Sarai I-Fellowship Posting 3.2 - Review and analysis of "National Governments and Control of the Internet: A Digital Challenge"

This book is written by Giampiero Giacomello, a post-doctoral associate at Cornell University and a visiting professor at the University of Bologna. It's a somewhat contemporary (circa 2005) cross country comparative study of what the author terms as the issue of "internet control". Giacomello essentially seeks to lay out the rationale behind and the structure by which national governments in a selected group of western liberal democratic states seek to control the Internet and how it relates to fundamental civil rights in addition to economic activities. As he notes, the reason why democracies are for more interesting to study with respect to internet control in this context is that unlike autocracies (whom he argues seek to control all communications if possible by default), democratic states see far more development of the world's "information infrastructure" and due to their constitutional limitations, actually see competition between the Internet stakeholders and state interests. If you'll note, this goes back to the central reason behind my own research outline, in that the need to study how the Indian State regulates speech and expression on the Internet is because its constitutional structure envisages a restriction on the state's ability to interfere in the area of speech and expression. To put it in simpler terms, democratic states are more interesting to study and present more complex policy questions because they do not have the unfettered right to restrict speech and expression under their constitutional structures. Autocratic states are arguably unrestricted by constitutional quandaries of this sort and hence pose questions more related to transparency in determining and measuring restrictions along with the issue of circumventing censorship rather than matters pertaining to accepting policies under law.


Giacomello is primarily an international relations scholar; the linkage between the subject of Internet control and his own area of specialization in international relations in to do with the similarity between the development of the Internet with that of the International System (the issues of International involvement in Internet Governance and jurisdiction concerns which would normally pop to mind as normal linkages in such a situation actually get very little attention in this book). Essentially, he argues that the common feature of the early Internet with the International System was that of anarchy. He then tracks the effect that this had on national governments, quoting the Economist in saying that "National Governments found its [the Internet's] libertarian culture and contempt for national borders subversive and frankly terrifying". He then, like Wu and Goldsmith in "Who Controls the Internet", notes throughout his book how the Internet's initial chaotically libertarian environment was slowly but steadily weakened and regulated by national governments. Like them, Giacomello essentially gives us a view of the present which has seen the death of the initial libertarian dogma that the Internet was by its very nature impossible to regulate.

The reasons that he posits for the question of why national governments would want to control what he considers to be a difficult to control medium are twofold; the social theory linking control with power, which pertains to what is referred as "the sense of the information environment and, secondly, the history of state control in different forms over communication media (including primarily the extensive control regimes over such media in Europe). He argues that the belief that the Internet was sought to be controlled merely because it was a new communication medium to be incomplete and only a partial answer.


Giacomello splits the problem of "control to protect" into two forms. Firstly is with regards controlling what he terms as the national information infrastructure (NII) which includes the Internet as an integral part, and secondly the aspect of controlling online content. Thus, we have to look at controlling the infrastructure through which Internet communication is possible in a given state, i.e. the NII, along with the direct regulation of online content as two aspects of the same "control to protect" agenda followed by liberal democratic states. The importance of this split is again primarily of importance to liberal democratic states, because direct content regulation is more difficult to justify under their constitutional frameworks. Thus, they often begin the process of Internet control by regulating the NII as the same is often not as legally restricted and controversial as direct curbs on content which might violate the right to free speech and expression.

This is important, because I believe that the Indian state has also followed this approach, consciously or not, in how it has regulated the Internet in India. Access to the Internet at its outset in India was regulated, by virtue of the fact that it was being provided solely by VSNL, a government owned telecom monopoly. This gave the government direct control over the NII as such, which continued considerably even after this area was opened up to private players as part of the general liberalization of the telecom sector. All new players had to sign license agreements with the Department of Telecom which placed considerable conditions on their operation, including duties beyond the general onus to comply with Indian laws to the point where they were directly called upon to cooperate with blocking content if so ordered by the Department of Telecom. This is an explicit clause of the Internet Service Provider (ISP) Agreement. Essentially, the nature of the Indian State's economic regulatory apparatus in controlling such infrastructure providers, including the telecom sector, has seen the pervasive control of the Indian State in controlling the National Information Infrastructure in India. It has been from this generally pervasive control that the Indian State bases its growing direct and indirect control of speech and expression of the Internet in India.