Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

126 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
Following this logic of reducing social and political questions to a market
terminology, suggestions include the control of cyberspace (which
for marketing reasons is heralded as a ‘freedom’ space) through surveillance
tactics, including digital passports, the withdrawal of regulation
from e-commerce, the controlled consuming of purchased items so that
intellectual property rights can be controlled and the need to persuade
consumers to pay for services and information available online. Although
not in so many words, the recommendations identify as problems the fact
that consumers are unwilling to pay for content online and invite governments
to help consumers better understand the benefits of broadband
and online services (p. 31).
Effectively, the suggestions offered by the private sector aim at calling
upon the subsidization of aspects of e-commerce, especially those that are
costly or risky for businesses. However, at the same time, they present
state regulation as a barrier to business. Therefore, the role of the state
in the IS, according to these recommendations, is not that of a leader but
rather of a facilitator of conditions favourable to transnational capital.
Among the consequences of facilitating an environment predominantly
beneficial to corporations, other liberties and regulations that have until
now been taken for granted will need to be revised. Civil liberties, and in
particular the use of communications with a degree of anonymity, are now
seen as in need of overhaul, with GBD suggesting that electronic ID certification
becomes a prerequisite for the use of the Internet. Some governments
have proceeded in adopting such policies with potential benefits for
private enterprise, while opening the gates to the possibility of controlling
access and increasing surveillance by both state and private agencies of the
Internet and other electronic activities. Anonymity in media consumption
and use is one of the keys to independent and critical use of the media
– in the same way that there is no passport or ID required for purchasing
a newspaper or watching the news, there should be some guarantee of
similar conditions for the use of online services. Furthermore, an attempt
to proceed to the criminalization of private behaviour evident in cases of
consumption of electronic material becomes similarly evident in the policy
directions suggested by the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO) and transnational media companies (Sarikakis 2004a). In other
words, we are witnessing not simply the claim to change a few rules to
accommodate a new technological environment but to alter the contexts
of receiving and imparting information and to modify significantly the
use of communications technology so that it enables even more precise
surveillance of individual habits and communicative actions. The idea is
not to restrict personal freedom per se but to ‘modify’ the conditions of
personal freedoms as to comply with the new demands of the market.