Does great profit come with great responsibility? OSPs’ power and the need for public-private diplomatic relations

In contemporary information societies Online Service Providers (such as AOL, Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo!) are major actors, which significantly influence the informational environment and users’ interactions within it. Such a role is unprecedented and problematic for OSPs as well as for other stakeholders, like governments and citizens’ groups. The need to understand the responsibilities that OPSs bear in contemporary information societies is thus fast escalating and addressing it need requires a coordinated interdisciplinary theorising able to consider legal, social, and ethical standpoints.

This talk is from the workshop “Understanding the Responsibilities of Online Service Providers in Information Societies” held at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, on October 2015. The workshop gathered leading experts from different fields in order to share information and views.