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Workshop on Digital Move Empowering Families to Move Freely Online: Harnessing the Full Potential of the Internet Through Genuine Data Portability

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Workshop on Digital Move Empowering Families to Move Freely Online: Harnessing the Full Potential of the Internet Through Genuine Data Portability Workshop on Digital move Empowering families to move freely online: harnessing the full potential of the internet through genuine data portability Families on the Move conference www.coface-eu.org/consumers/families-on-the-move With the support of: Reality check and State of play The Internet has become an integral part of redirected instead of being stopped. Think the lives of families all across the world, yet about it as a spider web: if you need to go few reflect on its governance, a key aspect from one point to another in a spider web, to secure certain elementary freedoms like even if one thread of the spider web snaps, the freedom of movement. Moving freely there are many other possible routes you online doesn’t just mean being able to can take. consult any website you want, but also being able to consult them in similar With regards to the content/services side, conditions (the debate about “net we have seen a growing concentration in neutrality”) or being able to switch online the hands of a few companies: Google, services at any time which is what the Facebook and Amazon. This concentration workshops on “digital move” focused on. is detrimental for many reasons. For instance, a successful cyberattack on Just like any service, the Internet is prone to Amazon cloud services could take down centralization and lock in: huge parts of the Web (the web pages centralization as in the concentration would no longer be available). Another and control of a major part of its reason is the user experience: by reaching infrastructure and/or content in the near monopolistic positions, these giants hands of one or a few major players; can impose abusive access conditions and “lock in” meaning the difficulty of users unfair business models. The growing to switch services or online platforms. prevalence of online advertising on social networks or video sharing platforms and This phenomenon is not unique to the the increased exploitation and gathering of Internet and centralization and the “lock in” user data are directly linked to this effect have been seen in many other centralization process: by “locking in” the industries like the telephone operators user, you can exploit his/her data and make which in many countries functioned as him/her watch more targeted advertising, quasi monopolies and made it very difficult and not only for commercial reasons but to switch operator (you had to give up your also, increasingly, for political reasons phone number). during election campaigns. Centralization also enables easier censorship, be it from With regards to the Internet, we need to private actors or governments. distinguish the hardware/network (the cables and routers which link every While there is a natural tendency for individual’s computer together) from the centralization, certain decentralized content/services (the data and the online solutions, developed especially within the services). The hardware and networks were “Open Source” movement and community, designed, from the outset, in a have gradually emerged over the years. Too decentralized way and for very important often, however, these solutions are taken up reasons: to make sure that even if one part by the “geeks and nerds” community and of the network failed, the “traffic” would be never make it to the wider public. 2 Workshop on Digital Move – Families on the Move Conference HWC (Homebrew Website Club), share their knowledge for free, exemplified represented by Nicolas Collignon and via its most successful projet to date: the Ricardo Mendes is an example of a young Wikipedia encyclopedia. company which aims at bridging the gap The foundation builds their projects based between readily usable decentralized on a number of core values and a firm solutions from the “indie web” and ordinary belief in digital rights. Yet they also faced Internet users by hosting informal the same challenges as any other company gatherings to exchange expertise and on the Internet: how to deal with illegal knowledge about how these solutions work. content, harassment, censorship and so on. They also directly help NGOs, small businesses and other actors to make the To each challenge, its original response: switch to decentralized solutions which are often cheaper and more respectful of Illegal content is being taken down in privacy than commercial solutions. cooperation with law enforcement, when multiple jurisdictions apply, the In concrete terms, HWC proposes such strongest of the multiple laws applicable services as self-hosting which enables is taken as reference. Criminal content is anyone to directly host their not blocked but fully deleted. Such website/content without subscribing to a requests are rare however, given commercial online cloud service. Among Wikimedia’s core business. Illegal the self-hosting solutions, we find Cloudron, content is different. For instance, Yunohost, Nextcloud, Rocket.Chat, and regarding copyright infringement, there many more. is a discussion around each deletion to strike a balance between deletion for Examples of other decentralized service valid reasons and censorship. include Diaspora which is a decentralized social network and Signal which is a highly With regards to violence, nudity, or any secure and privacy respectful messaging other form of shocking content, service with end-to-end encryption. The use Wikimedia has decided to accept or of VPN (Virtual Private Network) is also delete it depending on whether it was listed as a privacy enhancing solution. treated “encyclopedically” or not; in essence, whether the content fulfils Finally, HWC explores various hardware some kind of educational purpose or is solutions for increased privacy and irrelevant to the subject being explored. autonomy such as the “Internet Cube” which enables self-hosting and VPN in one Inaccurate or low quality content is hardware, or Nextcloud box which also dealt with by strengthening the allows you to host your content directly community participating inside from your living room. Wikipedia and reinforcing the skills of HWC organizes monthly meetups in the contributors, but also in providing a Brussels open to anyone. space for editing and discussing the Wikimedia, represented by Dimitar content and cultivate values of Dimitrov, on the other hand, is an example cooperation, deliberation and of an online service provider whose mission democracy by allowing users to vote was to enable every single human being to 3 Workshop on Digital Move – Families on the Move Conference and have a say on the contents of During the discussion, many issues were Wikipedia. raised and some ideas proposed: Finally, with respect to harassment, While technical solutions to social Wikimedia adopts a “zero tolerance” problems may not be the panacea, they policy making it clear that harassment is have proven to be effective when being not and will not be tolerated, thereby well designed. The (technical) rules opting for “social” solutions rather than which govern the editing and technical solutions such as censorship. contribution process of Wikipedia have yielded stability and good overall Joe McNamee from EDRi (European quality of the content. As decentralized Digital Rights) gave examples of cases solutions are being rolled out, it is key where censorship or other technically driven to determine how to address problems solutions to solve human behavior online of harassment or criminal content given resulted in creating side effects which were that many such solutions do not have a sometimes worse than the problem meant “central authority” to contact regarding to be solved: liability or take-down, especially given that very often, being uncensorable and In Belgium, the censorship of fully anonymous is part of their newsgroups for music by the music underlying code. Some balance needs industry was used by users to create a to be struck between technical list of the best places to get music since solutions/rules embedded in newsgroups were not censored equally decentralized services and social by all Internet providers. solutions (education, fighting stereotypes, social and emotional The no longer existing Dutch social learning, values, critical thinking, network Hives created a system which resilience…). was meant to tackle cyberbullying and harassment based on user reporting. If Decentralized solutions can enhance the social network received 10 reports democracy via their participatory nature, from different IPs, it blocked the embedded in their code. content/person. This system was used by teenagers to bully others by There is an inherent tendency for grouping together to block a person. networks to centralize themselves in a self-reinforcing way. Everyone uses The issue of censorship is also treated Whatsapp and Facebook because selectively in many parts of the world. In the everybody else uses Whatsapp and United States for instance, depending on Facebook. To ensure that which organisation you are, “freedom of decentralization becomes a norm forces speech” can apply or not. For instance, us to identify the root causes of Wikileaks has been a victim of attempted centralization and address them directly censorship via paralegal means: by in the design of decentralized solutions. persuading companies like Cloud hosting or financial services to stop providing their In order to fully realize the potential services to Wikileaks. that decentralized solutions present 4 Workshop on Digital Move – Families on the Move Conference such as self-hosting or alternatives to networks) would not store your data social networks and other platforms, on their own servers, but the data two elements are essential: would be stored via a decentralized service chosen by the user and users - Achieve interoperability between the would give an authorization to various decentralized solutions in services to access parts of that data. order to minimize the likelihood of a This comes with many advantages: “lock in” effect. There are many users would not need to “reupload” examples of decentralized services multiple times a similar content which are interoperable such as across multiple services (for email.
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