The impact of state-society relations on the design and implementation of digital-communication networks: a Franco-American comparative perspective

Both the United States and France were pioneers in building modern Western democracies at the same time in history. Both place civil liberties in general, and freedom of speech and the press in particular, at the center of their state-society covenants. From the early nineteen seventies on, both countries aggressively pursued digitization policies which fostered information exchanges within their societies and with the outside world. Yet, the process of designing and implementing digital information-distribution networks and the results in terms of freedom to access and distribute information have taken different paths. Why? This dissertation argues that a key variable that explains the difference in design and implementation of digital information-distribution networks in the United States and in France is the role that the two states place on speech-content control and on information-distribution control in their respective state-society covenants. In France, content of speech is heavily constrained, in particular through a criminal law, the press act of 1881, which bans a wide variety of opinions. This regime is largely the result of a political tradition, in the realm of state-society relations, that rejects popular sovereignty as a valid concept and instead organizes society along a top-down model where a paternalistic State, in which sovereignty is vested, micro-manages society in order to protect the people against itself. A key concept is that freedom is dangerous and needs to be constrained by the State. This political tradition translates in the digital age into information-distribution network implementations, or, at least, implementation-attempts, that enable or would enable control over content and distribution of speech by the State, as a means of protecting the people against ""abuses of freedom."" In contrast, in the United States, First Amendment jurisprudence grants the people a heightened degree of protection against the government in the realm of content of speech. Practically, this means that speech that is outlawed in many Western liberal democracies, such as hate speech, is constitutionally protected in the United States. This regime is largely the result of a political tradition, in the realm of state-society relations, that is opposite to France, in that it rests on the concept of popular sovereignty; that is, the people, while it recognizes the legitimacy of its government, retains sovereignty, including the power to make micro-decisions. In contrast to France, danger is not perceived as originating from the people (which in turns need to be protected from itself by the State) nor from freedom, but rather from the government. This political tradition translates in the digital age into information-distribution network implementations that empower the people, rather than the state, to control modalities of information distribution.