Throughout history, space has been conceptualized as physical. However, disrupting technologies---especially information and communications technologies (ICTs)---shape and redefine how a space is experienced. Consider, for example, a train connecting two cities, or the electronic faregate in the station. Both dramatically influence a user's perception of a space, and their ability to interact with a given environment.
The Internet epitomizes this. Without physically altering geographic space, it transduces it, creating new location-agnostic communities, markets, and cultures. This shift calls for a new definition of space, one that focuses less on the location and more on the activity that a space facilitates. To draw from Manuel Castell: "Space is the expression of society. Since our societies are undergoing structural transformation, it is a reasonable hypothesis to suggest that new spatial forms and processes are currently emerging"[1].
As ICTs become increasingly pervasive, the space in which people spend their lives begins to lose its geographic centricity. Floridi calls this new society the infosphere, "a concept that can also be used as synonymous with reality, once we interpret the latter informationally"[2].
Similarly, local nation-states lose their saliency, as individuals are easily connected to people and organizations outside the state. Agents in the infosphere can use this new "information flow" to their advantage (for examples of this, see social media during the Arab Spring[3]), however, issues of sovereignty---a governing's agency's "supreme authority within a territory"[4]---emerge as government and non-government actors vie for control. To the end that modern democratic states state use their sovereignty to protect citizens' fundamental rights[5], the loss in statal influence poses a disadvantage to individual rights.
I argue that the presence of this threat calls for recognition of network sovereignty, the ability for an agent to "distinguish the boundaries of a network and then exercise a sovereign will or control within and at those boundaries"[6]. Further, I indicate ways that current technology can be augmented to create a better infraethics, technical systems with which better ethical decisions can be made.
Technically, the Internet is made up of hundreds of thousands of geographic networks, each subordinate to the state it is a part of. Each network, known as an autonomous system (AS), has thousands to millions of agents (called nodes) connected to it. These nodes are internet-connected devices, able to communicate with each other via an Internet router, which transmits data between them. An AS belongs to an organization, like an ISP or a university, who permits devices to connect to their network, and connected them to other ASes via a global infrastructure called the Internet backbone.
Transmitting data outside one autonomous system is what creates an "internet". ASes discover each other through the Border Gateway Protocol, an "inter-Autonomous System routing protocol" which "exchange[s] network reachability information with other BGP systems...sufficient for constructing a graph of AS connectivity". ASes learn about each other's existence and can then send information between nodes by finding a path from one AS to another. This is the way the internet routes information: when one nodes wants to communicate with another, a route is determined between them that passes through as many ASes as necessary, and then the data is passed from router to router, "hopping" from the originator to the destination. The most efficient route between multiple ASes is taken, similar to how a package in the postal service travels from city to city until it reaches its destination.[7]
Internet networks are politically and geographically agnostic. An AS will transmit data over international borders just as easily as it will domestically. The Internet, when viewed as a collection of these heterogeneous networks, then, is "governed" by multiple forces: the local and national laws for each AS, the code determining how nodes and networks interact with each other, and the non-statal organizations that facilitate the interaction (e.g. technical standards bodies and service providers). This places the Internet into Floridi's conception of a multi-agent system (MAS), where "organizations and institutions...that are not states but rather non-governmental multi-agent systems, are openly acknowledged to act as major influential forces on the political and economic scene internationally, dealing with global problems through global policies"[8].
The Internet as an multi-agent system meets Floridi's definition[9] by being
- teleological: its purpose is to facilitate communication between arbitrary nodes,
- interactive: people and other independent entities interact and communicate with each other via its infrastructure,
- autonomous: it silently routes information along an arbitrary, unknown path, and
- adaptable: each network within it is independently governed and controlled, can change behavior based on external intervention, and otherwise adapts to changing conditions on its own.
Accordingly, control and authority in the infosphere does not belong to a single powerful agent. As "the infosphere becomes synonymous with reality"[10], this places pressure on state sovereignty. John Reidenberg, looking forward from 1996, remarked that
Transnational information flows on the GII [Global Information Infrastructure] undermine these foundational borders and erode state sovereignty over regulatory policy and enforcement. Geographic limits have diminishing value. Physical borders become trans-parent and foreign legal systems have local relevance. Network activities may make participants subject to legal rules of distant jurisdictions. Political and economic communities based predominantly on geographic proximity and physical contact have less relevance in cyberspace because network communities can replace physically proximate communities. Political dis-course can ignore national borders, while affinities and affiliations transcend distances and human contact. Internet "listservs 's and "usenet groups" involve participants from around the world communicating directly with each other on topics of mutual interest. Economic relationships need no physical situs. With electronic cash and new means of electronic stored value, such as those developed by Cybercash and Mondex, Internet transactions may take place entirely on the network without the physical delivery of goods or services and without resort to any national payment system.[11]
The Internet presents two challenges to state sovereignty. First is an inability to protect fundamental rights. The modern democratic state has a strong commitment to protecting its citizens' natural rights, both through the social contract it forms with society and through domestic and international law. It is an exercise of a state's sovereign power to uphold its citizen's rights. Different nation-states have different levels of commitment to natural and civil rights, and are only obligated to respect the rights of their own citizens, yet in the borders-agnostic GII, this is increasingly problematic, since foreign nation-states regularly interact with "outsiders" in the infosphere. Second, unlike the socially-constructed nation-state, the Internet has no inherent commitment to rights. Fundamentally, it provides the technical infrastructure for the infosphere, but not the ethical infrastructure. This disconnect leads to new inability for the state to "exercise informational power"[12] over its subjects.
A case study for this is Canada. As observed by the IXmaps Project at the University of Toronto, a significant amount of Canadian Internet traffic is routed through the United States. Even Canadian-to-Canadian communicated often travels abroad: due to the US's formative role in Internet infrastructure, much of the highly-efficient infrastructure exists within US borders. Using a method of recording Internet pathways called traceroute, IXmaps determined that roughly 25% of Canadian-to-Canadian traffic passes through routers and switches in the US.
This is of particular concern due to suspected NSA surveillance of Internet communications. Project researchers Obar and Clement point to revelations from Snowden, Klein and others that suggest that NSA is engaged in bulk collection of Internet traffic at various top-tier "choke points" in the Internet backbone.[13] This paper does not intend to comment on the ethical implications of dragnet surveillance, however, what is important to recognize is that Canadians do not have rights as protected citizens under US law. While their data are passing through US networks, regardless of whether they intended to communicate with a US entity or not, they are foreigners subject to near-zero protections. As Obar and Clement note:
...the IXmaps research makes visible a widespread phenomenon we call ‘boomerang routing' whereby Canadian-to-Canadian internet transmissions are routinely routed through the United States. Canadian originated transmissions that travel to a Canadian destination, but via a U.S. switching centre or U.S. carrier, are subject to U.S. law --- including the USA Patriot Act and FISAA. As a result, Canadian-to-Canadian internet transmissions that boomerang expose Canadian communications to potential U.S. surveillance activities – a violation of Canadian network sovereignty.[14]
This example highlights a tension between individual privacy and the present MAS. Privacy is a necessary component of personal identity in a hyperhistorical society. Under Floridi's ethics, privacy or "information friction" is necessitated "by considering each person as constituted by his or her information, and hence by understanding a breach of one’s informational privacy as a form of aggression towards one’s personal identity"[15]. Thus, the system an individual exists in must have infrastructure in place to protect their civil right to privacy: "Any society (even a utopian one) in which no informational privacy is possible is one in which no self-constituting process can take place, no personal identity can be developed and maintained, and hence no welfare can be achieved, social welfare being only the sum of the individuals’ involved."
States may have a compelling interest to correct this, but due to the creation of space "outside of" national boundaries, they are unable to fix the infosphere by regulating the Internet. Thus, network sovereignty is threatened. Obar and Clement:
National sovereignty is threatened when an otherwise internationally independent state has its rights and powers of internal regulation and control violated by the encroachment of a foreign body...As sovereigns, they can decide where these networks go, their structural design and development, the extent to which they operate, in whole or in part, and at what speed and capacity, as well as who or what can travel on them, and at what price. It follows that a threat to national network sovereignty constitutes encroachment upon the rights and powers of the state to regulate and control any of these network aspects.
This threat to agency poses an ethical challenge by reducing an individual's ability to regulate their privacy and informational friction. There is a need for what Floridi calls infraethics---structures within the MAS that can be utilized to treat individuals ethically. Infraethics (a portmanteau of "infrastructure" and "ethics") are the "environments that can facilitate ethical choices, actions, or process"[16]. They are the "pipes" by which ethical actions can be carried: "an infraethics is not morally good in itself, but it is what is most likely to yield moral goodness if properly designed and combined with the right moral values."
With regard to network sovereignty, there are multiple policy proposals to create a better Internet infraethics. In Canada, Obar and Clement have pushed for stricter privacy laws[17], and for development of a stronger Canadian internet backbone, which will help reduce the "boomerang routing" problem with the US. In the EU, German Chancellor Angela Merkel proposed the "creation of a separate European Internet to shield users from surveillance"[18], which would create isolated networks apart from the Internet that are EU-only.
These and other statal attempts to deal with this problem have largely been focused on regulatory laws and policies (solutions within the purview of the state). However, I argue that the greatest infraethical gain will not come from new state policy, but rather new development in ICTs themselves, drawing inspiration from Floridi: "solutions to the problem of protecting privacy can be not only self-regulatory and legislative but also technological."[19] Scientific research has demonstrated ways to utilize Internet technology to return some network sovereignty to states, and potentially to individuals. One proposal promotes extensions to the Border Gateway Protocol to allow operators of Autonomous Systems to selectively refuse to send data to others---for example, a Canadian AS could be configured to keep certain kinds of private information internal to Canada.[20] Another proposal uses the time it takes data to physically travel between networks to measure the geographic distance between them (since optical data travels at light-speed), strongly assuring an agent whether or not their data entered a particular region.[21] The important thing here is that behind both of these proposals is a demonstration that internet infrastructure can (and will) empower sovereign agents. Reidenberg, anticipating this two decades ago, agreed:
Just as traditional foundations for governance are breaking down, new boundaries are emerging on the GII, The infrastructure itself contains visible borders. Network borders replace national borders. Network service providers, as well as the infrastructure architecture, each establish rules of participation for defined network areas. These rules form visible borders on the GII. In addition to these visible borders, network communities also develop distinct sovereign powers. Thus, infrastructure organizations acquire attributes of the traditional territorial sovereigns.[22]
The pervasiveness of an ethically underdeveloped Internet poses problems for individual rights: people exist in a system that has lost some of its ability to ensure their right to privacy, and thus their right to their personal identity. Foreign statal and non-statal agents have unprecedented ability to deny privacy rights due to a lack of network sovereignty. But a combination of political and technological solutions exist as well, creating a stronger infraethics and empowering agents to better ensure ethical treatment of their data subjects. If Floridi is right that "powerful multi-agent systems are now the new sources of policies in the globalized information societies"[23], then it follows that such an infraethical solution is the way forward.
[1] [@castells p. 440-441]
[2] [@floridi p. 41]
[3] [@zuckermann]
[4] [@sep-sovereignty]
[5] Ibid., see "circumscription of sovereign state"
[6] [@PostSnowden]
[7] [@PostSnowden p. 16, see "The Internet Is Not a Cloud: Routing Basics"]
[8] [@floridi p. 173]
[9] [@floridi p. 180]
[10] [@floridi p. 41]
[11] [@reidenberg p. 914]
[12] [@floridi p. 175]
[13] [@PostSnowden p. 15]
[14] [@obar2012internet p. 3]
[15] [@floridi p. 119]
[16] [@floridi p. 190]
[17] [@obar2012internet p. 6-7, see "Strengthen Canadian Privacy Laws (i.e. PIPEDA)"]
[18] [@merkel2014]
[19] [@floridi p. 115]
[20] [@levin2007boycotting]
[21] [@levin2015alibi]
[22] [@reidenberg p. 917]
[23] [@floridi p. 174]