The Politics and Diplomacy of Neutrality

This article discusses the diplomacy and foreign policy of neutral actors in international relations. It introduces popular research themes of neutrality studies and presents some of the relevant literature. Neutrality has been most profoundly developed, studied, and defined under international law. However, there are other dimensions to it like politics, ethics, norms, identity, and security under which it remains a relatively fuzzy concept. The Finnish president, Urho Kekkonen, once explained it best: “There are as many kinds of neutrality as there are neutral states.” That is because the concept has diplomatic implications that do not stem directly from a country’s abstention from conflicts, but rather from strategic or ideational factors like the normative self-conceptualizations of peoples living in neutral countries and the political choices they make. In this respect, much research on the motivations and development of individual neutralities has been conducted over the years, including case studies, comparative works, theoretical treaties, and general histories. The focus of this article lies on the development of the concept since the maritime and Great Power neutralities of the 18th century. In particular, it covers the major literature of the past one hundred years, during which neutrality in the classic sense of international law underwent several changes and new forms of the neutral idea emerged in the form of nonalignment and neutralism. Furthermore, neutrality also has a place in the history of international organizations like the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and humanitarian institutions like the International Committee of the Red Cross. Therefore, this article understands “diplomacy” in a loose sense, including the foreign policies of states and the international political approaches of non-state actors alike. It defines “neutrality” as an actor’s military noninvolvement in third-party conflicts, especially in interstate wars. Hence, neutral diplomacy refers to the coordinated activities of international actors who remain—or try to remain—at a distance from third-party conflicts. The article does not cover technical understandings of neutrality that do not refer to a subject’s exclusion from conflicts but to different principles. For instance, “net-neutrality,” refers to the non-discrimination of Internet access speeds, not to the Internet’s exclusion from conflicts, and will not be covered in this analysis.

Economic Democracy and the Quest of Net Neutrality in Indonesia

Net neutrality has played critical issues in internet-based businesses, as it may stop Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from discriminating against certain legal internet contents, platforms, or services. This study argued that net neutrality has a strong relationship with economic democracy as the constitutional basis of the Indonesian economy. This study examined net neutrality and considered its possible adoption in Indonesia under economic democracy by justifying economic democracy required the state to build an inclusive economy as per political economy theory. It used a socio-legal method through an interdisciplinary study of law and political economy with conceptual and comparative approaches. The study showed that the idea of the internet as a level playing field was founding net neutrality. For instance, in the United States and across different Global South countries, net neutrality relied on three orders of no blocking, no throttling, and no paid prioritization, which provided equal access for everyone to create their opportunities. At this point, economic democracy and net neutrality made their cross-cut. Like net neutrality, a discriminatory action against a content provider violated economic democracy, where policy-makers formulated economic policies to enable a level playing field for economic actors. Minimum barriers to entering the market might create such a level playing field. Without net neutrality, ISPs could carry out arbitrary actions and abuse of power for business interests. This study concluded that the adoption of net neutrality into formal regulation created a positive climate of innovation in the digital business ecosystem in Indonesia. KEYWORDS: Economic Democracy, Net Neutrality, Digital Economy.

Promises and challenges of Blockchain in education

Blockchain is arguably the next technology-mediated socioeconomic mega trend after the ongoing era of Net Neutrality and Big Data. This theoretical paper explores blockchain technology and its impacts on education. It is argued that we cannot take for granted that the network neutrality, popularized accessibility of the Internet and its influence on education will remain as we know it today. Blockchain promises, among others, a greater control over financing and investing in education, implementing instructional projects, a certification/accreditation system and learning. Education blockchain with its distributed ledgers would set novel standards of crypto-learning and crypto-administration that are acceptable across organizations and nations, enhancing thus the objectivity, validity and control of information without being compromised by socio-economic instabilities. The slow rate of adoption of blockchain technology in education reflects the rate in the fields of finance and management but, at the same time, it poses a few critical challenges such as lacking tangible incentives for technology maintenance or ‘blockchain mining’ (inward sustainability) coupled with a rather feeble orientation to collective development of education (outward sustainability).

STRATEGIC INTERACTION OF PROVIDERS FOR DIFFERENTIATED INTERNET SERVICES

As computing and Internet connections become general-purpose technologies and services aimed at broad global markets, questions arise about the effectiveness of such markets in terms of public welfare, the participation of differentiated service providers and end-users. Motorola’s Iridium Global Communications project was completed in the 1990s due to similar issues, reaching the goal of technological connectivity for the first time. As Internet services are characterized by high innovation, differentiation and dynamism, they can use well-known models of differentiated products. However, the demand functions in such models are hyperbolic rather than linear. In addition, such models are stochastic and include providers with different ways of competing. In the Internet ecosystem, the links between Internet service providers (ISPs) as telecommunications operators and content service providers are important, especially high-bandwidth video content providers. As increasing bandwidth requires new investments in network capacity, both video content providers and ISPs need to be motivated to do so. In order to analyze the relationships between Internet service providers and content providers in the Internet ecosystem, computable models, based on the construction of payoff functions for all the participants in the ecosystem, are suggested. The introduction of paid content browsing will motivate Internet service providers to invest in increasing the capacity of the global network, which has a trend of exponential growth. At the same time, such a browsing will violate the principles of net neutrality, which provides grounds for the development of new tasks to minimize the violations of net neutrality and maximize the social welfare of the Internet ecosystem. The models point to the importance of the efficiency of Internet service providers, the predictability of demand and the high price elasticity of innovative services.