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Digital Feudalism published

Digital Feudalism: Enclosures and Erasures from Digital Rights Management to the Digital Divide was recently published in the latest issue of CommLaw Conspectus: Journal of Communications Law and Policy. As Sascha Meinrath, Victor Pickard and I write in Digital Feudalism:

As we enter the second decade of the 21st Century, we find ourselves at a rare historical moment—a time of great opportunity fraught with substantial pitfalls. Numerous potential trajectories of the Internet may unfold before us. While the decentralized and participatory platforms of the Internet have birthed a revived movement for democratized media production, these phenomena depend on the common resource of the Internet…But even as social networking and media production have empowered users, less visible structural changes threaten to foreclose many of the Internet’s democratic possibilities…If these trends continue, the Internet will devolve into a feudalized space—one that limits democratic freedoms while enriching an oligopoly of powerful gatekeepers.

Discussing the concept of feudalization, the structural transformations through which public space becomes controlled by private interests, the paper argues for a new police provisions required to preserve the democratic potential of the Internet.

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