Philip N. Howard - Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up

PAX TECHNICA

PHILIP N. HOWARD

PAX TECHNICA

HOW THE INTERNET OF THINGS MAY SET US FREE OR LOCK US UP

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN & LONDON

Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.

Copyright 2015 by Philip N. Howard. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

An online version of the work is made available under a Creative Commons license for use that is noncommercial and not derivative. The terms of the license are set forth at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. For more information about a digital copy of the work, please see the authors website: http://philhoward.org/.

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ISBN 978-0-300-19947-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

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For Gina Neff, who makes things possible and worthwhile.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

In the next few years we will be immersed in a world of connected devices. This book is about the political impact of having everyone and everything connected through digital networks. The internet of things consists of human-made objects with small power supplies, embedded sensors, and addresses on the internet. Most of these networked devices are everyday items that are sending and receiving data about their conditions and our behavior. Unlike mobile phones and computers, devices on these networks are not designed for deliberate social interaction, content creation, or cultural consumption. The bulk of these networked devices simply communicate with other devices: coffee makers, car parts, clothes, and a plethora of other products. This will not be an internet you experience through a browser. Indeed, as the technology develops, many of us will be barely aware that so many objects around us have power, are sensing, and are sending and receiving data.

One industry analyst estimates that the internet of things will have an installed base of twenty-six billion devices by 2020, only a billion of which will be personal computers, tablets, and smartphones. An industry consulting firm estimates thirty billion connected devices. One of the main manufacturers of

Industry estimates like this are often bullish. But it is safe to say that by 2020 there will be around eight billion people on the planet, and three or four times as many connected devices. Engineers expect so many of these connected devices that they have reconfigured the addressing system to allow for 2 to the 128th power addressesenough for each atom on the face of the earth to have 100 internet addresses. The internet of things is developing now because weve figured out how to give everything we produce an address, we have enough bandwidth to allow device-to-device communications, and we have the capacity to store all the data those exchanges create. But why write a book, now, about the politics of the next internet?

Many of us are not happy with the internet we have now and are eager to find more ways of protecting individual privacy, sharing data, and bringing access to everyone. The internet of things, with embedded sensors and extensive device networks, will solve some problems but exacerbate others. Many of the design choices for this next internet are being made now, and our experience over the past twenty-five years is that it is almost impossible to use public policy to guide technology development after the technology has rolled out to consumers. And there are cluesthere is evidenceabout how the political internet has developed that can help us anticipate the problems and think proactively about how to steer the massive engineering project that is the internet of things.

For example, the latest smartphones, watches, and wearable technologies reveal how immersive and pervasive the internet of things will be. Cell phones have the ability to take one location point per second, but dont do so because their power supply is limited. If you give an application on your phone permission to use location information, it will send information to a server at the rate the developer chooses. If you use a crowd-sourcing application for traffic data, your phone is sending data about your commute. If you use an application to keep track of your jogging, your phone is generating geotagged data about your movements relative to other people. Every time you take a picture, check in with your favorite social networking application, or track your health, data is sent from your phone to a cell phone tower or router and over a vast network of digital switches.

More important for political life, the data flows through many different kinds of organizations: the companies that maintain your digital networks, the startups that build the apps, the third-party advertising agencies that have licensed access from your service providers and the startups. The platform developers and major social media organizations, such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, also have data accessat several points in the flow of information. The National Security Agency and perhaps other governments or other uninvited organizations can tap in.

The current objective for geolocation engineers is to design chips that require so little power that they can be left on all day. This would mean being able to generate one location point per second, all day long. As the price of making small, relatively simple chips declines, more chips can be put into devices other than your cell phone.

The internet of things will be the next, immense, physical layer of networked devices. We experience the internet through a few kinds of devices and the browsers they support. But the internet of things will be defined by communication between devices more than between people. It will be a different kind of internet: larger, more pervasive, and ubiquitous. What will be the political impact of such connectivity? What can we learn from the past twenty-five years about politics and technology that might help us anticipate the challenges and opportunities ahead?

For now, theres little research, experience, or public conversation on how the internet of things should be developed and organized. Scenarios are easy to imagine, especially since we know how media ownership issues have played out. For example, Google bought Nest, a home-automation company, for $3.8 billion in 2014.troubling scenarios, I want to develop the basic premises of how digital media have affected our political lives so far. Then I want to use those premises to understand the likely consequences of rolling out the new infrastructure of an internet of things. If we dont have a public conversation about the politics of the internet of things, we risk being trapped by decisions made for us.

I wrote this book because I believe that while the internet has been used in many places to creatively open up some societies, it has been used to close down too many societies with censorship and surveillance. My goal is to focus not on the internet you are familiar with but on the one engineers, computer scientists, and technology designers are working toward. The underlying assumption of this book is that while the rapid diffusion of new information technologies may disrupt political life in the short term, there should eventually emerge some noticeable patterns of behavior among political actors, some consistent trends in political life, and some conservatively safe premises about how global power is going to work in the years ahead.