Information Society Watch

This is a posting on an electronic mailing list for discussions on Internet governance in response to Milton Mueller's article 'Info-communism? Ownership and freedom in the digital economy' in the online journal First Monday.

I think that the notion of info-communism is a red herring, (excuse the pun) and can't be taken seriously - there is a some kind of radical chic at play there in the iconography - Che Guevara has become a mainstream icon used ironically by all comers, including business advertisers for their own purposes.

While the claims of freedom, the individual and constitutionality are very important, they do need to be balanced with the claims of the social. This is a key faultline in contemporary global politics that is at play in all sectors of society and the economy at present - particularly in the crisis around global financial markets. Freedom, individual property rights and extreme deregulation led to the crisis in which the whole system of global finances was threatening to become severely unhinged, leading the state representing the social interest in a stable financial market to intervene. In the space of intellectual property rights there is a similar extremism at play in the maximalist regime for IPRs that was, until challenged by social forces, willing to let masses of people in developing countries die of HIV/AIDS, aided and abetted by neo-conservatives like Thabo Mbeki in South Africa (to our shame). Microsoft is obviously an egregrious example in the world of software that could not be effectively restrained by social forces in the US, the centre of (extreme, suicidal) liberalism in the world. It is little wonder that the FOSS movement has taken up the issue aggressively, nor coincidental that it should be Gates who cast the first stone of info-communism around.

In the sphere of access to infrastructure, there has been ten-fifteen years of market liberalism at play which has had some successes but is not able to address the social needs of people who have little income, the bottom of the pyramid arguments notwithstanding. Here is a space for a commons to be created that can co-exist with a competitive market in access where citizens can pay for services. But the dice are loaded against such solutions - wireless municipal broadband whatever its problems is under severe threat in the US, for example. So I think there needs to be a paradigm shift in which claims of the individual to property rights and social claims for a commons can be balanced coherently. The fall out from the financial crisis is likely to facilitate this rebalancing process and it has nothing to do with the dead 20th century ideology of communism. but rather with issues of justice, equality and the assertion of the social.