Presentation by Michalis Vafopoulos, Petros Stefaneas, I. Anagnostopoulos and Kieron O'Hara at PhiloWeb 2012 (WWW 2012), Lyon, France.

1. A methodology for internal Web ethics
M. Vafopoulos, P. Stefaneas, I. Anagnostopoulos, K. O'Hara
Philoweb, WWW2012
WSSC: “webscience.org/2010/E.4.3 Ethics in the Web”

2. Research questions
what changes need to be incorporated
in the Web to best serve humanity?
Can philosophical theories help in this
direction? How?
2

3. Outline
① Hypotheses
② Being, space & time in the Web
③ Hayek‟s freedom
④ 3-level analysis
– The Technological Web
– The Contextualized Web
– The Economic Web
⑤ Results & discussion
3

4. Hypotheses
Web:
• ethically-relevant social machine
• magma of Users and code
start from the Web
assume a self-contained Web or
the “manna from heaven” hypothesis
(internal ethics analysis)
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5. “manna from heaven” hypothesis
• Web is the only existing system
• human beings are communicating &
working solely through it
• a compassionate „God‟ provides the
necessary quantity of „manna‟,
fulfilling all human needs, with no
cost & effort
• Web being, space & time
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6. Being, space & time in the Web
• A being exists if and only if there is a
communication channel linking to it
• Web beings communicated through
the Web
• Web space: the Web being‟s URI,
incoming & outgoing links
• Web time: visiting durations
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7. URI
 minimal description of invariant elements in
communication through the Web
 borderline, interlocutor & fingerprint of Web
being
 enables transformation from digital to Web
 directly connected to existence (birth, access,
navigate, edit & death of a Web being)
 other characteristics of Web beings may change
in time
 a change in URI means the death of existing &
birth of a new Web being 7

8. The Web space
• a division of position & place created by
the links among Web beings
• each Web being occupies a specific locus
in the Web network
• a 3d “geographic coordinate system”
• heterogeneous
• many “gravity” & relative “distance”
metrics
• Pagerank initially build on Web space 8

9. The Web time
• a series of choices (visits) in the Web
space (Bergsonian durations)
• visiting selections attach semantic
meaning
• casual relationships among Web beings
• counting: Log file as a generic common
property & co-operation in the Web
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10. The Web time
Durations are becoming:
Discoverable, Observable, Traceable
Processable, Massive
increases material dimension of networks
enables reconstruction of consciousness &
memory of Users
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11. How to analyze the Web as an
ethical space?
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12. Freedom I
othe source of values
o“freedom-coercion” tradeoff
–more options to solve problems
collectively & innovate, but
–some of these options may be
used in ways that cause
coercion
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13. Freedom II
• Theories:
how to construct a system that selects,
with minimum social cost which positive
options to sacrifice in order to minimize
coercion (or the dual problem)
• start with Hayek’s approach because
confronts with most Web characteristics
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14. Hayek’s freedom I
• State posses the monopoly to enforce
coercive power through General Rules
• Personal Sphere & Property
counterweight state power
• General Rules are enforced equally &
describe the borderlines between State &
Personal Sphere
• Property is a basic realization of General
Rules
14

15. Hayek’s freedom II
• Competition is possible by the dispersion
of Property
• Mutually advantageous collaboration is
based on Competition in service provision
• effective anti-monopolistic policy:
require from the monopolist (including
the state) to treat all customers alike
• Individuals should be responsible &
accountable for their actions
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16. 3-level analysis
Apply theory of freedom according to Web‟s
evolution from plain s/w to ecosystem
• The Technological Web
– Internet infrastructure & Web software
• The Contextualized Web
– Sets of rules enforced through trust
• The Economic Web
– Economic contexts
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17. The Web as a space of Freedom
Freedom Coercion
free access & inter-connection of any badware applications (e.g. computer-
compatible software/device zombies)
Internet traffic censorship (e.g.“Snooping”)
inadequate quality of transmission
Web software
freely navigate, create and update badware-infected Web Beings
Web Beings and links central control & censoring of traffic
universality, openness & separation of “walled gardens” in SN (privacy threats &
layers in engineering, editing, fragmentation)
searching & navigating manipulation of indexing & searching
(e.g. spamdexing)
establish specific contexts in order to un-trustworthy technologies, business &
form beliefs that some Users/Web governments
beings are trustworthy Contextualized badware & malicious representations
Web
Economic concentration of power in a minority of Users
no barriers to economize Web inability of some people to benefit from the
Web economy

18. Personal sphere
IP address: can only be processed for
certain reasons
o Web: log file common ownership by
design (admin & navigator)
o architectural element of co-operation
o Admin: direct access
o Navigator: not straightforward access
o not proper practices for collecting traffic
o should be further analyzed 18

19. General rules
Treating all Internet Users, Web
Navigators & Editors equally
• profile customization
• open technological standards
• efficient business incentives
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20. The contextualized Web
• Web 2.5: not only User-Generated
Content, but context
• communication is central to
establishing trust (Habermas)
• rich connectivity of the Web is bound
into its function
• antitrust & coercion= the prices for
widespread & beneficial trust
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21. The contextualized Web
internal Web ethics:
• ensure not that antitrust happens,
but
• that it is outweighed by beneficial
trust to as great a degree as possible
consistent with Hayekian notions of
freedom
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22. Challenges in the economic Web I
obtain the right balance between:
• open access and processing of online
information (e.g. socially aware cloud
storage, g-work)
&
• provision of incentives to produce
content & to develop network
infrastructure
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23. Challenges in the economic Web II
• accelerate socio-economic
development by facilitating life-
critical functions in the developing
world (e.g. W3F)
• enable transparency & participation
in the developed world (e.g. Open Data)
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24. Challenges in the economic Web III
o“Link economy”
o“App economy”
oexcessive market power in Search
Engine market
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25. Results I
• centralization of traffic & data control
• rights on visiting log file
• custom User profiles
• interplay among function, structure &
moral values
are directly connected to the quality of
freedom in the Web
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26. Results II
issues about freedom in lower levels of
the Web (i.e. technology) have crucial
impact on the subsequent levels of
higher complexity (i.e. context,
economy)
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27. Next steps
o involve more theories & disciplines
o relax assumptions
o connect to engineering issues (e.g.
TAG)
o Webizing humanity & humanizing Web
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28. Webizing humanity & humanizing Web
Web:
• emerged not as a business project with
hierarchical structures but
• as a creative & open space of volunteers
outside traditional market and pricing
• markets would have never invested such
amounts in labor costs to develop it
• temporal disconnection between effort &
rewards
• symbiosis between non-financial and financial
incentives 28

29. Webizing humanity – humanizing web
In economy
o incorporate in the entire economy, the best of
the symbiosis between virtues and economic
incentives in the Web
o the Web has still many lessons to take from the
long-living market mechanisms on how to best
orchestrate effort and reward in society
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30. Role of philosophy
What society can learn from the
Web?
What can teach it in order to
become more useful?
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31. Thank you!
• More in vafopoulos.org
References
• Being, space and time in the Web.
Metaphilosophy (forthcoming).
• The Web economy: goods, users,
models and policies. Foundations and
Trends in Web science (forthcoming).
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32. appendix
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33. The Web time
“time of social systems” is
• indeterministic,
• Heterogeneous
• irreversible
• built on the Einsteinian time of
physical systems.
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34. The case of Net Neutrality
• QoS issues
• Technological approach (e.g. Flow-
Aware Networking)
• generic freedom-coercion trade-offs
are useful in framing the feasibility
space but incomplete in treating
more specific cases in practice (like
NN)
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35. Flow-Aware Networking
FAN may ensure neutrality along with the awareness of QoS
create an occurrence, upon which the implicit separation
will be performed solely based on the current link status
(e.g. dataflow congestion, traffic bottleneck etc.).
Therefore, all datagrams are forwarded unconditionally in
the pipeline, but they are also “equal”, subject to be
separated or even dropped when the network tolerance
demands it.
The main advantage of FAN-based architectures is that they
differentiate the data flow, taking into account only the
traffic characteristics of the currently transmitted
information.
Hence, apart from data discrimination, it is not possible to
comprehensively discriminate certain applications, services
and end-Users.
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