Communication policy, lamentably, is an often important but overlooked topic – a blind spot in much social policy research and public discourse, except when issues such as peace and security, pornography, or more recently, international trade and intellectual property piracy are concerned. Front‐page issues such as climate change, illegal immigration, corporate bailouts, human trafficking, genocide, public health or education are presented as if they have little to do with communication policy issues such as freedom of expression, diversity of voices in the production and creation of electronic media, or access to information. In fact, media and telecommunications systems have become so fundamental, ubiquitous and pervasive that we often take them for granted as enablers, and nothing more, of many other freedoms, rights, and capabilities. Many do not realize the extent to which politics concerning communication resources are quite vulnerable to fluctuating corporate and government interests.

Elisions of communication policy issues in general policy discourse are understandable given the generally obscure and technical nature of the policy issues involved, especially those related to infrastructure. Recent examples include debates about “network neutrality” or the transition to digital television. Such topics tend to be framed in highly bureaucratic, procedural and techno centric terms that address a wide range of issues that appear to be more about machines than about people. They appear, at best, peripheral to other pressing societal concerns. Topics include electronic privacy and surveillance, copyrights and patents, equitable deployment of broadband services, community radio and other media like cable TV access or technology centers in libraries, community centers or schools. Others are wireless communications, media and communication industry ownership structures, radio frequency spectrum reform, digital convergence, technical standards such as open source, knowledge economy trade, network security, competition policy, media diversity, affordable and nondiscriminatory telephone and broadband services, and Internet governance.

Three types of regulation affect how available, affordable, and useable is the ensemble of communication infrastructure resources. Generally speaking, broadcasting policy allocates licenses for use of the radio‐frequency spectrum resource (i.e. the airwaves). Telecommunications policy determines aspects of telephone systems and by extension, the computer networks that depend on them. Internet policy is an emerging area that has to do with internet‐related resources such as the domain name system, among other things. Increasingly, information policy debates about copyrights, trademarks and patents as well as about “access to information” laws intersect with all three of these regulatory domains whenever digital content distribution issues come into play. For example, broadcasters want to prevent piracy of downloaded music by embedding rights management controls into the digital transmission stream. Also, Internet service providers are sometimes complicit in filtering content delivered on their networks.

While on the surface quite diverse, what these and other communication policy issues share is their concern with the infrastructure needed to be informed and engaged citizens, publics, audiences, and consumers. Decisions affect not only the structure of industries that produce and deliver news and entertainment content using broadcasting, telephone, and Internet resources. They also give form to the many new electronic spaces for speech that make it possible to access and use electronic communication resources and thus, for us to speak and be heard. This focus on speech, or freedom of expression more broadly, is an increasing concern for a variety of “third sector” stakeholders that include advocacy groups, issue coalitions and networks, and philanthropic organizations. These stakeholders are building new types of advocacy infrastructures designed to protect citizen and consumer interests related to freedom of expression.

This project further develops ideas put forth in conference papers presented in 2009 in Mexico at the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).¹ These papers describe two funder‐influenced international civil society projects focused on how communication infrastructure policies affect citizen and consumer rights related to freedom of expression issues primarily in the global south. The first is called the Global Consumer Dialog on Access to Knowledge (A2K) and is led by Consumers International. The second is the Freedom of Expression project based in London.

The A2K project is a collaboration of the Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation. Its focus is on building the capacity of consumer groups to respond to the fact that the main beneficiaries of strong copyright law are rights holders in developed countries. For example, the US and the EU are leading a push for stronger protections at the international level given that enforcement is now a key focus of their future work. These countries have set up a joint working group on piracy and counterfeiting that focus on third country ‘infringers.’ Governments, particularly those from developing countries, are increasingly put under pressure to have very strong protections for rights holders. There is also increasing pressure on governments through bilateral trade agreements to go further than international rules actually require. Thus the project seeks to bolster the collective voice and effectiveness of consumer groups working around the world and across issue sectors to achieve more balanced IP regimes that favor consumer/citizen, not simply business/government‐aligned interests.

The Ford Foundation initiated the Freedom of Expression Project several years ago in response to changes taking place in global communications. It set out to assess the impacts of these changes for human rights and social justice. Thus far, according to the project’s reports, nearly 200 people from 36 countries have been part of the Project’s thinking and its growing network during the first phase of its work. The project has convened human rights activists, technology developers, consumer rights groups, communications regulators, business innovators, broadcasters, NGOs, journalists, policy makers, researchers, e‐government experts and academics. It is now working with its partners, primarily in the global south, on the following agenda:

-  “A set of common values shared by all stakeholders as the foundation for a public interest communications environment, grounded in internationally recognized human rights;

-  Policy principles that express and realize these values in communications environments;

-  How stakeholders can work together to implement and make real the policy principles. We are carrying out geographically specific research to define the factors that undermine or uphold the principles in different contexts, exploring the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholder groups and exploring the levers for change.”

Informed by critical discourse and collective action/social movement theories, this Media@Mcgill strategic research grant is being used to conduct more detailed case study research on both of these projects. I am particularly interested in exploring the various sorts of “tensions” that have emerged in this work that affect the effectiveness and also the potential sustainability of these and similar projects. Tensions include but are not limited to the following:

-  Leadership tensions: donors/funder vs. expert/professional v. citizen/consumer;

-  Tactical tensions: advocacy focus on information (content) v. distribution infrastructure (conduit)

-  Geopolitical tensions: global north vs. global south perspectives

-  Strategic tensions: focus on reform via episodic issue campaigns v. issue transformation via enduring social movement engagement.

I plan to disseminate the results of this research via an essay on the M@M website, selected blogs that may include OpenDemocracy.net, Demos, Ars Technica, or WACC, as well as through publication in appropriate peer-reviewed journals such as Mobilization, Communication, Culture & Critique, Policy & Internet, Media, Culture & Society, or possibly Discourse & Society.

 

1. “Reframing Freedom of Expression Advocacy,” Roundtable on “Communication as a human right: policy challenges, public interest narratives and visions for the future” jointly organized by the Working Group on Global Media Policy and the Emerging Scholars Network, International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), Mexico, 21‐24 July 2009.

“Access to Knowledge in the Information Society: Reconciling Consumer and Citizen Frameworks in Transnational Rights Advocacy,” International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), Mexico, 21-24 July 2009.