‘We need the Einstein of the Internet Age’: Interview with Steven Wildman, FCC Chief Economist

Abstract

With the digitisation of all forms of media content, and the convergence of media industries, platforms and services, many of the longstanding assumptions of media policy and regulation are thrown into question. In particular, the idea that one can pursue platform-based regulation, and enact laws and policies related to the content delivered through that platform, is now becoming less relevant as content is accessed across multiple platforms and devices, and as content users are themselves increasingly content creators. For policy makers throughout the world, new questions are being raised about how to transform laws and regulations for twenty-first century media, if we assume that the ‘public interest’ principles that have traditionally informed media regulation remain relevant. These issues are discussed in an interview with Professor Steven Wildman, who was from 2012–14. Wildman was at this time the Chief Economist of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Professor Wildman was interviewed by Terry Flew at the FCC offices in Washington, DC in September 2013.

Keywords:

• media economics’ media policy
• convergence
• Internet
• media regulation
• public interest

Could you begin by saying something about the role of Chief Economist at the FCC?

FCC chief economists are usually taken from academia, and serve for a year or two, and then go back to their university post. The idea is to partly supplement the Commission’s resources, but also to serve as an internal advisor and consultant, and perhaps help with direction on a few major matters. My PhD is in economics from Stanford University, and I am on faculty at Michigan State University where I direct the Quello Centre for Telecommunications Management and Law.

Could I ask you about your understanding of the concept of media convergence?

Convergence is one of the terms that I feel gets used a lot but is rarely defined in a terribly useful way. It used to be viewed as the coming together of all sources of content on a common platform, and that is certainly happening as we’re moving to digital communications. Although the pathways are differently shaded, everything is digital. So digital was viewed as the common core of the notion of convergence, but you have a wire line, you have fibre, you have the satellite, you have wireless, which is increasingly becoming important. If we haven’t already, I think we’ll soon cross the threshold for half of all data traffic being wireless, and voice is becoming just another data application. So in that sense we have convergence because we’re converging on, at least if nothing else, a common protocol for directing traffic across these interconnecting networks. It also becomes the protocol or the mechanism by which we embed content. So there is technological convergence.

Now whether that technological convergence implies a convergence of services, content, and so forth is another matter. I think there’s a tendency to say that one kind of convergence implies the other, and it is not clear to me that’s the case. If we take an analogy with highways, we have asphalt highways, and by and large they are dominated by vehicles that have internal combustion engines and rubber tyres, but those are not the same thing. You have trucks, you have automobiles of various kinds, you have motorcycles and buses, and nobody is talking about the convergence of buses and automobiles and motorcycles. So I think we have to be careful about what we mean by convergence.

I think that what convergence does in the policy sphere is that it does focus us on overlapping spheres of regulatory and legal influence.

I wonder if you could say more about what you would see as some of the key pressure points where that challenges existing policy and regulatory frameworks?

I think if we look at media, what we are seeing with media convergence is really the transition from older channel-based forms of distribution. Whether they came via satellite, via cable, or over the air, nevertheless content – if we are talking about television or radio – was coming down a channel. And because you had a channel – we didn’t use the term streaming but we do now – basically content was streamed in an analogue format, and now it’s in a digital format.

Because you have a channel to occupy, and it’s only when somebody tunes to a certain channel they get the content on that channel, then the channel itself becomes a bottleneck. With multiple channels if becomes a different kind of bottleneck: it becomes something of a dam that slows down the flow, because the amount of content available to you at any given time is a function of the number of channels that are available. Whereas the amount of content that actually exists is a vast multiple of the number of channels, and so it’s the cost of adding a channel to your distribution system that is really a constraint on the amount of content you get.

When we move to digital media and the Internet, or using the IP protocol, then basically each individual at any given time is using a dedicated channel, but that channel can be repurposed or refocused on different sources of content. So that the channel itself is no longer a constraint, and that changes the technology-based logic of how you organise the services. Where it used to be organised around the control of the channels, now the gatekeepers are the people that have provided us with aggregation and search services online.

In my opinion, as we make this transition, we’ll see a radically different kind of industry emerge. What we’ve traditionally thought of as networks exist primarily to create the sequence of which content flowed through those channels, but that sequencing no longer matters, except perhaps for things like news and sports programs, and even then it’s pre-scheduled in a certain way. And so, by and large, I think what we’ll be seeing is the development of aggregators and people who are offering to search, and for pre-selection services to ease that search process.

The Australian Communication and Media Authority put out a paper in 2011 called Broken Concepts (Australian Communications and Media Authority [ACMA], 2011), where they identified 55 current pieces of Australian broadcasting and telecommunications legislation which they saw as having a problem in the context of digital convergence. Their observation was ‘regulation constructed on the premise that content could and should be controlled by how it’s delivered is losing its force both in logic and in practice’ (ACMA, 2011, p. 6).

That’s absolutely right. And I assume that Australia is a lot like the US, in that we have based a lot of our regulatory and legal framework on controlling the people that actually own the pipes.

Yes.

But once the key sources of access and the gathering of attention reside online, then all of these access facility-based regulations really don’t have much impact for what goes on there. It leads us into a whole different space, probably a whole different set of legal concepts.

The fact that something that has a tangible representation and fairly high upfront costs like cable infrastructure means that you don’t change it very rapidly. On the other hand, something that resides in the Internet can be changed much more rapidly. What you constantly see on platforms such as Facebook or Google or You Tube or whatever, is content that is constantly mutating. That means that the notion of what it is – where we used to have things that were fairly fixed conceptually and we could identify them and point at them and think we knew what we were talking about – then you no longer makes those claims, I think, about what happens online.

Whether it’s a danger or just a case for not doing something is another question, but nevertheless you try to fix things in place by the way you regulate. But suppose that we impose restrictions on Facebook, and we defined it as Facebook and we described Facebook, and somebody comes up with something else that offers a lot of the same functionalities, but it doesn’t quite fit the definition? Then we’ve just relocated the problem to somebody and something else! That happens extremely rapidly with these new services.

Twitter just became a phenomenon almost overnight, and I think that’s partly because you don’t have the high fixed costs as barriers to infrastructure, mobility, or flexibility, like we had with fixed services. In the online space, that can change so rapidly.

It seems that when we were talking about convergence in the 1990s, for instance, it was clear that broadcasting and telecommunications were starting to move into the same orbit, and you had the issues around the relationship of cable to broadcasting. You now have something quite different, and it’s hard to know what sort of industry you would describe Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and others as being in.

It’s not just a matter of what industry they are in. If we think in terms of defined and enforced competition policy, it is also based around the question of what is a market? We define a market as being both in product space and in geographic space, and then we ask whether it is possible to monopolise that market. How many people do you need within that market before you have competition? And so on. But that requires an identification of substitutes, where you can demonstrate a fairly high cross-elasticity of demand between two products or services.¹

The economic drivers behind the new platforms and services are complex, and we do not have a good conceptual understanding of them. Feedback effects are one factor, but you don’t have a lot of similar sized competitors offering similar products: there’s nobody that rivals Facebook, there’s nobody that really rivals Google. And in all of the different cases, there is one of these entities that have carved out a fairly large sphere of their own.

If look at the larger players in this space, the ones that are really having a big impact, it is interesting how, when we define the players that are big in the new communications environment, we are not talking about businesses that are providing tangible infrastructure anymore. If you go back five or six years ago Cisco was important, but now we don’t hear about Cisco so much anymore either. That stuff is sort of disappearing into the background. There’s a lot of competition, a lot more people offering the same kind of hardware services. But nevertheless, that is the background to those things that matter to us. So we look at Google, we look at Apple, we look at Amazon, and we look at Microsoft still to some extent, at least in their online space. And we say these are companies that have been – especially the first three – very successful in assembling platforms. But if you look at their platforms, they differ quite a bit.

Do we have competition in the platform space? How do we define that? We do have competition but nevertheless there’s no easily definable marketplace. And I think maybe we’re at the point where we need to come up with a new conceptual framework, and maybe new ways of defining these things to think about how we conduct a merger analysis, for example, or what constitutes market power. I think we’re being brought to a conceptual impasse and we probably need to innovate some more.

It struck me when I was doing policy-related work and consultations (Flew, 2014a) that if you met with the broadcasting industry, you knew who these people in the room were, and why they were there representing the broadcasting industry. If you met with the cable industry, you knew who those people were. We have an Internet Industry Association in Australia, but no one would presume they spoke on behalf of Google or Apple or Facebook, so you met with of all them separately. But it wouldn’t make sense to refer to the Google industry or the Facebook industry. So where does that position a regulator? Is a regulator then dealing primarily with what might be called the legacy media?

That’s a good question. The infrastructure still matters, so we have to worry about the access, the pipes, spectrum and so on. But when it comes to concerns with content, then it’s no longer very effective, or is rapidly becoming ineffective, to try and regulate any particular individual source of the content. That whatever it is, if you only label one pathway by which it gets to consumers – such as broadcast television – and regulate that, there are multiple other pathways, and consumers will find it. We still have regulations for the major American broadcast TV networks on what they can show during family hour, and requirements that they show children friendly programming at a certain amount of time and so forth…

The watershed as it is known …

Yes, and there’s a safe harbour, so that more controversial, risqué material can be on the TV and radio after ten o’clock at night, when children are presumably in bed. Those things don’t matter much now, because how many children really don’t know how to access the Internet and find what they want? So the impact of these kinds of restrictions that we’ve had in the past – even though we still argue fervently over them, they’re impacting upon a smaller and smaller fraction of the citizenry. And we’re left without a clear understanding of what might be done to address the same objectives when we go online.

Is a concept like the public interest relevant in these new environments?

There’s no question that it’s relevant. The question is how do we address the public interest in this new and emerging media context? And that’s where I think we struggle. We see this with traditional issues relating to content, we also see it when we look at things for which there are no clear precursors, like social media. And social media raises a lot of questions about legal boundaries.

Can I give an example from Australia? If someone sets up a Facebook page vilifying Indigenous people, or another section of the community, does Facebook have a responsibility in relationship to that page, or are they basically the conduit through which people set up such pages?

We have similar issues arising here with cyber bullying, stalking online etc., and a lot of these things seem to be more matters that have in the past been addressed through civil or criminal law, but outside of the communications regulatory context.

The question is who constitutes a publisher? Publishers have certain legal rights and restrictions, but now that anybody can post online, are they still publishers? How do we prevent children or teenagers from posting pictures of themselves and their paramours online that they’ll regret later? Is it a violation of privacy? How do you deal with these things? We don’t have a good clue.

An example of how our conceptual boundaries are being stretched is that in the United States we have the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure. So you need to show reasonable cause and get a court order and so forth in order to search somebody’s physical belongings, to get in the trunk of their car, the closet in their house, or even to get in their house. On the other hand, if you get arrested for a traffic violation, does the officer have the right then to search the contents of your cell phone? Now people are saying maybe we could use the First Amendment to protect against what would have been a search and seizure Fourth Amendment case in the past.

So the applications of traditional legal concepts and older context start to change as well. I mean it’s really fascinating but I think that it means we’re in for a sort of a wholesale intellectual reinvention of many things.

It will be interesting to see the extent to which those resolutions are played out through the courts, as compared to being played out in terms of public policy, or how the players themselves manage some of these relations. One of the examples that Google brought to our attention in Australia was the way in which they manage the content that goes up on You Tube, which is through a user flagging process.² They would argue that user flagging is a reasonably cost effective way of filtering out some of the worst sort of content that people might put up.

My research centre [the Quello Centre for Telecommunications Law and Policy at Michigan State University] organised a conference on law and policy for social media a year ago, and one of the issues that came up was whether you can enforce property rights in virtual worlds. If somebody says no trespassing, and it’s a virtual world they’ve created, and somebody else walks across it, then is that enforceable in a court of law? And that’s uncertain legal doctrine right now.

Is it now legitimate to call companies like Google media companies?

I think that it’s legitimate. It’s just that the notion of what we mean by a media company has become rather amorphous. Clearly there are media aspects to it, and we would recognise them from things we used to do in the past. But there are also things for which the notion of a media company has no antecedent in terms of what we now see.

In Australia, and this is also true in the European Union, a media company has obligations in terms of contributing to local culture, through locally produced content. There was a discussion in the Convergence Review in Australia (Convergence Review, 2012) about whether there should be a threshold point in which you should reasonably expect Google or Apple or whatever to be expected to make a contribution to local content?

How do we even define local with something that’s virtually defined and virtually located? Does it mean if we make that claim that you have a local obligation of some kind, that means no matter where you go in the world there’s a local obligation? Is that even a sustainable burden?

In the Australian context local typically means national …

In the US context local means something different. It literally refers to a community where somebody lives, a locally defined community. And in the early days of the Internet, there were attempts to enforce the pornography laws of one state on content originating in another state, even though it came online, over the Internet.

So you get the idea you can have a Virginia Internet that would be different to a Washington DC Internet?

I mean, how many countries are there in the world? 200-plus? So that means that Google would have obligations to 200 different countries.

But they do meet some of those obligations. A classic example is material that promotes Nazi ideology in Germany or France. That content is expected to be blocked.

That would be a negative restriction rather than an affirmative obligation.

How are some of these issues presenting themselves in terms of regulatory responsibilities? Has it shifted the relationships that the FCC might have to other branches of government?

Actually, I don’t think so. I mean the old things the FCC used to do still have to be done. The broadcasters, the cable companies and the phone companies still exist. What it does, though, is that it creates new ambiguities. So when we think of a cable company, it is also is a broadband company. This raises questions as to whether or not they might restrict access to the speed at which Netflix streams on their service, because it competes with the conduit they provide for their normal service. It raises new questions.

This is the net neutrality issue. It’s not net neutrality if you treat your own Internet services the same way right, but there’s still this question that if we have an online video server that competes with what you get through your normal cable service, if we restrict the former to enhance the demand or the customer base for the latter, that would still be anti-competitive.³

From the more traditional side of the media spectrum, one of the issues that has certainly been raised in the Australian context was that of what broadcasters would describe as regulatory parity. They would say ‘Look, as broadcasters, we had to get these licenses, and these licenses have given us a series of formal obligations. Informally, we spend a lot of time justifying ourselves to parliamentarians and so on. And these obligations don’t apply to new players. Is that fair?’.

We used to have the same arguments, going back well over twenty years. You have the public service obligations, which meant an affirmative obligation to provide content that meets community needs. That used to be observed by the broadcast networks by putting on church programs on Sunday mornings.

Also children’s shows…

Also expectations that there would be more public service announcements, and things like coverage of Presidential addresses, and so forth. Now, as the broadcast networks’ share of the audience market has diminished, and TV station profits have fallen, that affirmative obligation has been diminished considerably. So you will not necessarily find all broadcast networks covering every Presidential address. It used to be that you always knew they would, but now it is more likely to be CNN or the other news channels.

The focus of regulations for broadcasters has been more on restrictions such as the ability to include nudity and profanity and so forth, which their competitors on cable don’t have to worry about that. Those issues are still there, but they aren’t hurting nearly as much as they were before. I think the focus has shifted more to the changing competitive balance. You used to think of broadcasters and cable as being unequal players, and I think broadcasting is no longer looked at in that light. And so there’s been a shift in focus and attitude.

At the moment, content rules are typically linked to a delivery platform. Could one say ‘Well, content is content, and if there’s an issue arising with content on one platform, should it not be approached in a similar way on another platform?’

That’s what the broadcasters say, as they want their restrictions eased to enable them to be more like cable. We used to view cable as something where, because you paid to get it, then it was a medium of personal choice, and the government was not meant to interfere with that too much, whereas the broadcast spectrum was given away freely (although we increasingly auction parts of the spectrum), so the reciprocal obligation on the part of broadcasters was the public service component. You could argue that you need to preserve a certain amount of profitability to make that bargain hold together, so that as their profits have diminished, then the ability of regulators to hold broadcasters to that old bargain, or even to reiterate it in a forceful way, has diminished.

I think we used to use the different channels as the means of segmenting the audience. You could assume that one channel was always safe for children, and people who were highly sensitive to different nuances of content could always go to the broadcasting channels, and avoid potentially more risky cable content. Now, no matter what the content is, because it goes online and gets streamed back, everything is available to everybody now.

Your question is whether we should impose the same restrictions on everybody. I think there’d be a pretty large outcry if people didn’t have the choice they wanted. And it may not be feasible to create online safe harbours that aren’t easily gotten around.

I think that’s absolutely right, but it nonetheless leaves you with an interesting logical dilemma. In the Australian context, there is a case for relaxation of rules around early evening television, partly because such rules generate their own anomalies, but also because the issue around children, it seemed to me, was at least partly resolved by multi-channeling. The public broadcaster, the ABC, now has two dedicated children’s channels. So with the digital switch over, pretty much every home can choose to put that on if they don’t want their children to see violent or disturbing content.

That argument is made here too. You’ve got parental choice, and certainly there are parental controllers that you can use for your cable service. And this supposedly exists for online content as well, although I’ve never tried that. We’ve also got the code, you’ve got a little symbol that that shows up on every TV program when it first comes on, and it will give you a content rating and parents can use that as a guide. I’ve literally never noticed it.

We found that in Australia there was quite a lot of awareness of what a G or a PG or an M or whatever meant. Because the networks run quite a lot of public service advertisements saying that these are the classifications, there was quite a lot of community awareness as to what they were.

Well, good. I mean, you could argue then that the choice was there, and people have the option of exercising choice. But certainly right now, the creative part of television is with the pay cable services, with HBO, Showtime, and even some of the basic cable networks, such as AMC and FX.

In Australia you would get a certain constituency that would say that a media baron such as Rupert Murdoch has too much power, and uses it for political purposes, so the government should do something about this use of public power. In the next breath, people would say ‘Well we have to keep the government’s filthy hands off our Internet, and they’ve not allowed to chill free speech’, and so forth. Is there something going on around a certain view of what, if you like, constitutes big media on the one hand, and about communication and free speech on the other?

My impression is that the general public are not nearly as concerned with big media as a few advocacy organisations are. If you move outside of Washington and major research universities, most people would have never have heard of these advocacy groups, and would not be very sensitive to their arguments. So it’s not part of the common policy discussion here. It’s more part of the elites, I suppose, although I hesitate to use that term. It has a connotation I don’t like.

Also, in the US, the constitutional guarantees of free speech are just so much stronger.

True. But I think there are some big changes going on. Rupert Murdoch’s power is through basically controlling supply channels, right? It’s the pipes, it’s the newspapers, whatever. As we move to an online environment, it’s really the content creators rather than people that aggregate under the distribution side that have the power. So we end up with a very, very different set of media access, media control, and media influence questions once we move to an all-online environment.

But the aggregators have some power? What is or isn’t available at the Apple iTunes store, for instance?

Yes, but there’s very little that isn’t available, right? I mean at least so far as their interests have been to aggregate as much content as they can, because otherwise you will go to Amazon instead. So the tendency is to make as much content available as possible, and I think it’s probably the logic of the online environment. When you have to add channels to make more content available to people, then the marginal cost of the channels is a constraint. When it’s server capacity, and server capacity is extremely cheap, you just proliferate server capacity, you store stuff for years and years. I don’t know how many billions of videos You Tube have there now that nobody ever looks at, but they just keep adding more and more and more.

But You Tube is no longer just user generated content.

Absolutely. It’s another example of something that has evolved to a very different animal than what it started out as. So it may be the case that once everybody is going to You Tube or to Apple, then we might be asking the question, if somebody can’t get their content on You Tube, will they be denied a voice?

Tim Wu puts the argument in The Master Switch (Wu, 2011) that by 2020 we may have a situation where these sectors have stabilised around a small number of mega players?

That’s possible. I actually haven’t read that book. But that may be the case, in which case we may be coming back with the same kind of arguments we’ve had in the past regarding people that control the access to the physical distribution channels.

We used to wax rhetorical about the hypothetical possibility of somebody distributing paper flyers on the street corner who could compete with the local newspaper. But there was always a limit to how far you can distribute your flyers. On the other hand, there do seem to be mechanisms by which people are able to gather attention online. And I think it’s much easier to circumvent whatever the powers that may be online. Maybe that won’t be the case by 2020, that everybody will be going here or there. But it’s very inexpensive to rent your own server space and put something out there. And I think it will be hard to control the ability to publicise it.

If you are looking at the 2013 Australian election, the parts of the country where you would have expected Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers to have the most influence were where the voting swings were not particularly notable (Flew, 2014b). So maybe we are at the end of the golden age of the big media baron, able to swing things their way?

The whole question of whether we’ve become self-contained online communities, only talking to people like ourselves, a kind of echo chamber, may now be the bigger one.

Another feature of the new media platforms is that they are transnational. But they are transnational platforms that still operate across nation states that have their own regulatory frameworks. Do you think there are pressures towards greater parity of regulation between countries? Or is it just one of those things that regulations in different countries will always differ, and these transnational entities will just have to negotiate around that?

That’s a good question. I mean here’s where we’re getting on thin ice. I don’t feel that I may be especially knowledgeable on this. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it. It is the case that local cultures will continue to be distinct, and that will be reflected in law and regulation. So the transnational companies will have to deal with idiosyncratic local laws and regulations, as they always have done in the past. On the other hand, I think it creates a reason for countries to get together and have dialogues over this, and that leads to some international organisation and common agreements. We have the international organisations formed to try to harmonise these things, such as the International Telecommunications Union, because everybody wants international commerce to flow, and for that you need some harmonisation of laws.

The European Union is an interesting case here. I know that in the games field they have a pan-European games classification framework (PEGI). Everyone except Germany, I think, has bought into it, even though you know the countries themselves are all quite different.

I think that answers your question. There is some case for harmonisation, as different laws create a lot of difficulties, making it difficult for companies to achieve scale in terms of markets. The geographic reach of a service is much greater now than it used to be.

To conclude, I say ‘Thank God for the Internet’, because I thought the economics of law, of media and communication, was getting kind of boring until the Internet came along. We were spending more and more time refining our analyses of the same old things. But now we have this whole new set of questions that we keep trying to cram into the old frameworks, and they don’t really fit very well and we’re struggling.

We need a new set of conceptual categories and it takes a long time to evolve this. You know, we need the Einstein of the Internet Age to help us out in that regard.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), as part of the Convergent Media Policy research program.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Terry Flew

Terry Flew is Professor of Media and Communciation in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. In 2011-12, he chaired the National Classification Scheme Review undertaken by the Australian Law Reform Commission, whose Final Report, Classification: Content Regulation and Convergent Media, was tabled in the Australian House of Representatives in February 2012 (ALRC, 2012). He was an advisor to the Convergence Review conducted for the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), whose Final Report was released in April 2012 (Convergence Review, 2012). He has also undertaken research into the implications of convergence for media policy in Australia and internationally (Flew, 2012, 2014a), and is the author of the following books: New Media: An Introduction (OUP, 2014, 4^th Edition), Understanding Global Media (Palgrave, 2007), Creative Industries, Culture and Policy (Sage, 2013), Global Creative Industries (Polity, 2013), Key Concepts in Creative Industries (Sage, 2013), and Media Economics (2015, Palgrave, co-authored with Stuart Cunningham and Adam Swift).

Steven Wildman

Steve Wildman is a Professor of Media and information and the Founding Director of the Quello Center at Michigan State University. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters on economics and policy for communication industries and technologies, he is an author or editor for the following books: International Trade in Films and Television Programs (Ballinger, 1988); Electronic Services Networks: A Business and Public Policy Challenge (Praeger, 1991); Video Economics (Harvard University Press, 1992); Making Universal Service Policy: Enhancing the Process Through Multidisciplinary Evaluation (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999); Rethinking Rights and Regulations: Institutional Responses to New Communications Technologies (MIT Press, 2003); and Handbook on the Economics of the Media (Edward Elgar, in press).

Notes

1. Cross-elasticity of demand is a term used in economics to describe the effects of a change in price for one type of good or service for the demand for another, usually related, good or service. For example, when a cable channel such as Home Box Office (HBO) offers direct content steaming to computers or tablet devices for a small subscription fee, this can be expected to reduce the demand for full service cable to the home, as some consumers will prefer to access a single channel at a lower fee to paying a significantly larger fee for a larger bundle of channels and services. The extent of the change is what is measured through the cross-elasticity of demand.

2. User flagging refers to the process where the user of a service such as You Tube can report content that they consider to be inappropriate by clicking on a ‘Flag’ icon and reporting that content. Site moderators then receive that report, and decide whether the content in question is in breach of the Terms of Service for use of that site. This can lead to content being taken down from a site, or possibly to particular users being blocked from using the service.

3. The concept of ‘Net neutrality’ refers to a core principle of the Internet’s development, which has been that the Internet infrastructure is itself indifferent to the type of content that it carries, and to who was the original sender of the content. Concerns about the end of ‘net neutrality’ are concerns that particular providers, such as telecommunications companies and internet service providers, may be able to reconfigure networks in order to give preferential access to some types of content, such as that of commercial partners of the telecommunications service or ISP, over other types of content (Wu, 2011, 310-17).