Britain’s flip-flopping on Huawei’s presence in new communications infrastructure – supporting it (with restrictions) in January, opposing it (with a delay) in June – is driven by US strategic concerns: there has been no meaningful shift in the apparent security risks attached to Huawei, and in any case the UK has a specific security expertise for the company through the Huawei Cybersecurity Evaluation Centre, in operation at Banbury, Oxfordshire since 2010. At present, however, Huawei holds the dominant technological provision in 5G infrastructure, being able to supply the essential equipment more cheaply than its nearest rivals (principally Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung) and (importantly for countries with more robust planning regimes, like the UK) able to do so with fewer aerials, allowing for speedier deployment. Not using Huawei represents a genuine economic cost in this sense.
5G, once implemented everywhere, would represent a step-change in the presence of the internet in our daily lives. It would allow the creation of a genuinely ubiquitous “Internet of Things”, continuously connecting any given device to the global internet. This, in theory, could bring applications like remote surgery or self-driving cars much closer to reality, but as a result, the number of connected devices globally is forecast to rise from 15 billion today to 75 billion in 2025, generating 90 trillion gigabytes of data annually – up from 66 trillion gigabytes produced by the entire internet in 2018. The failure to capture the market for the provision of its infrastructure is a serious blow for the US, which has lost its technological lead in telecoms equipment over the last two decades. The longer-term fear for Washington is that a country achieving a fully-blown 5G implementation first would be able to leverage that increase in data into an insurmountable advantage in data-intensive new Artificial Intelligence applications.
In the meantime, expansions in data generation and transmission are predictably likely to favour the Big Data incumbents, who can use their existing economies of scale in the processing and analysis of data to further dominate new markets. Already, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, signed a deal in March with US telecoms provider AT&T to provide clouds services over 5G, whilst Amazon announced a similar 5G partnership with another US telecoms giant, Verizon, in December last year.
The digital commons: local and regional action at the forefront
One response to this market domination is to argue for greater competition – to break up the digital giants, and to impose regulations (as far as possible) on their activities. But there are two problems here: first, the capacity of the British state to take action against predominantly US multinationals is limited, particularly in the context of Brexit negotiations where the UK is not in the strongest position, as squabbling over the Digital Service Tax indicates. The IPPR report strongly recommends that data sovereignty needs to be reasserted by the UK in any future trade deals, and that underpricing the value of national datasets, like that of the NHS, perhaps to try and squeeze more favourable treatment elsewhere, will cost us severely in the long run.
Second, the data giants command the position they do because of the economies of scale in data: each new dataset, if added to existing data and processed, generates more value. This is potentially a real gain for society; breaking up those economies of scale through imposing competition risks losing the gain from amalgamation. Worse, the creation of many competing smaller companies risks simply reproducing the undesirable activities of the existing companies many times over.
Instead, IPPR’s new report proposes that we work towards creating a digital commons: that we recognise the value of data and its processing exists in its aggregation, but that we can seek to create new forms of ownership for that data that allow the value to be put to public use. Data trusts are one promising mechanism to do this, potentially allowing (for example) local NHS providers to exercise greater control over their patients’ data without losing the value-added of aggregation. The question of scale can be addressed directly – already cities like Amsterdam and Barcelona are using their city-wide powers (through regulation and procurement, principally) to place the value created in the city’s data back into public hands and under democratic control. Local authorities and Metro Mayors in the UK have fewer direct powers, but licensing and regulation, as well as procurement – if conducted on a multi-authority basis – can both be used creatively, as the report argues.
Combined with the need, which is becoming all too apparent as the COVID pandemic moves into its next phase, of tailored, local responses to outbreak and the management of social distancing, local authorities should be seeking ways to bring the management and use of data in their areas of governance more directly under transparent and democratic control. As has become clear over the last few months, national measures must be retained, including the rapid use of national lockdowns where a situation has run out of control. But in practice localised flare-ups of this virus will require localised measures, and management of social situations when the virus is known to be present will require tailoring. The point has been stressed repeatedly by public health experts that the centralisation of public health provision in Public Health England, arising from the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, alongside severe cuts to local authority funding left the UK poorly prepared for a pandemic of this type.
Meanwhile, the perceived failure of the national Test and Trace system has led to one council setting up its own, local version of the same. This is not a digital operation, in the first instance: effective contact tracing, as the evidence from South Korea and elsewhere shows, needs human contact tracers able to interview and record accurately the different social contacts those infected (or in contact with those infected) have made. It is only after this contact has been made that data technologies can come into their own. Contact tracing apps, despite the fuss made over their possible use, have been effective only when supplemented by heavy use of human contact tracing, and concerns about personal privacy and possible data-grabbing by their operators have been raised across the globe.
Dealing with the particular challenge of excessive reliance on digital technologies, ironically, may also require other councils to implement similar local contact tracing systems, rather than relying on the national rollout. New powers for local authorities to deal with local outbreaks, announced in July, make viable local tracing more important – particularly if, as Sandwell council claim, the data needed to contain local outbreaks is not forthcoming from national government. It is not entirely clear that the new Joint Biosecurity Centre, intended to be the first national contact point for local information on cases and co-ordinator of the national response, is entirely up to speed. Announced in May, it was meant to be fully functional “later in the summer” to provide national guidance on alert levels, but has suffered from being “shrouded in secrecy”, in the words of one SAGE member. In the interim, local and Combined Authorities should be looking at their own data use during the pandemic, with a view to applying it on a local and regional basis.
But the challenges of COVID-19 are not only in the immediate and near future. The pandemic is imposing longer-term changes: with or without a working vaccine, speedily developed, produced, and deployed, at least some of the shift in working patterns and social life, in particular, is likely to prove permanent as we adjust to a world in which the risks of future outbreaks are both more likely and seen to be more likely. These shifts will, as we have seen, almost certainly involve the greater penetration of data technologies into every part of our lives. Local and regional plans for the recovery need to start building in their own plans for local and regional data use and processing in the years ahead, as an integral part of their post-pandemic planning – for example, in creating locally- and regionally-owned and managed Smart Grids, which are hugely data-intensive and which the data giants are investing in.
Looking further out, we need to place the national regulation of data on a different setting: not one based only on competition – although anti-monopoly action has its place – but on the broader concept of a digital commons. As the IPPR report recommends, a new Office for the Digital Commons could and should be created from the existing regulators, charged with exactly this overview.
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James Meadway | Radio Free (2020-08-06T08:03:53+00:00) Creating the digital commons after COVID-19. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/08/06/creating-the-digital-commons-after-covid-19/
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