Operationalising communication rights: the case of a “digital welfare state”

Academic debates tend focus on attempts to codify and promote communication rights at the global level. This article provides a model to analyse communication rights at a national level by operationalising four rights: access, availability, dialogical rights, and privacy. It highlights specific cases of digitalisation in Finland, a country with an impressive record as a promoter of internet access and digitalised public services. The article shows how national policy decisions may support economic goals rather than communication rights, and how measures to realise rights by digital means may not always translate into desired outcomes, such as inclusive participation in decision-making.

INTRODUCTION media are at the heart of this ideal (Nieminen, 2014). This ideal has been central to what Syvertsen, Enli, Mjøs, and Moe (2014) called the "Nordic Media Welfare State": Nordic countries are characterised by universal media and communications services, strong and institutionalised editorial freedom, a cultural policy for the media, and policy solutions that are consensual and durable, based on consultation with both public and private stakeholders.

OPERATIONALISING RIGHTS
How does Finland, a country with such unique policy traditions, fare as a "Digital Welfare State"? In this article, we employed a basic model that divides the notion of communication rights into four distinct operational categories (Nieminen, 2010;Horowitz & Nieminen, 2016). These divisions differ from other recent categorisations (Couldry et al., 2016;Goggin et al., 2017) in that they specifically reflect the ideal of the epistemic commons of shared knowledge and culture. Communication rights, then, should preserve and remove restrictions on the epistemic commons. We understand the following rights as central to those tasks: Access: citizens' equal access to information, orientation, entertainment, and other contents 1.
serving their rights. Availability: equal availability of various types of content (information, orientation, 2. entertainment, or other) for citizens. Dialogical rights: the existence of public spaces that allow citizens to publicly share 3.
information, experiences, views, and opinions on common matters. Privacy: protection of every citizen's private life from unwanted publicity, unless such 4. exposure is clearly in the public interest or if the person decides to expose it to the public, as well as protection of personal data (processing, by authorities or businesses alike, must have legal grounds and abide by principles, such as data minimisation and purpose limitation, while individuals' rights must be safeguarded).
To discuss each category of rights, we deployed them in three levels: the level of the Finnish regulatory-normative framework; the level of implementation by the public sector, as manifested in the level of activity by commercial media and communications technology providers; and in the level of activity by citizen-consumers. This multi-level analysis aims at depicting the complex nature of the rights and the often contested and contradictory realisations at different levels. For each category, we also highlighted one example: for access, telecommunications; for availability, extended collective licencing in the context of online video recording services; for dialogical rights, e-participation; and for privacy, monitoring communications metadata within organisations.
are perhaps the most illustrative cases of access. They were originally introduced in Finland by the Russian Empire; however, the Finnish Senate managed to obtain an imperial mandate for licensing private telephone operations. As a result, the Finnish telephone system formed a competitive market based on several regional private companies. There was no direct state involvement in the telecommunications business before Finland became independent (Kuusela, 2007).
The licenses of the private telephone operators required them to arrange the telephone services in their area to meet the telephone customers' needs for reasonable and equal prices. In practice, every company had a universal service obligation (USO) in its licensing area. However, as the recession of the 1930s stopped the development of private telephone companies in the most sparsely inhabited areas, the state of Finland had to step in. The national Post and Telecommunication service eventually played a pivotal role in providing telephone services to the most northern and eastern parts of Finland (Moisala, Rahko, & Turpeinen, 1977).
Access to a fixed telephone network improved gradually until the early 1990s, when about 95% of households had at least one telephone in their use. However, the number of mobile phone subscriptions surpassed the number of fixed line telephone subscriptions as early as 1999, and an increasing share of households gave up the traditional telephone completely. As a substitute to the fixed telephone, in the late 1990s, mobile phones were seen in Finland as the best way to bring communication "into every pocket" (Silberman, 1999). Contrary to the ideal of the epistemic commons, the official government broadband strategy was based much more on market-led development and mobile networks than, for example, in Sweden, where the government made more public investments in building fixed fibre-optic connections (Eskelinen, Frank, & Hirvonen, 2008). Finland also gave indirect public subsidies to mobile broadband networks (Haaparanta & Puhakka, 2002). While the rest of Europe had started to auction their mobile spectrum (Sims, Youell, & Womersley, 2015); in Finland, the operators received all mobile frequencies for free until 2013.
The European regulations of USOs in telecommunication have been designed to set a relatively modest minimum level of telephone services at an affordable price, which could be implemented in a traditional fixed telephone network. Any extensions for mobile or broadband services have been deliberately omitted (Wavre, 2018

AVAILABILITY
As a communication right, availability is the counterpart to access, but also dialogical rights and privacy. Availability refers to the abundance, plurality, and diversity of factual and cultural content to which citizens may equally expose themselves. Importantly, despite an apparent abundance of available content in the current media landscape, digitalisation does not translate into limitless availability, but rather implies new restrictions and conditions thereof as well as challenges stemming from disinformation. Availability both overcomes many traditional boundaries and faces new ones, many pertaining to ownership and control over content. For instance, public service broadcasting no longer self-evidently caters for availability, and media concentration may affect availability. In Finland, one specific question of availability and communication pertains to linguistic rights. Finland has two official languages, which implies additional demands for availability both in Finnish and in Swedish, alongside Sami and other minority languages. These are guaranteed in a special Language Act, but are also included in several other laws, including the law on public service broadcasting.
Here, availability is examined primarily through overall trends in free speech and access to information in Finland, as well as from the perspective of copyright and paywalls in particular.
Availability is framed and regulated from an international and supranational level (e.g., the European Union) to the national level. Availability at a national level relies on the constitutionally safeguarded freedom of expression and access to information as well as fundamental cultural and educational rights. Freedom of the press and publicity dates back to 18th-century Sweden-Finland. After periods of censorship and "Finlandization", the basic tenet has been a ban on prior restraint, notwithstanding measures required to protect children in the audio-visual field (Neuvonen, 2005; (Tiilikka, 2007).
Regarding transparency, and publicity in the public sector, research has showed that Finnish municipalities, in general, are not truly active in catering to citizens' access to information requests, and there is an inequality across the country (Koski & Kuutti, 2016). This is in contrast to the ideals of the Nordic Welfare State (Syvertsen et al., 2014). In response, civil society group, Open Knowledge Finland, has created a website that publishes information requests and guides people to submit their own request.
The digital environment is conducive to restrictions and requirements stemming from copyright and personal data protection-both having an effect on availability. The "right to be forgotten",

DIALOGICAL RIGHTS
Access and availability are prerequisites for dialogical rights. These rights can be operationalised as citizens' possibilities and realised activities to engage in dialogue that fosters democratic decision-making. Digital technology offers new opportunities of participation: in dialogues between citizens and the government; in dialogues with and via legacy media; and in direct, mediated peer-to-peer communication that can amount to civic engagement.
Finland has a long legacy of providing equal opportunities for participation, for instance as the first country in Europe to establish universal suffrage in 1906, when still under the Russian Empire. After reaching independence in 1917, Finland implemented its constitution in 1919. The constitution secures freedom of expression, while also stipulating that public authorities shall promote opportunities for the individual to participate in societal activity and to influence the decisions that concern him or her.
Currently, a dozen laws support dialogical rights, ranging from the Election Act and Non-Discrimination Act to the Act on Libraries. Several of them address media organisations, including the Finnish Freedom of Expression Act (FEA) that safeguards individuals' right to report and make a complaint about media content and the Act on Yleisradio (public broadcasting) that stipulates the organization's role in supporting democratic participation.
Finland seems to do particularly well in providing internet-based opportunities for direct dialogue between citizens and their government. These efforts began, as elsewhere in Europe, in the 1990s (Pelkonen, 2004). The government launched a public engagement programme, followed in the subsequent decade by two other participation-focused programmes (Wilhelmsson, 2017). While Estonia is the forerunner in all types of electronic public services, Finland excels in the Nordic model of combining e-governance and e-participation initiatives: it currently features a number of online portals for gathering both citizen's opinions and initiatives, both at the national and municipal levels (Wilhelmsson, 2017).
Still, increasing inequality in capability for political participation is one of the main concerns in the National Action Plan 2017-2019 (Ministry of Justice, 2017). The country report on the Sustainable Governance Indicators notes that the weak spot for Finland is public's evaluative and participatory competencies (Anckar et al., 2018). Some analyses posit that the Finnish civil society is simply not very open for diverse debates, contrary to the culture of public dialogue in Sweden (Pulkkinen, 1996). While Finns are avid news followers, they trust the news, and they are more likely to pay for online news than news consumers in most countries (Reunanen, 2018), participatory possibilities do not entice them very much. Social media are not widely used for political participation, even by young people (Statistics Finland, 2017) and, for example, Twitter remains a forum for dialogues between the political and media elite (Eloranta & Isotalus, 2016).
The most successful Finnish e-participation initiative is based on a 2012 amendment to the constitution that has made it possible for citizens to submit initiatives to the Parliament. One option to do so is via a designated open source online portal. An initiative will proceed to Parliament if it has collected at least 50,000 statements of support within six months. By 2019, the portal had accrued almost 1000 proposals, 24 had proceeded to be discussed in Parliament, and two related laws had been passed. Research shows, however, that many other digital public service portals still remain unknown to Finns (Wilhelmsson, 2017).
As Karlsson (2015) has posited in the case of Sweden, public and political dialogues online can be assessed by their intensity, quality, and inclusiveness. The Finnish case shows that digital solutions do not guarantee participation if they are not actively marketed to citizens, and if they do not entail a direct link to decision-making (Wilhelmsson, 2017). While the Finnish portal for citizen initiatives has mobilized some marginalized groups, the case suggests that eparticipation can also alienate others, for example older citizens (Christensen et al., 2017).
Valuing each and every voice as well as prioritising ways to do so over economic or political priorities (Couldry, 2010) or the need to govern effectively (Nousiainen, 2016) could be seen as central to dialogical rights between the citizen and those in the government and public administration.
trusting citizens in the EU when it comes to the use of their digital data by authorities (European Union, 2017).
In Finland, the right to privacy is a fundamental constitutional right and includes the right to be left alone, a person's honour and dignity, the physical integrity of a person, the confidentiality of communications, the protection of personal data, and the right to be secure in one's home (Neuvonen, 2014). The present slander and defamation laws date back to Finland's first criminal code from 1889, when Finland was still a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire. In 1919, the Finnish constitution provided for the confidentiality of communications by mail, telegraph, and telephone, as well as the right to be secure in one's home-important rights for citizens in a country that had lived under the watchful eye of the Russian security services.
In the sphere of privacy protection, new laws are usually preceded by the threat of new technology (Tene & Polonetsky, 2013); however, in Finland, this was not the case. Rather, the need for new laws reflected a change in Finland's journalistic culture that had previously respected the private lives of politicians, business leaders, and celebrities. The amendments were called "Lex Hymy" (Act 908/1974) after one of Finland's most popular monthlies had evolved into a magazine increasingly focused on scandals.
Many of the more recent rules on electronic communications and personal data are a result of international policies being codified into national legislation, perhaps most importantly EU legislation's transposition into national law. What is fairly clear, however, is that the state has been seen as the guarantor of the right to privacy since even before Finland was a sovereign nation. The strong role of the state is consistent with the European social model and increased focus on public service regulation (cf., Venturelli, 2002, p. 80). Nevertheless, the potential weakness of this model is that the privacy rights seldom trump the public interest, and public uses of personal data are not as strictly regulated as their private use.
Finland has also introduced legislation that weakens the relatively strong right to privacy. After transposing the ePrivacy Directive guaranteeing the confidentiality of electronic communications into national law, the Finnish Government proposed an amending act that granted businesses and organisations the right to monitor communications metadata within their networks. The act was dubbed "Lex Nokia" after Finland's leading newspaper published an article that alleged that the Finnish mobile giant had pressured politicians and officials to introduce the new law (Sajari, 2009  urgently call for a variety of conceptualisations and operationalisations to uncover similarities and differences between countries and regions. As Eubanks (2017) argued, we seem to be at a crossroads: despite our unparalleled capacities for communication, we are witnessing new forms of digitally enabled inequality, and we need to curb these inequalities now-if we want to counter them at all. We may need both the global policy efforts, but we also need to understand their specific national and supranational reiterations to counter these and other inequalities regarding citizens' communication rights.