BRIDGING DISCIPLINARY DIFFERENCES:
CONCEPTUALIZING TRUST FOR THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET
Stefano De Paoli & Aphra Kerr
National University of Ireland Maynooth
Department of Sociology and NIRSA
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ABSTRACT
The goal of this paper is to review a sample of the literature on trust as part of a research project on the “Future of the Internet”. Following some contextual discussions on the rhetorical struggle between different design approaches to the internet we focus on three conceptualizations of trust: from sociology, automation and computer science and provide a comparison between their respective definitions of trust. Within this literature we focus specifically on trust as a relationship between the trustor and the trustee. Much sociological work has seen trust as a human attitude which is placed in another human being. Our analysis shows that computer science makes no such distinction and suggests that a Trusted System – i.e. a computer system which controls access to information - can be the trustor in a trust relationship and that the trustee can equally be a human or a non-human actor. By using the concepts of free association and delegation from Actor-Network Theory our analysis helps to bridge the common assumed division between the social and the technical,. We argue that these concepts are a useful starting point both to bridge the disciplinary approaches between social and computer science and to begin to empirically investigate the development and implications of ‘trusted systems’ for the Internet at a micro, socio-technical level.
Keywords: Trust, Future of the Internet, Sociology, Computer Science, Actor-Network Theory
INTRODUCTION
In this paper we lay some theoretical foundations for examining governance, users and trust in the internet environment. In particular the goal of this paper is to review the literature on trust as part of a research project on the “Future of the Internet”. The aim of this paper is not to provide an exhaustive survey of the sociological literature in this area, nor to review the literature on trust between people in online settings, such as for example trust between participants in virtual communities (Jarvenpaa and Leidner, 1998) or the literature on the users' trust toward the Internet in general (Turow and Hennessy, 2007; Dutton and Shepard, 2004). Rather the goal here is to begin to explore different disciplinary conceptions of trust, with particular attention paid to computer science concepts and the differences between these and sociological concepts. Approaching trust using an interdisciplinary lens is one of the goals of our research project which involves an interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, designers and sociologists. We discovered early on that the research team had different understandings of the key challenges facing the Internet, particularly as they relate to security and trust. One key challenge is the trend towards more top-down network and service level controls justified in terms of network stability, quality of service and security concerns. Of particular interest is the extent to which we can delegate security maintenance, governance and control to technology, what decisions get coded into these technological solutions and what the implications might be for end users.
This paper is then a contribution to building bridges between different disciplines and a contribution to the project’s mapping of key social and economic issues surrounding the future development of the Internet. In this paper we compare different approaches to trust: the sociological, the definition existing in the computer engineering sub-field of automation and the definition developed in early computer science (CS) literature[1]. A key focus for this comparison is to investigate the relationship between the trustor and the trustee and to observe the entities that, according to different disciplines, fills these roles. Our goal is to outline similarities and differences in trust notions, as a starting point for enhancing interdisciplinary collaborations. The paper is organized as follows: in sections 1 and 2 we will present the motivation for researching trust as well as the social and political implication for the future of the Internet; in section 3 we will present some key sociological conceptualizations of trust; in section 4 we briefly present how trust is conceived in the field of automation; in section 5 we present a review of trust in computer science based on early literature (mostly work from the 1970s coming from US army research); in section 6 we have a discussion which is followed by a conclusion. In the final two sections we identify some interpretative concepts – in the light of the analysis provided in this manuscript - that we will use in our future work.
1. THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET
The Internet grew out of the libertarian counter culture of the 1960s and of course the military-academic research complex in the United States. It outgrew proprietary networks in the 1980s and 1990s in large part due to its open and non hierarchical nature. It became, along with the general purpose technology of the personal computer, the defining technology of the information, knowledge or network society and increasingly a key driver in the growth of the ICT and software industries in the last two decades. Metaphors like the ‘information superhighway’, the ‘world wide web’ and ‘surfing’ were used to domesticate an otherwise rather unattractive technology of networks, switches and software programmes.
Today, the Internet, as we know it, faces several challenges that can be grouped under the broad umbrella terms of the “Future of the Internet” or “Next Generation Networks”. Interestingly these terms are at the top of research agendas in Europe, Japan and the USA. For example, the Bled-Declaration[2] outlined the challenges facing the Internet as follows: “today's Internet was designed in the 1970s for purposes that bear little resemblance to current and foreseen usage scenarios. Mismatches between original design goals and current utilisation are now beginning to hamper the Internet’s potential. A large number of challenges in the realms of technology, business, society and governance have to be overcome if thefuture development of the Internet is to sustain the networked society of tomorrow.”.. According to EU representatives, the Internet faces structural limitations in terms of scalability, mobility, flexibility, security, trust and robustness (Zimmerman, 2008). Unforeseen technical limits also need to be addressed e.g the limitations of the IPv4 addresses system which will run out in 2010-2011 (IPv6, 2009).
While substantive financial resources are currently being devoted to research in this area, it is also true that the Future of the Internet is surrounded by competing rhetorical discourses particularly in relation to governance where the bottom-up/open “Internet culture” encounters the top-down/hierarchical “Telecomm culture”. This culture clash has also been described as the Netheads culture (Internet Service Providers) against the Bellheads (Telecommunications Service Providers). While it could seem that the Future of the Internet is pretty much a technological-research challenge (i.e. solving the mismatches between original design and current use), in fact it is important to recognize that every technological change is always promoted and accompanied by a specific social change (Callon, 1987): in the case of the goverance clash a more libertarian and unplanned approach versus a more regulatory and planned approach (Frieden, 2001). It is also quite clear that different cultures might lead to different types of governance for the Internet and for the various stakeholders using it.
The problem can be understood referring to The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Zittrain (2008). In this book the author praises what he calls the “generativity” of the Internet + PC architecture (i.e. the openness of this infrastructure). According to Zittrain, generativity is a system's capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences. However Zittrain notes that many of today’s major “Internet stakeholders” advocate a more closed approach, at both the level of the network, with, for example a replacement of the end-to-end principle, as well the diffusion of closed platforms[3] that will totally replace the general purpose personal computer. For this reasons Zittrain warn us that “This counter revolution would push mainstream users away from a generative Internet that fosters innovation and disruption, to an appliancized network that incorporates some of the most powerful features of today’s Internet while greatly limiting its innovative capacity—and, for better or worse, heightening its regulability.“ (2008: 8).
In this light the most evident social issue - as related to the Future Internet socio-technical change - is that the characteristics of the Internet that made it so attractive in civil libertarian terms start to seem like “bugs” rather than features. This is another way of interpreting what the Bled declaration defines as the mismatches between original design and current use. This is also the reason why we witness, for example, a critique of some key Internet design principles such as the end-to-end (i.e. that whenever possible communication protocols operations should occur at the end point of the network)[4]. In fact placing the control operations at the applications level (i.e. at the end point of the network) rather than within the network diminishes the role of Telecomm Operators. This, at the same time, greatly facilitates the creation and proliferation of independent services at the end point of the network. The critique of end-to-end is also reflected in the network-neutrality debate whereas the actual neutrality of the Internet (i.e. the neutral access, without specific privileges to the Internet content) is challenged by a rather large consortium of Telecomm companies and non profit organizations (see http://handsoff.org/blog/category/net-neutrality/). Those against the network neutrality claim their right to provide preferred services (i.e. fast access to services) for those who pay a fee. They also portray the governments will to defend the neutrality of the network as an interference in market self-regulation. This will mean that rather than having a single public network (the Internet) the proposed model is that of having several fast private networks and a relative slow public network.
Thus, it is clear the Future of the Internet involves a range of technical issues, which have significant social and political implications and are far from neutral, from the point of view of the end users and researchers. The trend would appear to be towards more top-down network and service level controls and less user autonomy and such a move is justified in terms of network stability, quality of service and security concerns.
2. TRUST AND THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET
It is clear from a review of the current academic and popular literature that the openness of the Internet is increasingly seen by many as a weakness. In this light the issue of trust management is one of the problems that lies at the very centre of the future of the internet. Current approaches to Trust management propose that trust can be increased through (software implemented) controls over the use of information (e.g. the user is trusted or untrusted to access and use a certain piece of information). Given a trust definition based on “control” it is rather clear that the debate “Internet culture” Vs “Telecomm culture” relates to whether control over information access is placed at the end point (where the Internet culture is located) or within the network itself (where the Telecomm culture is located). In particular, placing trust within the network might have an effect on the end-to-end and net-neutrality principles: the nodes of the Internet will be modified from passive machines to active trusted system. Much of the current research on the Internet that focuses on trust issues proposes that we can construct technological and legal solutions to increase trust and improve user security over the internet (Artz and Gil, 2007).
However, these discussions and the solutions proposed may have serious implications for end users experiences, for user rights and indeed for user driven innovation. For example, Nissenbaum (2001) points out that trust researchers tend to ignore a whole range of practices which threaten to undermine users' trust and use of the Internet more than hackers, cheaters, lurkers, spam and illegal content. Other work points to the covert monitoring of user behaviour on commercial sites and dataveillance whereby personal profiles are matched to user behaviour online and used to target or personalize commercial services (Humphreys, 2008, Jarrett, 1999, Jarrett, 2008). It is difficult at this stage to track how extensive such behaviour is but it is clear that internet based technologies and new applications like social networking sites are facilitating easy tracking, monitoring and targeting of users. Manuel Castells has argued that “The transformation of liberty and privacy on the Internet is a direct result of its commercialisation. The need to secure and identify communication on the Internet to make money out of it, and the need to protect intellectual property rights” (Castells, 2001: 170). This has lead on the one hand, to the increasing use of surveillance and monitoring technologies to track user behaviour and on the other to the development of a discourse of risk, security and threat. This trend has been compounded post 9/11 with the changing geo-political climate. While most trust “builders” are concerned with outside threats, Nissenbaum and others point out that there are inside threats to trust also.