Norway’s digital infrastructures

The Digital Agenda (Meld.St. 27 (2015-2016)) intends to “exploit ICTs in the best interest of society”, but the policy also presents a substantial challenge: the digital communication infrastructures on which this aim rests remain largely obtuse, unmapped and unregulated. Particularly at the platform level, the functions provided by Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft have been met with rising concerns, including privacy and surveillance fears, threats to freedom of expression, and technological and infrastructure capture.

This project will provide a first, comprehensive oversight of the Norwegian digital media ecology and its actors, data structures, markets and regulations. A network analysis will map the actors who control the backbone, access and platforms, who owns the data streams, and where people access content with the structure.d.

Project leader: professor Helle Sjøvaag, Department of Media and Social Sciences

Data shape the governance of these infrastructures in a number of ways: as a proprietary resource, as knowledge structures, and as communities of practice. Data move decisions in the public interest beyond politics toward an ‘invisible’ realm. Datafication and its algorithms, cloud computing and analytics, become intrinsic to decision-making, and thus to power.

This creates power asymmetries between those who provide data and those who own, trade and control data. As citizenship grows more dependent on corporate platforms for communication, they become bound by the benevolence of private actors, to which states have little recourse for action to regulate against the abuse of market power.

Project leader: associate professor Raul Ferrer Conill, Department of Media and Social Sciences

Multi-sided information markets operate on top of these infrastructures, serviced by platforms that host and store public expression, organise access through search and recommendation, and install it to mobile devices. The players dominating this ecology act increasingly as infrastructures in their own right. As digital intermediaries, search engines and social media assume increasing shares of media industries’ audience and advertising revenue, potentially influencing public opinion formation.

This ‘platformisation’ of the digital infrastructure shifts the open, public internet towards the private realm, embracing the logics of aggregation and automation that increasingly negotiate transactions between markets and social entities, informing governance systems, institutions and public discourse.

Project leader: Ragnhild Olsen, OsloMet

As these infrastructures intersect, it becomes increasingly difficult to create and enforce policy. Not only do different technologies have different regulatory implications, there is also a discrepancy between the commercial logics of the actors involved in the governance of fiber cables, cloud services and data centres and the universalist welfare state principles on which regulation is based.

The Digital Agenda and its many supporting policies remain worryingly optimistic about the promises of digital technology in promoting social inclusion, equality and diversity. Such celebratory rhetoric often fails to recognise the implicit biases embedded in platforms and the algorithms that organise social life, and the loss of democratic power in favour of private actors.

This project will expose the logics of this ecology and their potential impact on the distribution of communicative power in society, the aim of which is to ensure that datafication process do not compromise the universalist principles upon which media policies are legitimised.

Project leader: associate professor Ann-Karin Tennås Holmen, Department of Media and Social Sciences