More Regulation?

Does InternetNZ REALLY want greater regulation of the Internet?

The Internet was developed using late 20th Century information technology and advanced high speed communications network technology. Such technology is universally available to the entire world and, by its very nature, is not exclusive to any one ethnicity. In fact, it is one of the most democratising of any technology – of the world’s 8.20bn population, 5.56bn individuals use the Internet, and the average personal daily usage is over six hours!

InternetNZ is an organisation which, as its name suggests, operates in the Internet space and has done so for many years. Its website describes its principal and most lucrative activity as follows:

InternetNZ holds the delegation for the .nz country code top level domain. It operates the regional registry for New Zealand (the .nz Register). The .nz Register is a single register, shared registry system that manages the registration of .nz domain names and associated data.

The following principles guide the management of .nz:

· .nz should be secure and trusted: .nz infrastructure must be dependable and secure, and .nz be trusted

· .nz should be open and accessible: everybody should be able to observe, participate, innovate and enjoy the benefits of .nz

· .nz should serve and benefit New Zealand and reflect and be responsive to our diverse social, cultural and ethnic environment

· .nz should support te reo Māori me ōna tikanga and participation in .nz by Māori

· .nz should enable New Zealand to grow and develop: it should help people, businesses and organisations connect, create, innovate and grow.

The importance of the domain name system cannot be over-estimated. It is basically the addressing system that every Internet user uses. The maintenance and functioning of the domain name system should be the first – indeed the only priority – for InternetNZ.

As part of its activities, InternetNZ carries out an annual survey. In an article about the survey written by Vivien Maidaborn, the Chief Executive of InternetNZ, there is confirmation that we are spending more time online than ever.

Social media, emails and streaming services are the three most popular activities, while messaging friends, browsing news websites and apps, and using search engines also rate highly.

In the words of Ms. Maidaborn

“Facebook’s grip stretches furthest — 58% of us log in at least once a day, making it the most frequently visited platform among all social media channels.

As we navigate this landscape of likes, shares, and endless scrolling, it begs the question: are we shaping our digital world, or is it shaping us?”

Well, the answer to that last question is “yes”. As Marshall McLuhan said in the 1960’s “we shape out tools and thereafter our tools shape us”.

The trouble is that Ms Maidaborn seems to attribute the responsibility for that to the platforms rather than the fact that the underlying tool is the communications system that is the Internet itself. And implicit within that umbrella technology are a number of properties or affordances that enable a number of on-line activities – most if not all of which - are communicative in nature. What the Internet has done is to have issued in a new paradigm – the Digital Paradigm – for communication.

Many of “our” concerns – as she puts it – relate to whether big online platforms self-regulate effectively. It is clear that in using the term “our” she is speaking for InternetNZ. And the regulation or self-regulation to which she refers must relate to communication and the ability of people to express themselves and receive ideas and information.

She then goes on to say:

“Meta and X have taken big backwards steps on content moderation recently, which now risks years of fragile progress made to keep people safer online. It's up to governments around the world to hold them accountable.”

In making this sweeping assertion she ignores the fact and indeed the existence of the Aotearoa New Zealand Code of Practice for Online Safety and Harms, developed by Netsafe and NZTech, aims to enhance online safety and reduce harmful content, addressing issues like bullying, child safety, and misinformation, with a mechanism for lodging complaints.

The Code commits signatories to a set of principles and commitments that aim to mitigate risks and reduce the prevalence of harmful content in areas like child sexual exploitation, bullying, hate speech, incitement of violence, violent content, misinformation, and disinformation.

But clearly for Ms Maidaborn and for InternetNZ this is not enough. The State must get involved although no rationale for doing so is advanced. She notes that

“Initiatives that had great potential, like Safer Online Services and Media Platforms and Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, looked like they would go some way to addressing peoples’ concerns, only to be unceremoniously benched.”

This raises a couple of issues.

First, the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill was a protectionist move for mainstream media whose complaint was that platforms were attracting their advertising revenue and that the platforms were aggregating their content. This Bill had nothing to do with domain names or Internet technologies and in my view is beyond the scope of InternetNZ’s interest.

Secondly, the Safer Online Service proposals, which were largely supported by InternetNZ at the time and the demise of which are mourned by Ms. Maidaborn, were a wide-raging regulatory proposal for the Internet that would have had dire outcomes for freedom of expression and robust debate.

In my view neither of these proposals were within the scope of interest of InternetNZ which should stick to its knitting – managing the domain name space efficiently and effectively.

Ms Maidaborn’s concerns about a reduced level of content moderation seem to be a swipe at developments in the US that are associated with the Trump/Musk approach to information dissemination.

It does not follow that the same issues will follow here. There are existing laws in New Zealand to address issues arising from Internet based content – the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 and defamation law are two examples.

It is of concern that an organisation like InternetNZ – which was dedicated to a free and open Internet – should support constraints on Internet activity such as the Safer Online Service proposals. But perhaps Ms Maidaborn has done the wider community a service in identifying the attitude of InternetNZ to government-based restraints on Internet activity. Of course another word for such restraints is censorship.

The recently increased membership of Internet NZ should take note.