The Internet Monitor project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University recently released its first annual report, “Internet Monitor 2013: Reflections on the Digital World.”
The report—a collection of essays from roughly two dozen experts around the world, including Ron Deibert, Malavika Jayaram, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Molly Sauter, Bruce Schneier, Ashkan Soltani,and Zeynep Tufekci, among others—highlights key events and recent trends in the digital space.
Urs Gasser, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and HLS Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder and director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, serve as co-principal investigators for the project.
The report is intended for a general interest audience and invites reflection and discussion of the past year’s notable events and trends in the digitally networked environment. The goal was to highlight and discuss some of the most fascinating developments and debates over the past year worthy of broader public conversation.
Contributors canvass a broad range of topics and regions—from a critique of India’s Unique Identity project to a review of corporate transparency reporting to a first-person report from the Gezi Park protests. A common thread explores how actors within government, industry, and civil society are wrestling with the changing power dynamics of the digital realm.
A number of Harvard Law School faculty members contributed essays to the report. Assistant Professor Mark Wu wrote “China Moves to the Cloud.” Lecturer on Law Christopher Bavitz co-wrote “The Information Technology Act and Intermediate Liability in India” (with Bryan Han), and Professor of Practice Urs Gasser co-wrote “Cloud Computing and the Roles of Governments” (with David R. O’Brien). Berkman Center staff, Rob Faris, research director, Rebekah Heacock, senior project manager, Colin Maclay, managing director, also contributed essays.
The full report and individual chapters are available for download from the Internet Monitor website.
An interactive, full text version of the report is available on H2O, where you can remix, share, excerpt, and comment on each essay: H2O: Internet Monitor 2013.
Internet Monitor is a research project to evaluate, describe, and summarize the means, mechanisms, and extent of Internet content controls and Internet activity around the world. The project compiles and curates data from multiple sources, including primary data collected by the Berkman Center and our partners, as well as relevant secondary data. Internet Monitor will create a freely available online fact base that will give policy makers, digital activists, and user communities an authoritative, independent, and multi-faceted set of quantitative data on the state of the global Internet. The project also produces annual reports that compile this information and provides expert analysis on the state of the global Internet.