The European Commission recently proposed a break up of Google’s display advertising business. We argue that the market definition used by the Commission risks being too narrow and propose expanding it to include Google’s broader ecosystem. We then ask a simple question; why can consumers not choose which advertising network they would like to use with Google’s zero-priced online platforms? Our answer is that by integrating its advertising network into its popular online platforms, Google has foreclosed competition in the online advertising market by denying rival supply-side ad networks access to its customer base. We propose a remedy called marketised monetisation, which is complementary to the break up proposed by the Commission. Marketised monetisation would introduce an interoperability layer between Google’s popular online services and third-party ad networks to make the online advertising market more contestable. The interoperability layer would allow consumers to choose which firm should monetise their usage of Google’s zero-priced products and services. We argue that such a remedy is within the scope of the Commission’s investigation, is technically feasible, and consider how it could be implemented either through competition law or under the Digital Markets Act.

“Violence” and “nonviolence” are, increasingly, misleading translations for the Sanskrit words hiṃsā and ahiṃsā—used by Gandhi as the basis for his philosophy of satyāgraha. I argue for rereading hiṃsā as “maleficence” and ahiṃsā as “beneficence.” These two more mind-referring English words capture the primacy of intention implied by Gandhi’s core principles. Reflecting a political turn in moral accountability detectable through linguistic data, both the scope and the usage of the word “violence” have expanded dramatically, making it harder to convincingly characterize people and actions as “nonviolent.” New terminology could clarify the distinction between hiṃsā and ahiṃsā, and, thereby, prevent misunderstandings of Gandhi. Training in beneficence would reflect Gandhi’s psychological path to reducing avoidable harm: ego-detachment, universal love, and seeking truth by experiment.

The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit words hiṃsā and ahiṃsā -- which were used by Gandhi as the basis for his philosophy of satyāgraha. I argue for re-reading hiṃsā as “maleficence” and ahiṃsā as “beneficence.” These two more mind-referring English words – associated with religiously contextualized discourse of the past -- capture the primacy of intention implied by Gandhi’s core principles, better than “violence” and “nonviolence” do. Reflecting a political turn in moral accountability detectable through linguistic data, both the scope and the usage of the word “violence” have expanded dramatically. The expanded scope of “violence” reflects greater consciousness of the various forms that serious harm can take, but also makes it harder to convincingly characterize people and actions as “nonviolent.” New translations could clarify the distinction between hiṃsā and ahiṃsā, and thereby prevent some misunderstandings of Gandhi. Training in beneficence would reflect Gandhi’s psychological path to reducing avoidable harm: detachment from the ego, learning to love universally, and seeking truth by experiment.

This paper expands on an idea recently voiced by neo-Brandeisians and formally modelled by economists in the past two decades – namely, that the Chicago School’s arguments for the harmless and efficiency generating nature of vertical integration do not apply on zero-priced monetized markets. We build on these findings by developing a non-formal, incentive-based theoretical model that shows how the non-interventionist Chicago School approach leads towards irreversible market failure. We propose marketization as a solution to this conundrum – a structure whereby consumer activity on zero-priced markets and its subsequent monetization are no longer in the hands of the same company. Instead, marketization introduces competition by allowing the consumer to choose how and by whom to be monetized. Lastly, we proceed to examining the potential for eventual policy implementation of marketization through the recent Commission proposal for a Digital Markets Act.

Online deliberation is one important instance of civic tech that is both for and by the citizens, through engaging citizens in Internet-supported deliberative discussions on public issues. This article explains the origins of a set of symposium articles in this journal issue based on the 2017 'International Conference on Deliberation and Decision Making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Civic Tech' held in Singapore. Symposium articles are presented in a sequence that flows from designing decision making systems to platforms to specific technological nudges.

Though successive generations of digital technology have become increasingly powerful in the past twenty years, digital democracy has yet to realize its potential for deliberative transformation. The undemocratic exploitation of massive social media systems continued this trend, but it only worsened an existing problem of modern democracies, which were already struggling to develop deliberative infrastructure independent of digital technologies. There have been many creative conceptions of civic tech, but implementation has lagged behind innovation. This essay argues for implementing one such vision of digital democracy through the establishment of a public corporation. Modeled on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the U.S., this entity would foster the creation of new digital technology by providing a stable source of funding to nonprofit technologists, interest groups, civic organizations, government, researchers, private companies, and the public. Funded entities would produce and maintain software infrastructure for public benefit. The concluding sections identify what circumstances might create and sustain such an entity.

Coordination is a key problem for addressing goal–action gaps in many human endeavors. We define interpersonal coordination as a type of communicative action characterized by low interpersonal belief and goal conflict. Such situations are particularly well described as having collectively “intelligent”, “common good” solutions, viz., ones that almost everyone would agree constitute social improvements. Coordination is useful across the spectrum of interpersonal communication—from isolated individuals to organizational teams. Much attention has been paid to coordination in teams and organizations. In this paper we focus on the looser interpersonal structures we call active support networks (ASNs), and on technology that meets their needs. We describe two needfinding investigations focused on social support, which examined (a) four application areas for improving coordination in ASNs: (1) academic coaching, (2) vocational training, (3) early learning intervention, and (4) volunteer coordination; and (b) existing technology relevant to ASNs. We find a thus-far unmet need for personal task management software that allows smooth integration with an individual’s active support network. Based on identified needs, we then describe an open architecture for coordination that has been developed into working software. The design includes a set of capabilities we call “social prompting”, as well as templates for accomplishing multi-task goals, and an engine that controls coordination in the network. The resulting tool is currently available and in continuing development. We explain its use in ASNs with an example. Follow-up studies are underway in which the technology is being applied in existing support networks.

Goel et al. (2016) examined diffusion data from Twitter to con- clude that online petitions are shared more virally than other types of content. Their definition of structural virality, which measures the extent to which diffusion follows a broadcast model or is spread person to person (virally), depends on knowing the topology of the diffusion cascade. But often the diffusion structure cannot be observed directly. We examined time-stamped signature data from the Obama White House’s We the People petition platform. We developed measures based on temporal dy- namics that, we argue, can be used to infer diffusion structure as well as the more intrinsic notion of virality sometimes known as infectiousness. These measures indicate that successful petitions are likely to be higher in both intrinsic and structural virality than unsuccessful petitions are. We also investigate threshold effects on petition signing that challenge simple contagion models, and report simulations for a theoretical model that are consistent with our data.

This is a review of Susan Greenfield's 2015 book 'Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark On Our Brains'. Greenfield is a neuroscientist and a member of the UK House of Lords, who argues that digital technologies are changing the human environment "in an unprecedented way," and that by adapting to this environment, "the brain may also be changing in an unprecedented way." The book and its author have created a surprising amount of controversy. I discuss both Greenfield's book and a prominent critique by Bell et al. (2015). The exchange points to some flaws in Greenfield's argument and represents an interesting debate about the public role of scientists, but it does not undermine the value of the book as a springboard for discussions about possible policies and future research.

There has been rapidly growing interest in studying and designing online deliberative processes and technologies. This SIG aims at providing a venue for continuous and constructive dialogue between social, political and cognitive sciences as well as computer science, HCI, and CSCW. Through an online community and a modified version of world cafe discussions, we contribute to the definition of the theoretical building blocks, the identification of a research agenda for the CHI community, and the network of individuals from academia, industry, and the public sector who share interests in different aspects of online deliberation.

Public deliberation elicits informed perspectives on complex issues that are values-laden and lack technical solutions. This Deliberative Methods Demonstration examined the effectiveness of public deliberation for obtaining informed public input regarding the role of medical evidence in U.S. healthcare.We conducted a 5-arm randomized controlled trial, assigning participants to one of four deliberative methods or to a reading materials only (RMO) control group. The four deliberative methods reflected important differences in implementation, including length of the deliberative process and mode of interaction. The project convened 76 groups between August and November 2012 in four U.S. locations: Chicago, IL; Sacramento, CA; Silver Spring, MD; and Durham, NC, capturing a sociodemographically diverse sample with specific attention to ensuring inclusion of Hispanic, African-American, and elderly participants. Of 1774 people recruited, 75% participated: 961 took part in a deliberative method and 377 participants comprised the RMO control group. To assess effectiveness of the deliberative methods overall and of individual methods, we evaluated whether mean pre-post changes on a knowledge and attitude survey were statistically different from the RMO control using ANCOVA. In addition, we calculated mean scores capturing participant views of the impact and value of deliberation.Participating in deliberation increased participants' knowledge of evidence and comparative effectiveness research and shifted participants' attitudes regarding the role of evidence in decision-making. When comparing each deliberative method to the RMO control group, all four deliberative methods resulted in statistically significant change on at least one knowledge or attitude measure. These findings were underscored by self-reports that the experience affected participants' opinions.Public deliberation offers unique potential for those seeking informed input on complex, values-laden topics affecting broad public constituencies. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Online deliberation may provide a more cost-effective and/or less inhibiting environment for public participation than face to face F2F. But do online methods bias participation toward certain individuals or groups? We compare F2F versus online participation in an experiment affording within-participants and cross-modal comparisons. For English speakers required to have Internet access as a condition of participation, we find no negative effects of online modes on equality of participation EoP related to gender, age, or educational level. Asynchronous online discussion appears to improve EoP for gender relative to F2F. Data suggest a dampening effect of online environments on black participants, as well as amplification for whites. Synchronous online voice communication EoP is on par with F2F across individuals. But individual-level EoP is much lower in the online forum, and greater online forum participation predicts greater F2F participation for individuals. Measured rates of participation are compared to self-reported experiences, and other findings are discussed.

There has been rapidly growing interest in studying and designing online deliberative processes and technologies. This SIG aims at providing a venue for continuous and constructive dialogue between social, political and cognitive sciences as well as computer science, HCI, and CSCW. Through an online community and a modified version of world cafe discussions, we contribute to the definition of the theoretical building blocks, the identification of a research agenda for the CHI community, and the network of individuals from academia, industry, and the public sector who share interests in different aspects of online deliberation.

Interest has been revived in the creation of a "bill of rights" for Internet users. This paper analyzes users' rights into ten broad principles, as a basis for assessing what users regard as important and for comparing different multi-issue Internet policy proposals. Stability of the principles is demonstrated in an experimental survey, which also shows that freedoms of users to participate in the design and coding of platforms appear to be viewed as inessential relative to other rights. An analysis of users' rights frameworks that have emerged over the past twenty years also shows that such proposals tend to leave out freedoms related to software platforms, as opposed to user data or public networks. Evaluating policy frameworks in a comparative analysis based on prior principles may help people to see what is missing and what is important as the future of the Internet continues to be debated.

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The nature-nurture debate is surely among the oldest in behavioral science. The last decade in particular has been a period of intense investigation aimed at apportioning the responsibility for behavior among hereditary and environmental components. Very recently the results of eight years of twin research at the University of Minnesota have made headline news, even though these results have, for the most part, not yet appeared in the journals. The thrust of the reports on this study, and other similar ones on twins and adoptees that have appeared in the last ten yea.rs, is that the personality similarities that have been observed to hold between identical twins who have been reared apart (and between adoptees and their biological parents) establish with certainty that much of complex human behavior is determined genetically. What exactly it means to say that "heredity has a greater influence on one's personality and behavior than either one's upbringing or the most crushing social pressure" (Lang, 1987) is not a subject that gets treated in the popular accounts of this work. Reading this research uncritically has led not just those who have reported on it but also the most towering figures of science to conclude that many aspects of people that we might seek

Design choices can be clarified when group interaction software is directed at solving the interaction needs of particular groups that pre-date the groupware. We describe an example: the Deme platform for online deliberation. Traditional threaded conversation systems are insufficient for solving the problem at which Deme is aimed, namely, that the democratic process in grassroots community groups is undermined both by the limited availability of group members for face-to-face meetings and by constraints on the use of information in real-time interactions. We describe and motivate design elements, either implemented or planned for Deme, that addresses this problem. We believe that "problem focused" design of software for preexisting groups provides a useful framework for evaluating the appropriateness of design elements in groupware generally.

Individual decision behavior has increasingly been described by several authors as noncompensatory: decisions are based on just a subset (often a minimal subset, i.e. one) of the dimensions that could be thought relevant. A further claim recently advanced is that these rules are adaptive (that they “make us smart”), because the environments in which decisions are made are themselves noncompensatory -- affording the discard of most information. This paper examines the consequences of noncompensatory rules applied in the context of voting and elections, both by individuals and collectives. Both theoretical and empirical arguments are put forward which question the collective efficacy of noncompensatory rules, while suggesting that they may yet be descriptive and explanatory of voting behavior and political party positioning.