Ankur Jain's musings

Better data for a better Internet

Quantitative, trustworthy research on Internet use is essential for policy making and freedom, writes Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey in their latest article in Science. Here is a brief summary:

When people took to the streets across the UK in the summer of 2011, the Prime Minister suggested restricting access to digital and social media in order to limit their use in organizing. The resulting debate complemented speculation on the effects of social media in the Arab Spring and the widespread critique of President Mubarak’s decision to shut off the Internet and mobile phone systems completely in Egypt.

Decisions about when and how to regulate activities online will have a profound societal impact. Debates underlying such decisions touch upon fundamental problems related to economics, free expression, and privacy. Their outcomes will influence the structure of the Internet, how data can flow across it, and who will pay to build and maintain it. Most striking about these debates are the paucity of data available to guide policy and the extent to which policy-makers ignore the good data we do have.

Data-Poor Decisions, or None at All?

Web sites and Internet service providers collect statistics about seemingly every aspect of Web usage throughout the commercial world. Companies collect so much information about how individual people use the Internet that we are seeing a growing backlash, in the name of user privacy, against corporate data collection.

Yet at a systemic level, we understand little about what’s going on in the digital world in the ways that should matter most to policy-makers. Policy-making is based, too often, on anecdotes collected at random (or worse, self-servingly) or on research produced or funded in ways that call into doubt its scholarly integrity.