Workshop “Understanding the Responsibilities of Online Service Providers in Information Societies”

2 October 2015 - Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK

The exponential development of Internet services and resources has brought enormous benefits and opportunities to ever more people. However, it has also greatly outpaced our understanding of their ethical implications, raising unprecedented social challenges, ranging from the protection of individual rights and the regulation of surveillance measures to access to data and information. In this complex scenario, Online Service Providers (OSPs) - such as for example 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, as proven by recent examples like the PRISM scandal and the debate on the “right to be forgotten”.
The need to understand the responsibilities that OPSs bear in contemporary information societies is thus fast escalating and addressing it requires a coordinated interdisciplinary theorising able to consider legal, social, and ethical standpoints. The workshop will be a major occasion to gather leading experts from different fields in order to share information and views. Contributions to the workshop will address issues concerning:

· The role of OSPs in contemporary information societies, whether and to what extent their role differs from the one of publishers, mass-media, and gate-keepers;
· The moral responsibilities of OSPs in contemporary societies;
· Ethical frameworks for the understanding of OSPs responsibilities, e.g. corporate social responsibilities or human rights;
· The gap in OSPs’ policies and possible strategies to overcome it;
· The gap in existing legal frameworks regulating OSPs.

Dates, instructions, and timeline

The workshop will be a one-day event and will be held at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, on October 2, 2015.
500-word abstracts (in MS Word or PDF format) can be submitted to Dr Mariarosaria Taddeo by August 1, 2015.
All submitted abstracts will be reviewed by the workshop organizers, Professor Luciano Floridi and Dr Mariarosaria Taddeo, and authors will be notified of the outcome by August the 17, 2015.
Authors of the accepted abstracts will be invited to participate in the workshop and to submit a full paper by November the 2, 2015, for peer-review and publication in a dedicated edited volume.

Contact information
Mariarosaria Taddeo mariarosaria.taddeo@oii.ox.ac.uk
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford,
1 St Giles Oxford OX1 3JS, United Kingdom