On Platforms v. Publishers, and the Fight for the Right to Repair
Dear Reader,
As 2023 rolls to an end, the world looks to a momentous year ahead. Indeed, the political stakes are high, with nearly 40 countries - encompassing 42% of global GDP and 41% of the world’s population - heading to elections in 2024, including notably, the US, UK, Russia, and India. In an ever-escalating climate of disinformation, extreme speech, and the algorithmic distortion of our communicative rights, platform activity in the coming year will likely push the public sphere’s health to its limits. Whether the recent surge in platform regulation can address the challenges ahead will remain to be seen.
Further, 2024 will also be a defining turn for the future of digital governance in other ways, with the upcoming UN Summit of the Future and the WSIS+20 review. How these play out may well shape our geo-political and digital landscape for the next decade, and we shall be redoubling our efforts to stay on top of the fall-out of these events for our digital futures.
Turning to the month gone by, one of the more exciting stories in recent weeks has been the spirited confrontation that Swedish union workers have mounted against Tesla, challenging the company’s policy of dismissing any engagement with organized labor. The strike has drawn solidarity from allied workers and groups across the continent, and may even force Tesla to finally concede to worker demands. If it does happen, this will mark a fitting end to a year that has seen a resurgence of worker power and a slew of important labor victories.
In other news, Big Tech companies have fired back against the legal reins that have increasingly been cast around them worldwide. Specifically, Meta, Apple, and TikTok have challenged their classification as ‘gatekeepers’ within the EU’s new digital markets regulations, inaugurating the first real test for the scope and effectiveness of this new regulatory regime. This move comes amidst other developments, as this month also saw Australian authorities push for greater anti-monopoly legislation in the digital economy, as well as Google lose an antitrust case against Epic Games, which contested the draconian policies of its app store.
The tumultuous COP28 summit also just took place. A notable feature of this year’s proceedings was the emphasis on a ‘Green Digital Action’ track. A number of initiatives in this regard were announced, including reducing emissions, working together to reduce e-waste, and the need to build stronger sustainability standards for the digital economy. Whilst the agreements achieved were modest, they do mark a growing consensus towards ensuring that climate justice concerns are incorporated into analysis and policymaking for the digital sphere.
Finally, taking forward the growing impulse for moving towards AI regulation, we also saw new commitments from global leaders and corporations at the Global Partnership in AI conference in New Delhi. This came on the heels of the EU agreeing to a version of the AI Act, after a prolonged and intense trilogue. The Act, anchored in a risk-based approach, is the first legislative regime to fully engage with and regulate the existing span of AI use-cases, including foundational models and general-purpose AI systems. It also mandates public bodies and private entities in service provision that deploy high-risk systems to undertake a fundamental-rights impact assessment. However, critics have pointed to the significant dilutions to commitments with respect to privacy and the use of biometrics, as well as questionable loopholes, including filtering conditions regarding what constitutes genuine high-risk applications.
In our last issue for the year, we bring you two pieces that engage with some of these recent debates. Our first piece takes a look at the perils of electronic waste and the corporate behavior and political backdrop that aggravates its fallout. Our second piece, riding on the momentum of the recent Canadian Online News Act, engages critically with the news content-digital platform conjuncture, using India as a case study to unpack the growing strife and regulatory concerns therein.
The DataSyn Team
THE BIG EXCESS
Right to Repair and the Fight Against Planned Obsolescence
Sonja Leyvraz
While many have foregrounded the exorbitant energy costs of data centers as a key challenge for sustainability, other environmental externalities remain under-represented in public discourse. An example is the vast proliferation of e-waste, which continues to be exported to the developing world, and which largely results from corporate practices and attitudes that induce early obsolescence. Sonja Leyvraz critically engages with the politics of this within the EU.
Read on.
THE POLICY TABLE
Big Tech and News Media in India: The Frenemies Who Control What We Read
Madhavi Singh
As the recent battle in Canada over revenue sharing from news feeds bore out, the tension between news media and social media platforms has been a site of intense contestation in recent years. Indeed, with both sides claiming to generate immense and unacknowledged value for the other, this uneasy relationship has elicited considerable debate amongst regulators on how to think about power and dependence in the platform economy. Using the Indian media landscape as a case study, Madhavi Singh weighs in on these debates.
Read on.
The Sins & Synergies Lounge
Understanding environmental and digital justice as twin goals can underscore how championing the causes of one can serve as important victories for the other too. Read this piece where Cory Doctorow foregrounds the importance of the ‘Right to Repair’ in our fight against the monopolistic tendencies of Big Tech.
A new working paper estimates that the value of news to digital platforms is far higher than usually acknowledged, and an adequate system of remuneration would have these platforms owe publishers in the order of tens of billions. Listen to Anya Schiffrin and Haaris Mateen elaborate on their findings and discuss the broader debates around the platformization of journalistic content.
One of the central theoretical questions around the digital economy is how to think about the value of data: How high is it? What conditions does it have? What forms of data manifest it most? Tune in to this recent episode of ‘This Machine Kills’ podcast, where hosts Jathan Sadowski and Edward Ongweso Jr. are joined by Salome Viljoen to engage with this thorny subject.
While we engage with the many problems of concentration in the platform economy, the landscape of the digital economy is also being contested by emerging companies and nations that are determined to overturn Big Tech’s hegemony. For an overview of these dynamics, check out Rest of World’s coverage of ‘40 Global Tech Companies Beating the West’.
What might be the elements of a feminist development policy to facilitate a just digital transition? With inputs from IT for Change, a new study co-helmed by Betterplace Lab and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) seeks to respond to this question. Have a look at it here.
Post-script
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