],[9],[10].
Their main use consists of file discovery and exchange.
Many policy issues are related to these physical and virtual
networks initiated and controlled by end users.
In the applications arena, there are many examples of
influential applications initially started by individuals, for
instance the Google search engine, the Skype VoIP system
for Internet telephony, the Wikipedia collaborative
knowledge system and the PGP (pretty good privacy)
encryption system [11],[12],[13].
the creation of user generated content and the ownership of
In the content arena, the end user has obtained an
unprecedented role in creating and publishing content in
various forms: websites, blogs, webcams, movies,
wikipedia articles, etc. This has been made possible by a
host of easily accessible and affordable (often free) content
creating tools. Access to all this content has been made
possible by the current highly effective search engines.
In addition to empowering the individual, a host of new
technologies, often called social software, contributes to the
effective collaboration in groups. E-mail is the oldest and
still among the most used tools in this group. Important new
members of this type of software are the wiki's, the social
network organizing tools such as Hyves and LinkedIn,
content exchange platforms such a YouTube and
knowledge sharing tools such as social bookmarking sites
[14].
For the coming decade, we foresee that especially this
social software trend will further strengthen the position of
the end user. This social software compensates for one of
the main disadvantages of end users in comparison with
large companies: they are in principle on their own, but
social software will facilitate finding partners, forming
groups, sharing ideas and knowledge, generating content
groupwise, support collaborative working and collaborative
decision making. This has been demonstrated already by
open source communities [15] but will be used by far
greater numbers of individuals than is currently the case.
A second important development for the coming decade is
ambient intelligence, the omni-presence of commodity
computing and networking devices, becoming a
commodity. This will mean that large numbers of people
will be constantly on line, where ever they are, constantly
in touch with group members and constantly up-to-date of
relevant developments while moving within personal
networks (PNs) [16].
4. END USER INITIATIVES
We sketched the technological innovation that broadens the
space for ICT users to actively play new roles when they
have access to good ICT-resources and the skills to handle
them. What is it exactly that ICT users do within this digital
space? In Box 1 we provide an overview of the end-user
activities that we identified in society at the moment. We
make a distinction into the four classic realms of e-services:
information sharing, communication, entertainment and
transactions.
Information
Communication
Entertainment
Transaction
Blogging
Contributing to public wiki’s such as Wikipedia
Making websites for personal and commercial purposes
Discussion via digital forums (for instance del.iciou.us)
Open Software Development
Digital submission of data for e.g. government
Privately built and operated fibre-optic and WiFi networks with or without open access
(Mobile) grid computing
Wiki’s in learning environments and with organisations for knowledge sharing
Web-based social networking (Cyworld; Hyves, LinkedIn)
Voice over IP-telephony (VoIP)
Online communities
User-generated content (e.g. MySpace & YouTube)
Publishing their own digital information (e.g. photographs via Flickr)
Participating in Interactive television programmes
Mobile entertainment (for instance Podcasts, I-Pod, mobile television)
Distribution of music via P2P networks
Internet television
Media Centres for collecting media content to be viewed at an opportune moment
Individual choice of digital offerings instead of package deals from broadcasters
Determining the time of broadcast
Creating/living as an Avatar in Second Life
Multi-user online games
Virtual entrepreneurship (e.g. in Second Life)
Micro-entrepreneurship
Person-to-person trading (e.g. via eBay)
Online shopping
Digital banking, online payments
Direct sale of digital products (e.g. music directly from maker to buyer)
Worldwide online sale and buying of houses
Box 1 New activities of ICT users
Which are the most striking conclusions that we can draw
from this overview?
First, the fact that these activities require a proactive
attitude from the users: the transformation from a couch
potato into a self-selecting, self-producing participant in the
e-society. This requires a fundamental change in lifestyle,
that is foremost visible among youngsters who mainly
interact digitally with their friends and peer groups via
mobile phones, MSN, chat sessions etc.
Second, individuals now enter market places that were
formerly restricted to traditional market players. Via virtual
trading they become micro entrepreneurs that buy and sell
services or physical goods, mainly in, but not restricted to,
the person to person market.
Third, being a capable ICT user opens doors to a diversity
of activities that allow new forms of participation in
society, without having to leave your home or without
having to classify yourself with formal educational training.
Thus, elderly people who never finished secondary
education can still become (economically) active e.g. by
selling services via websites such as making clothes. And
school dropouts can be great digital entrepreneurs because
the costs of entry to digital markets are low.
The fourth striking aspect of ICT user activities can be
found in their motivation: they are not only motivated by
monetary goals, but participate in open source
developments or online communities for personal
motivations such as becoming a recognized member of a
specific group or ranking high in user classification. Or ICT
users want to satisfy their wish to contribute to society by
sharing their knowledge or skills with interested individuals
worldwide.
Fifth, a blurring of boundaries is taking place between
public and private spaces. Youngsters are not reluctant to
present their private lifes for international audiences on the
Internet. To them, exposure is a motivation to be active in
the ‘market of attention’, perhaps without being able to
realize all the (later) consequences of what they do
[17],[18]. Also the ownership of network components, such
as in WiFi networks, blur the boundaries between
commercial or public and citizen ownership of the
infrastructure, leading to hybrid electronic networks.
Sixth, end users enter domains that were formerly restricted
to professionals (blogging as a journalist, uploading
pictures or videos taken by mobile phones like a
photographer). Or they replace and ignore intermediary
functions such as real estate agents for direct buying of
houses or financial institutions for acquiring loans, see for
example www.boober.nl. In Box 2, we present an overview
of these aspects.
Via their activities end users contribute to innovation by
means of ICT, a trend that will be taken even further in the
decades to come. We will have a glimpse at the power of
ideas and the power of the masses in the next section.
Now that we have sketched the potentials and mechanisms
of ICT user innovation and adoption we will take a closer
look at the policy issues that are raised.
End user activities are characterized by:
• A proactive attitude, an e-active lifestyle
• Entering virtual markets, often person to person
trading
• Participation in society: e.g. selling services via
websites or micro entrepreneurship
• Motivation not only economic in nature, but
socially motivated
• Blurring of boundaries between public and
private spaces
• Entering professional domains, replacing or
skipping the functions of intermediaries
Many policy issues can be found in both the negative,
undesirable, and the positive, desirable effects of the
increased power of active end users. (Un)desirable here is
considered from the viewpoint of democratically chosen
governments that support freedom of speech, information
sharing, micro entrepreneurship etc. The viewpoint of other
regimes may include the following issues too, but the way
of dealing with them will be different and is left outside the
scope of this article.
The undesirable effects may range from copyright
infringements, cybercrime, phishing, child pornography
distribution to virtual communities of terrorist groups. The
technologies that contribute to these effects are primarily
the P2P networks, encryption, search engines and content
creating tools. New technologies will raise similar issues.
Governments have a responsibility to reduce these negative
effects. Another point is the new initiatives in network
design that include end user components, such as citizen
built WiFi networks. These networks raise questions for
governance such as: are these networks public
telecommunications networks on which formal regulation is
applicable? And can we trace central points of
authority/responsibility in case of policy problems that are
raised by these hybrid networks?
Box 2 Characteristics of ICT users’ activities: an
overview
5. INNOVATIVE POWER
Apart from the transition of passive end users towards
active ICT users, there is another remarkable transition.
This one has to do with the origins of an electronic
innovation and its subsequent adoption curve. Many einnovations are designed by individuals with idea power.
Because of the wide availability of (open source) software
tools for creating new electronic products, content and
services, users are able to transform an idea into an
innovation that is adopted by other users. For example the
initiators of the P2P network KaZaa later invented Skype,
the Voice over IP communications service that challenged
the vested interests of the telecommunications operators.
This is what we call the power of idea and the ability of a
minority to design an innovation.
However, designing it is not enough and this is where the
other type of users comes into the picture: the majority. Einnovations require the power of the masses to create
network externalities. Although the majority of ICT users
may remain end users of e-innovations created by a small
minority of e-innovators, their role is important in reaching
a large scale of adoption. Once this large scale is reached,
network externalities become apparent. The technological
trends that we sketched before will reinforce end user
innovation and the subsequent adoption curve even further.
But there is another side to this distinction between
minority and majority power. Masses can also have the
power to hinder innovation that is marketed as necessary by
market players. A recent and still current issue is the
transition from the IPv4 towards IPv6 that stagnates,
amongst other reasons, by the reluctance of end users to
make the step [20],[21],[22]. In this case claimed potential
worldwide benefits cannot be reached without the
willingness of users to support the transition.
6. DECENTRALIZED POLICY ISSUES
But governments should also be interested in the positive
effects of end user activities. The new technologies increase
the possibilities for collaborative working, knowledge
sharing and distance learning, for end users taking care of
their own security and privacy on the net, for starting small
scale businesses, for the prevention of monopolies in
electronic communications and for increased innovative
power of end users. In addition to the technologies
mentioned for the negative effects, it is the social software
that contributes especially to the positive effects.
The new end user activities will no doubt lead to new
policy issues. But the character of these policy issues has
changed likewise. Formerly, policy makers had the means
to design central policy solutions that were enforced upon
specific, well identifiable market players. For example, a
formal institutional framework for handling intellectual
property rights was in place and the violator of these rights
would be a specific actor or organization that could be
formally addressed. However, technological innovation in
the e-communications sector lead to policy issues with
decentralized characteristics that do not match with a
centralized approach. And we are only at the start of
bottom-up decentralized individual initiatives that challenge
the dominant top-down centralized and structured trends of
e-innovation and their matching e-policies of the past.
A well-known example is the regulation of spam. When
first government arrangements were made to deal with
spam as a negative way of marketing, governments tended
to design central solutions, for example by formally stating
that spam was prohibited. However, the creators of spam
evaded national anti-spam governance and related
regulation by moving their official residence to countries
that did not have formal anti-spam regulation in place. Also
spammers made themselves hard to identify. Thus spam
became a decentralized problem that could not be beaten by
centralized formal government arrangements [23]. A next
option that was explored, amongst other countries in the
Netherlands, was to activate the role of end user
participation by means of awareness campaigns on how to
deal with spam properly and by opening a website and
telephone number to invite reports on the receipt of spam.
After such citizen reports, the regulatory authority was able
to fine spamming organizations at least within the national
boundaries. A new approach is now to look for the central
points in the spam value chain that can be addressed by
regulators: the location of the websites that are mentioned
in spam e-mails (reported by citizens). If these websites can
be deactivated, the business model of spammers will be
undermined. This spam example shows that the roles that
end users and technology can play in the governance of
decentralized policy issues that require innovative
arrangements in order to limit their negative consequences.
If active ICT users lead to new business models and new
applications, why not use them as a source of governance
too?
Decentralized policy issues require a new policy approach.
We suggest two components that should be given more
consideration in the design of policy arrangements. The
first is taking the ICT user into account. The second is to
study the governance role of technology.
7. NEXT GENERATION POLICY: END USER
INVOLVEMENT
To start with the first option: how can end users contribute
to solving a policy problem? A recent example that we
described above is in the realm of spam regulation, in
which an end user awareness campaign was included in the
policy design to combat spam. But this example is limited
in the sense that it was instigated by a formal regulatory
authority and only a limited part of the regulatory
arrangement. A source of inspiration for an extension of the
users’ role in government arrangements can be found in the
coordination mechanisms that underlie the rise of inverse
infrastructures. Inverse infrastructures are information
infrastructures that develop bottom-up, initiated by users
and that rely on self-organization [15].
We already mentioned city-wide WiFi networks, FON, and
P2P networks; these are examples of inverse
infrastructures. Inverse infrastructures have the following
properties [24]:
1. Bottom-up investments of users;
2. Small heterogeneous networks coupled to larger
networks;
3. Use of existing ICT for other, unforeseen aims;
4. User- and consumer-driven development of
infrastructures;
5. Self-organizing,
self-configuring,
changing
network development at the component and
subsystem level and
6. Innovation is done by users.
This new type of emergent infrastructures challenge the
classic top-down and centralized development of former
networks such as the telephony, cable, and mobile networks
that were designed and rolled-out by telecommunications
companies. Standards in these networks were a reflection of
this centralized nature, for example circuit-switching and
ISDN standards [25] (For a more elaborate treatment of the
history and the paradigm shift from centralized to inverse
infrastructures,
see:
[15].).
Nowadays
inverse
infrastructures can be seen as the forerunner of things to
come when technological innovation in ICT continues to
broaden the users’ space for activity and creativity.
Therefore we claim that looking at the underlying
coordination mechanisms of these inverse infrastructures is
a source of inspiration for next generation policies.
We can identify a myriad of coordination mechanisms in
self-organizing systems, based on a study on coordination
in standardization, in Open Source Software (OSS)
development, complex adaptive systems (CAS) and
Systems of Systems (SoS)-theories [15]. If we restrict
ourselves to the study of coordination mechanisms in Open
Source Software development, we see the following list
(see Box 3).
The list shows that self-organizing, inverse initiatives
include coordination mechanisms that incorporate user
initiatives towards a grander design. As such they are an
example of a paradigm shift from top-down, centralized
design towards bottom-up/inverse developments in the ecommunications sector. The next step is to translate these
coordination mechanisms, or the dynamics behind them,
into innovative government arrangements that can deal with
the dispersed nature of new policy issues in the ecommunications sector that are spurred by technological
innovation.
Coordination
mechanisms
Committee
standardization
Market
coordination
Regulatory
coordination
Operational
coordination
Examples
Market and technology coordination in committees
Founding a standards community and standards procedures (e.g. Java)
Standardization initiatives
Coordination in the market place
Individual’s reputation as an expert
Software distributions
Desirability of a trademark
Consumer expectations
Market share as a sign of product quality
Project activity on website, high level of activity may indicate technical excellence
Company rules and government regulation enforce coordinative behavior
Participation agreements (e.g. OSS community membership registration)
Intellectual Property Right licenses
Contracts
Trademarks (e.g. Java-Compatible logo)
Developers in open source communities use several tools to support their activities. These tools
coordinate, i.e. focus and structure, their work:
software support tools, these support the development of interoperable programs
instructional books
certified training programs
manuals
test suites
reference implementations
concurrent versioning systems (CVS)/ Subversion: enables software developers to work on the
same version simultaneously
to-do lists
orphanages
gatekeepers, informal or formal hierarchy
Coordination by
authority
Box 3 Coordination mechanisms in Open Source Software development from [15]
8. NEXT GENERATION POLICY: THE ROLE OF
TECHNOLOGY
The other component that should receive more attention in
government policy and arrangements is the role of
technology itself. How can policy issues be solved or even
avoided by the technical design of infrastructures or
services? The expectation is that ICT users will
increasingly be provided with technology that they can
model towards their own preferences. Can this trend also be
used to include user activities into government
arrangements?
Let us take a look at the management of intellectual
property rights (IPR). ICT users increasingly face a myriad
of IPR-related issues in their private domain. They buy
music items from the Apple i-Tune store and copy CD’s for
friends that are subject to IPR, they make photos and videos
themselves and publish them on the Internet, they are
approached by digital producers who want to incorporate
their content into other media and they open their hardware
for WiFi passers-by, for grid computing or P2P file sharing.
How then can the end user be supported in his IPRmanagement? And in his privacy management when
dealing with material that contains pictures of others and in
his liability management, when challenged in court?
The other way around, can we analyze their activities in
order to find opportunities to make them contribute to
solving IPR-related, privacy and liability issues by means
of intelligent software? This is a major challenge and
source for innovation in governance approaches.
We will offer one more example. If we take a look at the
issue of robustness of the Internet, it turns out that now that
the e-communications sector is liberalized, the options to
address service providers with centralized policies are
limited. In European telecommunications law, only in case
a service provider is deemed to have significant market
power, can he be addressed by a range of regulatory
obligations in order to deal with the negative consequences
of that market power [26]. The technical way could be an
approach that is based on the theory of complex adaptive
systems, in this case the adoption of self-healing
mechanisms on the infrastructure level [27]. As illustrated
in Figure 1 this entails a shift from the classic way of
governing dependability by addressing the service
providers as market parties towards a new arrangement in
which the introduction of a protocol based on a Complex
Adaptive Systems approach is encouraged to indirectly
solve the problem of Internet dependability by
technological means [27].
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[1]
[2]
CAS
Reliability
[3]
[4]
Figure 1 Regulating dependability in the Internet
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The governance power of new information and
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power into regulatory arrangements is unexplored territory.
[5]
[6]
[7]
9. CHALLENGES FOR POLICY INNOVATION
Centralized policy options can deal with centralized issues,
but this approach is less suitable for decentralized issues (as
illustrated by spam, privacy, and intellectual property
rights, citizen ownership of network components, etc.).
Decentralized
issues
require
innovative
policy
arrangements that take an active end user role and elements
from the technical solutions space into account. This
requires a paradigm shift in thinking about regulatory
arrangements. A paradigm shift that extends the user
activity trends already visible in the domains of technical
innovation and the roles that users can play into the
governance arena.
Our intention in this paper was to sketch the changes in ICT
user activities. The classic end user still exists, but the
number of active ICT users is growing fast and the adoption
curve of new enabling technologies is steep. Also the
classic ways of governance and regulation will continue to
deal with policy issues in case the government tool matches
with the policy issue at hand. However, we claim that ICT
users as well as technology can be sources that should
explicitly be taken into account in the case of non-classic,
decentralized policy issues. We want to inspire
policymakers and market players to take another view at
users and technology and their combined forces to solve
policy issues. We think the best way to do so is to make an
inventory of policy issues that escape formal government
control on the one hand. And on the other hand, to analyze
policy arrangements that already take end user participation
into account. Also renewed attention should be paid to the
governance role of technology. Ultimately this should lead
to an overview of best practices of innovative arrangements
that are based on the participation of public and commercial
partners and ICT users and that explicitly take the role of
technology into account.
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THE ROLE OF THE END USER AND TECHNOLOGY
J. Ubacht & J.L.M. Vrancken
Delft University of Technology, Faculty Technology, Policy & Management, Delft, the Netherlands
j.ubacht@tudelft.nl; j.l.m.vrancken@tudelft.nl
ABSTRACT
Recent
technological
developments
in
the
ecommunications sector have lowered the threshold for
users of information and communication technology (ICT)
to enter the virtual domains of the Internet and to start
playing other roles in society. ICT users have shifted their
role from passive receivers of information and media
content towards an active role in becoming producers, like
in user generated content, or owners of infrastructure
components, like in WiFi hotspots. The end user is not ‘just’
end user anymore. The trend in technological innovations
undoubtedly will encourage this role shifting even further.
This raises policy issues such as for the governance of
privately held components of publicly accessible
infrastructures and such as issues of privacy and security in
virtual worlds. These policy issues have a decentralized
character that escapes formerly successful central policy
arrangements. We claim that policy arrangements should
explicitly include a role for end user participation and take
the role for technology into account. Coordination
mechanisms in Open Software Development are presented
as a first starting point towards innovative policy
arrangements.
Key words NG-networks, user initiatives, ICT
innovation policy, self-coordination mechanisms
1. SETTING THE SCENE
After the liberalization of the telecommunications sector,
the e-communications landscape has changed drastically.
The innovation rate of new information and communication
technologies is high and the spread has become worldwide.
Likewise the adoption rate of end users is high due to ever
decreasing retail prices for software, hardware and Internet
access. These trends enable ICT users to shift their role
from the receiver of content and information at the end of a
value chain towards a proactive role in finding, providing
and creating information and content, for example by Web
2.0 applications as YouTube, Facebook, del.icio.us and
Second Life [1]. And the domain of designing eapplications is no longer restricted to classic market
players.
New technologies and applications that are now in the R&D
phase will broaden the end user innovation space even
further. Artificial intelligence, Web2.0, mobile television,
RFID, Peer to peer (P2P) networks and personal profiling
will, on the one hand, make communications life much
easier (commoditization of the end user level), and, on the
other hand, provide the ICT user with new tools for
creativity.
These new roles of the ICT user raise policy issues that
escape the formerly centralized form of governance and
regulation. One of the reasons is the fading of boundaries
between spaces and roles. For example who is the owner of
a network based on the WiFi protocol in which individual
citizens provide for the components that build a communal
WiFi network spanning a city? Likewise Internet telephony
via the software based Skype application obscures the
boundaries between citizens who allow their computers to
be used for this Internet telephony traffic and market
players such as the owners Skype Group and EBay. And
who can be held responsible for the breach of intellectual
property rights (IPR) in Peer to Peer networks like eMule
and Tribler?
On the one hand the end user activities will raise new
policy issues that bear a decentralized character. This
decentralized character should be taken into account and
invite policy makers to explore new arrangements to deal
with e-communications policy issues. On the other hand
the end user activities can be a new resource for dealing
with policy issues that escape formal central law and
regulation. We want to take a closer look at the
opportunities that these two aspects of end user activities
offer for new government arrangements.
In addition, we claim that technological innovation can also
provide answers to policy issues in the e-communications
sector. The governance capabilities of technology are often
neglected in the search for solutions for policy issues with a
decentralized character. If we are able to fully understand
coordination mechanisms that are already present in next
generation infrastructures, we can activate these to play a
role in governance arrangements. Especially in such cases
where masses of users that possess (technological) means,
can be activated to make a contribution to governance
solutions, as illustrated by masses of users that use tagging
to detect and identify sources of spamming.
2. LINE OF ARGUMENTATION
We will first explore the trends in technological innovation
that increasingly lead to new end user initiatives: how does
ICT further broaden the space for end user initiatives? Next
we present some examples of these user initiatives that
illustrate the shift from a passive towards a proactive role in
components of ICT infrastructures. These trends lead to
fading boundaries between formerly distinct categories of
market players, professional organizations and users. These
fading boundaries present diffuse policy issues that are
difficult to address with central policy arrangements; we
provide some examples of this statement.
In a search for alternative arrangements that are able to deal
with these decentralized policy issues, we will focus on the
potential of a role for end user in the regulatory arena and
the role of technology itself to deal with policy issues. We
conclude this paper with the statement that the centralized
policy approach of dealing with ICT-related policy issues
should be supplemented with decentralized policy
arrangements that take the role of the ICT user and the role
of technology explicitly into account. This statement is the
first stepping stone towards a broad study into alternative
arrangements for decentralized policy issues and an
exploration into an active role for end users in the
governance and regulatory arena, as well as for the role of
technology.
3. TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION
The changing role of the end user by technological
innovation is most obvious in the content arena, but is also
present in the applications and even in the infrastructure
arena. To start with the latter, the rise of wireless
networking technologies, such as WiFi and Bluetooth, has
led to the phenomenon of individuals creating networks and
Internet access on various scales. It happened town-wise,
for instance in the Dutch town of Leiden (Wireless Leiden)
but it can also be done worldwide, for instance by the FON
community. Wireless-Leiden applies WiFi to create free
Internet access all over the town. It was among the first and
is still among the largest community based WiFi-networks
in the world [2],[3],[4]. FON has a somewhat different
approach. FON is about a worldwide community of users of
the FON WiFi device that participants of FON install in
their homes. Close to a FON device, free Internet access is
offered to other FON participants and cheap access is
offered to non-participants [5],[6].
A second end user driven development in the infrastructure
arena are the peer to peer (P2P) virtual networks on top of
the physical infrastructure of the Internet. Such networks
are already available in several variants, such as Gnutella
(among the first fully distributed P2P networks), Bittorrent
and Tribler (specializing in video content) [7],[8],[9],[10].
Their main use consists of file discovery and exchange.
Many policy issues are related to these physical and virtual
networks initiated and controlled by end users.
In the applications arena, there are many examples of
influential applications initially started by individuals, for
instance the Google search engine, the Skype VoIP system
for Internet telephony, the Wikipedia collaborative
knowledge system and the PGP (pretty good privacy)
encryption system [11],[12],[13].
the creation of user generated content and the ownership of
In the content arena, the end user has obtained an
unprecedented role in creating and publishing content in
various forms: websites, blogs, webcams, movies,
wikipedia articles, etc. This has been made possible by a
host of easily accessible and affordable (often free) content
creating tools. Access to all this content has been made
possible by the current highly effective search engines.
In addition to empowering the individual, a host of new
technologies, often called social software, contributes to the
effective collaboration in groups. E-mail is the oldest and
still among the most used tools in this group. Important new
members of this type of software are the wiki's, the social
network organizing tools such as Hyves and LinkedIn,
content exchange platforms such a YouTube and
knowledge sharing tools such as social bookmarking sites
[14].
For the coming decade, we foresee that especially this
social software trend will further strengthen the position of
the end user. This social software compensates for one of
the main disadvantages of end users in comparison with
large companies: they are in principle on their own, but
social software will facilitate finding partners, forming
groups, sharing ideas and knowledge, generating content
groupwise, support collaborative working and collaborative
decision making. This has been demonstrated already by
open source communities [15] but will be used by far
greater numbers of individuals than is currently the case.
A second important development for the coming decade is
ambient intelligence, the omni-presence of commodity
computing and networking devices, becoming a
commodity. This will mean that large numbers of people
will be constantly on line, where ever they are, constantly
in touch with group members and constantly up-to-date of
relevant developments while moving within personal
networks (PNs) [16].
4. END USER INITIATIVES
We sketched the technological innovation that broadens the
space for ICT users to actively play new roles when they
have access to good ICT-resources and the skills to handle
them. What is it exactly that ICT users do within this digital
space? In Box 1 we provide an overview of the end-user
activities that we identified in society at the moment. We
make a distinction into the four classic realms of e-services:
information sharing, communication, entertainment and
transactions.
Information
Communication
Entertainment
Transaction
Blogging
Contributing to public wiki’s such as Wikipedia
Making websites for personal and commercial purposes
Discussion via digital forums (for instance del.iciou.us)
Open Software Development
Digital submission of data for e.g. government
Privately built and operated fibre-optic and WiFi networks with or without open access
(Mobile) grid computing
Wiki’s in learning environments and with organisations for knowledge sharing
Web-based social networking (Cyworld; Hyves, LinkedIn)
Voice over IP-telephony (VoIP)
Online communities
User-generated content (e.g. MySpace & YouTube)
Publishing their own digital information (e.g. photographs via Flickr)
Participating in Interactive television programmes
Mobile entertainment (for instance Podcasts, I-Pod, mobile television)
Distribution of music via P2P networks
Internet television
Media Centres for collecting media content to be viewed at an opportune moment
Individual choice of digital offerings instead of package deals from broadcasters
Determining the time of broadcast
Creating/living as an Avatar in Second Life
Multi-user online games
Virtual entrepreneurship (e.g. in Second Life)
Micro-entrepreneurship
Person-to-person trading (e.g. via eBay)
Online shopping
Digital banking, online payments
Direct sale of digital products (e.g. music directly from maker to buyer)
Worldwide online sale and buying of houses
Box 1 New activities of ICT users
Which are the most striking conclusions that we can draw
from this overview?
First, the fact that these activities require a proactive
attitude from the users: the transformation from a couch
potato into a self-selecting, self-producing participant in the
e-society. This requires a fundamental change in lifestyle,
that is foremost visible among youngsters who mainly
interact digitally with their friends and peer groups via
mobile phones, MSN, chat sessions etc.
Second, individuals now enter market places that were
formerly restricted to traditional market players. Via virtual
trading they become micro entrepreneurs that buy and sell
services or physical goods, mainly in, but not restricted to,
the person to person market.
Third, being a capable ICT user opens doors to a diversity
of activities that allow new forms of participation in
society, without having to leave your home or without
having to classify yourself with formal educational training.
Thus, elderly people who never finished secondary
education can still become (economically) active e.g. by
selling services via websites such as making clothes. And
school dropouts can be great digital entrepreneurs because
the costs of entry to digital markets are low.
The fourth striking aspect of ICT user activities can be
found in their motivation: they are not only motivated by
monetary goals, but participate in open source
developments or online communities for personal
motivations such as becoming a recognized member of a
specific group or ranking high in user classification. Or ICT
users want to satisfy their wish to contribute to society by
sharing their knowledge or skills with interested individuals
worldwide.
Fifth, a blurring of boundaries is taking place between
public and private spaces. Youngsters are not reluctant to
present their private lifes for international audiences on the
Internet. To them, exposure is a motivation to be active in
the ‘market of attention’, perhaps without being able to
realize all the (later) consequences of what they do
[17],[18]. Also the ownership of network components, such
as in WiFi networks, blur the boundaries between
commercial or public and citizen ownership of the
infrastructure, leading to hybrid electronic networks.
Sixth, end users enter domains that were formerly restricted
to professionals (blogging as a journalist, uploading
pictures or videos taken by mobile phones like a
photographer). Or they replace and ignore intermediary
functions such as real estate agents for direct buying of
houses or financial institutions for acquiring loans, see for
example www.boober.nl. In Box 2, we present an overview
of these aspects.
Via their activities end users contribute to innovation by
means of ICT, a trend that will be taken even further in the
decades to come. We will have a glimpse at the power of
ideas and the power of the masses in the next section.
Now that we have sketched the potentials and mechanisms
of ICT user innovation and adoption we will take a closer
look at the policy issues that are raised.
End user activities are characterized by:
• A proactive attitude, an e-active lifestyle
• Entering virtual markets, often person to person
trading
• Participation in society: e.g. selling services via
websites or micro entrepreneurship
• Motivation not only economic in nature, but
socially motivated
• Blurring of boundaries between public and
private spaces
• Entering professional domains, replacing or
skipping the functions of intermediaries
Many policy issues can be found in both the negative,
undesirable, and the positive, desirable effects of the
increased power of active end users. (Un)desirable here is
considered from the viewpoint of democratically chosen
governments that support freedom of speech, information
sharing, micro entrepreneurship etc. The viewpoint of other
regimes may include the following issues too, but the way
of dealing with them will be different and is left outside the
scope of this article.
The undesirable effects may range from copyright
infringements, cybercrime, phishing, child pornography
distribution to virtual communities of terrorist groups. The
technologies that contribute to these effects are primarily
the P2P networks, encryption, search engines and content
creating tools. New technologies will raise similar issues.
Governments have a responsibility to reduce these negative
effects. Another point is the new initiatives in network
design that include end user components, such as citizen
built WiFi networks. These networks raise questions for
governance such as: are these networks public
telecommunications networks on which formal regulation is
applicable? And can we trace central points of
authority/responsibility in case of policy problems that are
raised by these hybrid networks?
Box 2 Characteristics of ICT users’ activities: an
overview
5. INNOVATIVE POWER
Apart from the transition of passive end users towards
active ICT users, there is another remarkable transition.
This one has to do with the origins of an electronic
innovation and its subsequent adoption curve. Many einnovations are designed by individuals with idea power.
Because of the wide availability of (open source) software
tools for creating new electronic products, content and
services, users are able to transform an idea into an
innovation that is adopted by other users. For example the
initiators of the P2P network KaZaa later invented Skype,
the Voice over IP communications service that challenged
the vested interests of the telecommunications operators.
This is what we call the power of idea and the ability of a
minority to design an innovation.
However, designing it is not enough and this is where the
other type of users comes into the picture: the majority. Einnovations require the power of the masses to create
network externalities. Although the majority of ICT users
may remain end users of e-innovations created by a small
minority of e-innovators, their role is important in reaching
a large scale of adoption. Once this large scale is reached,
network externalities become apparent. The technological
trends that we sketched before will reinforce end user
innovation and the subsequent adoption curve even further.
But there is another side to this distinction between
minority and majority power. Masses can also have the
power to hinder innovation that is marketed as necessary by
market players. A recent and still current issue is the
transition from the IPv4 towards IPv6 that stagnates,
amongst other reasons, by the reluctance of end users to
make the step [20],[21],[22]. In this case claimed potential
worldwide benefits cannot be reached without the
willingness of users to support the transition.
6. DECENTRALIZED POLICY ISSUES
But governments should also be interested in the positive
effects of end user activities. The new technologies increase
the possibilities for collaborative working, knowledge
sharing and distance learning, for end users taking care of
their own security and privacy on the net, for starting small
scale businesses, for the prevention of monopolies in
electronic communications and for increased innovative
power of end users. In addition to the technologies
mentioned for the negative effects, it is the social software
that contributes especially to the positive effects.
The new end user activities will no doubt lead to new
policy issues. But the character of these policy issues has
changed likewise. Formerly, policy makers had the means
to design central policy solutions that were enforced upon
specific, well identifiable market players. For example, a
formal institutional framework for handling intellectual
property rights was in place and the violator of these rights
would be a specific actor or organization that could be
formally addressed. However, technological innovation in
the e-communications sector lead to policy issues with
decentralized characteristics that do not match with a
centralized approach. And we are only at the start of
bottom-up decentralized individual initiatives that challenge
the dominant top-down centralized and structured trends of
e-innovation and their matching e-policies of the past.
A well-known example is the regulation of spam. When
first government arrangements were made to deal with
spam as a negative way of marketing, governments tended
to design central solutions, for example by formally stating
that spam was prohibited. However, the creators of spam
evaded national anti-spam governance and related
regulation by moving their official residence to countries
that did not have formal anti-spam regulation in place. Also
spammers made themselves hard to identify. Thus spam
became a decentralized problem that could not be beaten by
centralized formal government arrangements [23]. A next
option that was explored, amongst other countries in the
Netherlands, was to activate the role of end user
participation by means of awareness campaigns on how to
deal with spam properly and by opening a website and
telephone number to invite reports on the receipt of spam.
After such citizen reports, the regulatory authority was able
to fine spamming organizations at least within the national
boundaries. A new approach is now to look for the central
points in the spam value chain that can be addressed by
regulators: the location of the websites that are mentioned
in spam e-mails (reported by citizens). If these websites can
be deactivated, the business model of spammers will be
undermined. This spam example shows that the roles that
end users and technology can play in the governance of
decentralized policy issues that require innovative
arrangements in order to limit their negative consequences.
If active ICT users lead to new business models and new
applications, why not use them as a source of governance
too?
Decentralized policy issues require a new policy approach.
We suggest two components that should be given more
consideration in the design of policy arrangements. The
first is taking the ICT user into account. The second is to
study the governance role of technology.
7. NEXT GENERATION POLICY: END USER
INVOLVEMENT
To start with the first option: how can end users contribute
to solving a policy problem? A recent example that we
described above is in the realm of spam regulation, in
which an end user awareness campaign was included in the
policy design to combat spam. But this example is limited
in the sense that it was instigated by a formal regulatory
authority and only a limited part of the regulatory
arrangement. A source of inspiration for an extension of the
users’ role in government arrangements can be found in the
coordination mechanisms that underlie the rise of inverse
infrastructures. Inverse infrastructures are information
infrastructures that develop bottom-up, initiated by users
and that rely on self-organization [15].
We already mentioned city-wide WiFi networks, FON, and
P2P networks; these are examples of inverse
infrastructures. Inverse infrastructures have the following
properties [24]:
1. Bottom-up investments of users;
2. Small heterogeneous networks coupled to larger
networks;
3. Use of existing ICT for other, unforeseen aims;
4. User- and consumer-driven development of
infrastructures;
5. Self-organizing,
self-configuring,
changing
network development at the component and
subsystem level and
6. Innovation is done by users.
This new type of emergent infrastructures challenge the
classic top-down and centralized development of former
networks such as the telephony, cable, and mobile networks
that were designed and rolled-out by telecommunications
companies. Standards in these networks were a reflection of
this centralized nature, for example circuit-switching and
ISDN standards [25] (For a more elaborate treatment of the
history and the paradigm shift from centralized to inverse
infrastructures,
see:
[15].).
Nowadays
inverse
infrastructures can be seen as the forerunner of things to
come when technological innovation in ICT continues to
broaden the users’ space for activity and creativity.
Therefore we claim that looking at the underlying
coordination mechanisms of these inverse infrastructures is
a source of inspiration for next generation policies.
We can identify a myriad of coordination mechanisms in
self-organizing systems, based on a study on coordination
in standardization, in Open Source Software (OSS)
development, complex adaptive systems (CAS) and
Systems of Systems (SoS)-theories [15]. If we restrict
ourselves to the study of coordination mechanisms in Open
Source Software development, we see the following list
(see Box 3).
The list shows that self-organizing, inverse initiatives
include coordination mechanisms that incorporate user
initiatives towards a grander design. As such they are an
example of a paradigm shift from top-down, centralized
design towards bottom-up/inverse developments in the ecommunications sector. The next step is to translate these
coordination mechanisms, or the dynamics behind them,
into innovative government arrangements that can deal with
the dispersed nature of new policy issues in the ecommunications sector that are spurred by technological
innovation.
Coordination
mechanisms
Committee
standardization
Market
coordination
Regulatory
coordination
Operational
coordination
Examples
Market and technology coordination in committees
Founding a standards community and standards procedures (e.g. Java)
Standardization initiatives
Coordination in the market place
Individual’s reputation as an expert
Software distributions
Desirability of a trademark
Consumer expectations
Market share as a sign of product quality
Project activity on website, high level of activity may indicate technical excellence
Company rules and government regulation enforce coordinative behavior
Participation agreements (e.g. OSS community membership registration)
Intellectual Property Right licenses
Contracts
Trademarks (e.g. Java-Compatible logo)
Developers in open source communities use several tools to support their activities. These tools
coordinate, i.e. focus and structure, their work:
software support tools, these support the development of interoperable programs
instructional books
certified training programs
manuals
test suites
reference implementations
concurrent versioning systems (CVS)/ Subversion: enables software developers to work on the
same version simultaneously
to-do lists
orphanages
gatekeepers, informal or formal hierarchy
Coordination by
authority
Box 3 Coordination mechanisms in Open Source Software development from [15]
8. NEXT GENERATION POLICY: THE ROLE OF
TECHNOLOGY
The other component that should receive more attention in
government policy and arrangements is the role of
technology itself. How can policy issues be solved or even
avoided by the technical design of infrastructures or
services? The expectation is that ICT users will
increasingly be provided with technology that they can
model towards their own preferences. Can this trend also be
used to include user activities into government
arrangements?
Let us take a look at the management of intellectual
property rights (IPR). ICT users increasingly face a myriad
of IPR-related issues in their private domain. They buy
music items from the Apple i-Tune store and copy CD’s for
friends that are subject to IPR, they make photos and videos
themselves and publish them on the Internet, they are
approached by digital producers who want to incorporate
their content into other media and they open their hardware
for WiFi passers-by, for grid computing or P2P file sharing.
How then can the end user be supported in his IPRmanagement? And in his privacy management when
dealing with material that contains pictures of others and in
his liability management, when challenged in court?
The other way around, can we analyze their activities in
order to find opportunities to make them contribute to
solving IPR-related, privacy and liability issues by means
of intelligent software? This is a major challenge and
source for innovation in governance approaches.
We will offer one more example. If we take a look at the
issue of robustness of the Internet, it turns out that now that
the e-communications sector is liberalized, the options to
address service providers with centralized policies are
limited. In European telecommunications law, only in case
a service provider is deemed to have significant market
power, can he be addressed by a range of regulatory
obligations in order to deal with the negative consequences
of that market power [26]. The technical way could be an
approach that is based on the theory of complex adaptive
systems, in this case the adoption of self-healing
mechanisms on the infrastructure level [27]. As illustrated
in Figure 1 this entails a shift from the classic way of
governing dependability by addressing the service
providers as market parties towards a new arrangement in
which the introduction of a protocol based on a Complex
Adaptive Systems approach is encouraged to indirectly
solve the problem of Internet dependability by
technological means [27].
REFERENCES
Policy
[1]
[2]
CAS
Reliability
[3]
[4]
Figure 1 Regulating dependability in the Internet
Infrastructure via CAS approach [27].
The governance power of new information and
communication technologies and the translation of this
power into regulatory arrangements is unexplored territory.
[5]
[6]
[7]
9. CHALLENGES FOR POLICY INNOVATION
Centralized policy options can deal with centralized issues,
but this approach is less suitable for decentralized issues (as
illustrated by spam, privacy, and intellectual property
rights, citizen ownership of network components, etc.).
Decentralized
issues
require
innovative
policy
arrangements that take an active end user role and elements
from the technical solutions space into account. This
requires a paradigm shift in thinking about regulatory
arrangements. A paradigm shift that extends the user
activity trends already visible in the domains of technical
innovation and the roles that users can play into the
governance arena.
Our intention in this paper was to sketch the changes in ICT
user activities. The classic end user still exists, but the
number of active ICT users is growing fast and the adoption
curve of new enabling technologies is steep. Also the
classic ways of governance and regulation will continue to
deal with policy issues in case the government tool matches
with the policy issue at hand. However, we claim that ICT
users as well as technology can be sources that should
explicitly be taken into account in the case of non-classic,
decentralized policy issues. We want to inspire
policymakers and market players to take another view at
users and technology and their combined forces to solve
policy issues. We think the best way to do so is to make an
inventory of policy issues that escape formal government
control on the one hand. And on the other hand, to analyze
policy arrangements that already take end user participation
into account. Also renewed attention should be paid to the
governance role of technology. Ultimately this should lead
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