Haggart EFF and the Political Economy of the American Digital

1 The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Political Economy of the American Digital Rights Movement Abstract: As one of the world’s most prominent (if not the most prominent) digital-rights group, and one with a reputation for principled stands, EFF’s views on digital-platform regulation have an outsized influence on policy options not only in the United States, but abroad. Systematically outlining EFF’s digital political economy thus helps to highlight how it defines the issue, and whose interests it promotes. To analyze the EFF’s economic ideology, this paper proposes a five- point framework for assessing the political economy of knowledge that draws on Susan Strange’s theories of structural power and the knowledge structure. It focuses on the control of key forms of knowledge, the role of the state and borders, and attitudes toward surveillance. The paper applies this framework primarily to four years (2015-2018) of EFF blog postings in its annual “Year in Review” series on its “Deeplinks” blog (www.eff.org/deeplinks), drawing out the specific themes and focuses of the organization, including the relative prevalence of economic versus non-economic (such as, for example, state surveillance) issues. The revealed ideology – favouring American-based self-regulation, individual responsibility for privacy, relative support for corporate surveillance, minimalist intellectual property protection, and free cross-border data flows – mirrors the interests of the large American internet platforms. Blayne Haggart Associate Professor, Department of Political Science Brock University St. Catharines, Canada Research Fellow Centre for Global Cooperation Research University of Duisburg-Essen Duisburg, Germany [email protected] Paper presented at the annual International Studies Association Meeting, Toronto, ON, March 27-30, 2019 2 Draft paper. Please do not cite without first contacting the author. 3 The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Political Economy of the American Digital Rights Movement Since the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal exploded in early 2018 (Cadwalladr and Graham-Hudson 2018), the regulation of social media and the wider data-driven economy has shot to the top of policy agendas around the world. At stake are fundamental questions regarding corporate power and monopoly in the internet-based industries, free speech and the societally corrosive spread of dis- and mis-information, individuals’ rights to privacy, and who should control data – a key building block of the digital economy – and to what ends. That many of the largest internet companies (outside China) – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple – are quickly becoming critical infrastructure indispensable to modern life, and not just discrete online activities (Plantin and de Seta 2019, 2; Helmond 2015) renders even more urgent the debate over how best to regulate them. In this debate, some organizations are more important than others. Among non-governmental organizations, few are potentially as important as the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. One of the oldest (established in 1990) digital-rights advocacy groups in the world, it claimed support in 2017 from “nearly 40,000 dues-paying members” and revenues of $US19,063,915 (Electronic Frontier Foundation 2017, 2, 25). It currently has 86 affiliate organizations around the United States1 and is active in Europe, as well as in key international/global organizations such as the Internet Governance Forum, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Global Network Initiative.2 Over almost 30 years it has garnered a reputation for the forceful defence of civil liberties online, particularly in relation to government surveillance and against restrictive copyright and patent laws.3 However, as some commentators, notably former EFF employee and current Slate technology writer April Glaser, have remarked, the EFF and similar American digital-rights groups “have been jarringly quiet” regarding calls to regulate these platforms. In April 2018, Glaser reported: I asked each of them if they have campaigns related to Facebook, or have proposals for any kind of legislation that would address the ways Facebook and other companies surveil and monetize your every move. Not one does—the most they’ve done is write blog posts and started initial conversations. … Compare this level of engagement with these issues to the media, which has treated the weeks since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke as a public referendum on Facebook’s entire business model, or the growing outcry from academics who have long studied and warned of the deleterious effects of broad corporate data collection (Glaser 2018). In a sense, why EFF and other groups remained silent is relatively obvious, if uncomfortable for digital-rights activists to accept. As Glaser remarks, the EFF and the American digital-rights movement has its origins “in libertarian and anti-regulation philosophies” that focuses more on constitutional rights instead of actual harms to the community. Furthermore, both Glaser and 1 https://www.eff.org/electronic-frontier-alliance/allies. Accessed FeBruary 26, 2019. 2 https://www.eff.org/issues/global-policy-venues. Accessed FeBruary 26, 2019. 3 Disclosure: The EFF named the author’s 2014 Book, Copyfight: The Global Politics of Digital Copyright Reform a “must-read” of 2014 (Higgins 2014). 4 journalist Yasha Levine, writing in The Baffler, highlight EFF’s and others digital advocates’ financial dependency on Facebook and Google. In fiscal year 2017 EFF “took in about $822,000 from Google, including donations from employees that are matched by the company” (Glaser 2018; Levine 2018). Such funding is inherently problematic: O’Conner and Weatherall (2019, 119–20), citing philosophers of science Bennett Holman and Justin Bruner, argue that “the mere fact that certain scientists received industry funding can dramatically corrupt the scientific process” effectively by drawing in ideologically friendly researchers, and effectively excluding different points of view. Inaction, Levine and Glaser suggest, is in the interests of EFF’s funders, and so inaction results. Levine goes so far as to claim that “the truth is that EFF is a corporate front. It is America’s oldest and most influential internet business lobby—an organization that has played a pivotal role in shaping the commercial internet as we know it and, increasingly, hate it” (Levine 2018). While these reasons may explain the “why” of EFF’s actions, it is also useful to consider the precise content and implications of EFF’s views on the governance of the digital economy in and of itself, rather than in terms of its effects on free speech, which is the way the EFF prefers to discuss these issues. As one of the world’s most prominent (if not the most prominent) digital- rights group, and one with a reputation for principled stands, its actions and inactions have an outsized influence on policy discussions not only in the United States, but abroad. Systematically outlining EFF’s conceptions of the digital political economy thus helps to highlight how it defines the issue, and whose interests it promotes. To analyze the EFF’s economic ideology, this paper proposes a five-point framework for assessing how different groups and individuals approach the political economy of knowledge. It is focused on the control of key forms of knowledge, the role of the state and borders, and attitudes toward surveillance. It applies this framework primarily to four years (2015-2018) of EFF blog postings in its annual “Year in Review” series on its Deeplinks blog (www.eff.org/deeplinks), drawing out the specific themes and focuses of the organization, including the relative prevalence of economic versus non-economic (for example, state surveillance) issues. The revealed ideology – favouring American-based self-regulation, individual responsibility for privacy, relative support for corporate surveillance, minimalist intellectual property protection, and free cross-border data flows – mirrors the interests of the large American internet platforms, the “infrastructural arrangements that situate digital operability on proprietary systems that are, to some degree, programmable and/or customizable by the system users, making possible one- or multisided market exchanges” (Andersson Schwarz 2017). This paper also argues that EFF’s close relationship with the very companies it seeks to criticize fatally compromise its ability to act as a de facto regulator, suggesting a fatal flaw in the EFF’s view of a privacy-supporting digital economy regulated from within. This paper is structured as followed. The first section, which draws on Susan Strange’s conception of structural power and the knowledge structure, and Robert W. Cox’s conception of the state-society complex, outlines the paper’s framework. The second presents an overview of the EFF’s “Deeplinks” blog and of its main topics. The third section applies the paper’s framework to the blog posts, while the fourth section considers offers an analysis of the EFF’s political economy, including its beneficiaries. It concludes with some final thoughts about the framework’s general applicability. 5 A. Analyzing the knowledge structure: Rise of the “info-imperium state”4 The current moment in the global political economy is characterized by the extent to which the control of knowledge has become central to the exercise of economic, social and political power. In the economic sphere, its importance can be seen in the emergence

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