that I had my first visitor. Seeing a flickering light on my network hub, I knew someone was using it. It was Doc Searls, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and top U.S. blogger, who is in Britain for a few days. "The Revolution is on, People!" he was to write later that day, "I haven't felt this jazzed and with-it since the Sixties." Since then, he and many others have used the spare bandwidth on my internet connection" (Hammersley, 2002).

Although there was no prior art or knowledge on which to rely, it was not the only such endeavor. Also in 1999, Adam Burns and others independently launched Free2Air to provide a radio backbone between different artistic hotspots across London. The idea of "free networks" was in the air, and Consume helped give it the political framing that made it more salient. Soon, dozens of similar local initiatives spread across the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. The know-how on how to create local radio networks was fast spreading, these groups' techies were busy refining methods for dynamic routing as well as free hardware-software tools. Meanwhile, the media attention devolved to the WiFi grassroots revolution was growing.

### 4.2.2 Advocating for Free Networks Against the Incumbent

Consume.net did not have nor need any bylaws, only a mailing-list. It was all about self-organization. Thanks to radio, the goal was to restore the fantasied original promise of a bottom-up communication platform. This was the time of the dotcom bubble, and telecom operators were rushing to reap these new markets, Consume aimed to go against the trend of the Internet commodification. It was entitled self financed by its users, and although one foundation approached the group with a very generous proposal to launch the project on a bigger scale, the fact that the group was not incorporated prevented the founders from even seriously considering the offer (incorporation, even as a nonprofit, was apparently out of the question).

Contrary to other early community networks, the motives of Consume.net and the other similar initiatives to which it was connected were political from the start. And there was at least one common adversary: the incumbent operator British Telecom (BT). Consume.net. For them, the Internet was democratizing access to communications in ways never seen before, but all these promises were being held back because of the market structure of the telecom markets where the monopoly of BT on last-mile networks stifled competition. There were alternative commercial Internet access providers, but there were dependent on BT's infrastructure. BT's pricing model was still based on per-minute billing, which meant that it had no incentive to invest in faster speeds, and in particular in the development of ADSL. Quite clearly, slower speeds meant more time loading web pages and sharing files, which meant more money for the incumbent.

Against this backdrop, Consume.net was about "defining a sustainable network development" by circumventing BT's last mile copper infrastructure. The state aims was therefore to build WiFi radio links to "optimize infrastructural expenditure" and "increase network speed." Eventually, by recruiting enough participants, Consume.net would come to represent significant traffic and become

<figure><img src="image_71.png" /></figure>
large enough to exchange traffic on fairer terms with other networks, therefore "reducing connectivity costs" for all participants.

Stevens explains that around that time, BT even lobbied to extend the 1984 rule regulating the deployment of wired infrastructure across the public realm to wireless transmission. This led Consume and other free networks activists to work with Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications (CUT). Founded in 1998, this pressure group was advocating against the per-minute billing model which was still dominant in Europe at the end of the 1990s, and boasted 300 members as well as several corporate supporters like AOL, UK and Intel.

In June 1999, they had taken part in a EU-wide 24-hour-long boycott of the Web. The organizers called for the introduction of the flat-rate schemes for local calls – which was by then the dominant model in the U.S. and played a significant role in the take up on Internet connectivity and the development of online services. According to them, Internet users [should] dial up to Internet Service Providers using a telephone modem, without worrying about the clock ticking and charges ratcheting up.” Looking forward, they also asked for the “quicker introduction of modern access methods such as xDSL, cable modems and satellite access, which do not use the telephone modem and are a great improvement on it for users.” Their campaign had been effective in accelerating the spread of flat-rate schemes. Before CUT dissolved in 2001, one of their last stunt was to help Consume activists fight BT to reach out to policy-makers and telecom regulators to ensure that WiFi sharing would remain legal for citizens (Ziya, 1999).

These contacts were successful to the extent that wireless CNs were not outlawed or suffered new regulatory restrictions. It created a contact channel between Consume's activists and policy-makers. In rural areas where proper infrastructure was crucially lacking, local groups replicating the Consume model also negotiated with local city councils.

### 4.2.3 Consume.net's Legacy and Internationalization

The Consume.net experiments, and many other similar initiatives, slowly ended in the course of 2003, as the main organizers' changing interests pushed them to move on to other projects. Some launched commercial ventures around WiFi (looking back, Stevens speaks of the "self co-optation" of his fellow free networkers). Others joined other civil society groups keen on pushing the Blair government to deliver on its promise to bring broadband access to towns and villages across the U.K., and in 2003 started the Access to Broadband Campaign with people from CUT. Others started spin-offs like Community Wireless Network, a group of community organizations teaming up with small local access providers to resolve connectivity issues in rural areas.

Today, the British landscape for community networks has lost much of its vivacity. In part, it is due to the fact that it is the very idea of grassroots open WiFi that has been co-opted by big players, for instance with BT's Openzone network of WiFi hotspots, or more simply out-competed by the

<figure><img src="image_72.png" /></figure>
development of triple-play offers and high-speed mobile connectivity with 3G and 4G, which have created the incentives for people to pay for individual subscriptions rather than cooperating to share their gateaways to the Internet.

Interestingly, it is beyond British borders that Consume's legacy is the most enduring. Two of the most dynamic and large-scale community network in the world are Freifunk and Guifi, in Germany and Spain respectively. Their outbreak in the early and mid-2000s was directly influenced by Consume. In 2002, Consume people and their connections in Berlin organized the BerLon conference, bringing together people from Consume and local Berlin groups interested in WiFi technologies. "BerLon provided the contact zone between Berlin and London," says Medosch (2014), who took part in the event. "This set into motion a process which would eventually lead to a large and successful community network movement." BerLon marked the birth of Freifunk which todays boasts around 45,000 open access points across Germany. Later still, this nascent transnational network of WiFi activists helped Guifi's founders put up their first wireless nodes in rural Catalonia.

## 4.3 Conclusion: Reflecting on the First Generation of Community Networks

In this conclusive section, we aim to draw lessons on the first generation of community networks by comparing FDN and Consume.net. We address what by now should be recurring themes, namely the diversity of motivations and pricing models, the issue of geographic scope with the challenge of scaling from the local to the global, and finally the importance of political advocacy as a core component of the sustainability of CNs.

### 4.3.1 Diversity of Motivations and Pricing Models

Like with other alternative networks across history, one of the first striking observation is the diversity of model in Internet community networks. In this respect, there is nothing new. On the one hand, we find FDN, founded by IT specialists and computer experts coming out of middle class families and – for some of them at least – educated in France's top elite engineering schools. During FDN's founding years, its core volunteers are all white and males, whose motivation was to run their own ISP when no other existed and reduce the price of joining this new online world. They would go on to pursue their careers in the booming tech sector, and for some of them at least, in some of its most infamous multinationals. Though it apparently did not boast great ethnic and cultural diversity, Consume.net had a much more alternative ethos: It was founded by counter-cultural artists whose understanding of decentralization and flat organizational structures matched the possibilities offered by new radio technologies at the turn of the second millennium.

<figure><img src="image_73.png" /></figure>
The techno-legal governance of both organizations reflects these differences in motivations and ideologies. FDN had to rely on the leased landline infrastructures of major telecom operators and never developed an interest in WiFi technologies (to the difference of other, more recent French community networks), and would even pioneer flat-rate pricing models which would later be adopted by major market actors. It was incorporated as a non-profit under the French law on the freedom of association and, when doing so was possible, it favored the possibility of being legally recognized as a Internet access provider by regulatory authorities. The market and regulatory constraints drove its growing politicization. Consume.net on the other hand, was very political from the beginning and sought to use the spectrum commons to bypass almost entirely market actors. It had no bylaws and no pricing scheme: It was based on an almost anarchic ethos whereby people would freely contribute bandwidth and equipment. Here, it seems that market and regulatory constraints drew a lot of energy from the group, which seem to have play a role in what Stevens (2016) calls the “self co-optation” of its most active participants, rather than sharpening their collective political engagement. Thankfully, despite fundamental differences, both models have had enduring legacies.

### 4.3.2 The Stake of Networking Costs, From the Local to the Global

Another striking difference between these two early CNs is their difference of focus in scale and geographic reach. FDN essentially started as an effort of mutualization aimed at lowering the cost of accessing traffic originated in the US. From the beginning, relying on the national infrastructures of incumbent operators (at first the telephone network), it was – and still is – accessible on a national basis. In a way, it was a national effort aimed at bridging the gap between national legacy networks and the emerging global online world.

Consume.net, on the other hand, brought a major innovation to Internet politics by framing local Internet networks as the right level to organize a community, going against the globalizing tide. This move was in part a reaction to a context where global connectivity was increasingly affordable (thanks in part to the effort of groups like CUT), with the Internet being fast-molded into the macro-economic structures of global capitalism. At a time when the Global Justice movement was gaining traction in its opposition to neoliberal globalization, Consume.net reflected a similar criticism, seeking to embody a form of resistance to the growing commodification of the Internet by putting emphasis on locality. The irony was that such initiative was made possible by a technical innovation – WiFi – produced by regulatory decisions made by an international and corporate-friendly organization like the International Telecommunications Union, and first made available to the general public with the launch of Apple's Airport device.

Of course, Consume.net was aware of the fact that the local community networks they were building needed to be connected to the global Internet to maintain relevance. Unlike the Independents of early telephone networks in the U.S., long-distance interconnection was a given, and that which needed to be counter-balanced. Like for FDN, taking part in the global Internet was

<figure><img src="image_74.png" /></figure>
costly. Sharing costs was a way of making it more affordable, and both FDN and Consume.net understood that the more participants joined, the cheaper the community's bandwidth would be. In that respect, as noted by MacKenzie (2005), Consumet.net was also key in early attempts to "engineer the connection of local networks into extensive ad hoc informal meshes of wireless nodes across local and national boundaries" (p. 281). The joint effort took the form of the PicoPeering Agreement (PPA), a document first presented in 2003 which aimed to safeguard the values promoted by Consume.net and the growing movement around wireless CNs. The first version of the agreement opened on these lines:

> "There are now many community networks, but they are separated geographically and socially and do not form a coherent network. This document is an attempt to connect those network islands by providing the minimum baseline template for a peering agreement between owners of individual network nodes – the PicoPeering Agreement.

> The PPA is a way of formalizing the interaction between two peers. Owners of network nodes assert their right of ownership by declaring their willingness to donate the free exchange of data across their networks" (PicoPeering Agreement v.1, 2003).

The PPA held the potential of creating a network of community networks that would represent "a viable and competitive supplement to the internet, but one where the system of ownership is decentralized enough for it to remain a "common," according to a volunteer involved in the project (MacKenzie, 2005). Again, though the move from theory to practice has since been somewhat disappointing, the original idea of a peering agreement that would allow local community networks to federate at the local, regional and global levels lives up to this day. As De Filippi and Tréguer write (2015), the PPA suggests "a new model for interconnection, one that blurs the distinction between the backbone and the last-mile and federates networks in a decentralized manner, extending in every direction and potentially spawning over whole countries and even across borders." Freifunk has used the PPA as its model license for federating the nodes composing its network, both at the local and regional level, but also at the national scale. Another experiment of this kind was carried on in 2012, when community networks FunkFeuer from Austria, NEDWirelles from Croatia, and Wlan Slovenija established a wireless backbone spanning across geographical borders to create a direct link between them (Musti, 2012). These experiments, pioneered in the early 2000s, show that CNs can bring innovative techno-legal answers to the challenge of bridging the local and global scale in connectivity needs.

#### 4.3.3 Regulation and the Importance of Advocacy for Alternets' Sustainability

One last important lesson to draw from these short histories of FDN and Consume are their relationship to political institutions.

FDN approached partner public institutions like RENATER who was operating France's network for academic and research institutions. Later, the deal was severed because RENATER decided that

<figure><img src="image_75.png" /></figure>
FDN did not, in fact, qualify as an educational non-profit. The move coincided with the opening up of the country's telecom sector to market competition, which after a surge in the number of access providers led to a progressive and fast-paced recentralization of the market. FDN established loose connections with the emerging French digital rights scene in the second half of the nineties, which proved important to frame the political importance of the lone French CN and motivate some of its user to get involved in Free Software and Digital Rights advocacy efforts. However, at least until the late 2010's, FDN never really established a strong advocacy capabilities to influence increasingly hostile telecom policies to make room for alternative networks in the regulatory landscape. Although policy favoring the unbundling of last-mile networks allowed FDN to upgrade to ADSL technologies, the group played no role in pushing for such a policy and failed to organize to protect these "open access" policies in the era of fiber-to-the-home networks. It was only when a strong digital rights group emerged in France after 2009, and thanks to the launch of an actual CN movement in France from 2011 on, that FDN started getting more involved in policy discussions, both directly and indirectly (by sharing expertise with other groups), in particular around the issue of Net neutrality. Although FDN has become an important figure in the French debate on civil rights online (to the point of engaging in litigation against Internet surveillance policies, for instance), to this day it has yet to organize a sustained and coherent political effort aimed at influencing telecom regulation.

Consume.net was political from the start, but through a form of political engagement which did not naturally push it to talk to policy-makers. The anarchist, oppositional ethos of its founders did not predispose the group to reach out to the latter. However, it was able to rely early on consumer pressure groups, like the CUT campaign, to join advocacy efforts which had direct relevance to them. A few months later, when British Telecom launched a lobbying effort aimed at outlawing the broadcast of WiFi signals across the public realm, Consume.net's volunteers had the expertise, resources and connection that helped them preempt such regulation.

Each of these two early CNs have their paradox. On the one hand, FDN offers a model of a CN whose self-understanding has become rooted in civil rights discourse and a broad political agenda around "Internet freedom" while remaining at a distance of policymaking in telecom regulation. On the other, Consume.net rejected the human rights rhetorics (today, Stevens (2016) calls this line of discourse is "American bullshit"), but --with the help of other groups-- did not shy away from campaigning on delimited telecom policy items to achieve significant change in regulations (e.g. flat-rate pricing schemes). For contemporary CNs, there may be room for a third way, a middle ground where a pragmatic discourse on human rights online can be reconciled with effective campaigning and engagement with telecom policy-makers. Freifunk seems to be a good example of such middle ground, and FDN now seems to be moving in that direction as well. The history of CNs therefore points to the importance of alliance with advocacy and pressure groups as a way of anchoring CNs in a political movement and helping them develop resource for political mobilization.

<figure><img src="image_76.png" /></figure>
Finally, both examples suggest that one of the CNs remain highly dependent to market regulatory and business developments. FDN's rises and falls are closely linked to the (in)ability of traditional business players in the telecom market to respond to connectivity needs, or to regulatory authorities' support (or lack of thereof) for meaningful competition and diversity in telecom markets. The same goes for Consume.net, who benefited from the opening up of WiFi frequencies and helped frame the potential of WiFi to subvert part of the political economy of telecommunications. However, within a few years, it would see the idea of free WiFi hotspots co-opted by restaurants, hotel chains and telecom operators (with BT's Openzone hotspots for instance) and the "self co-optation" of those of its participants who went to market their technical skills in the tech and telecom sectors. As De Filippi and Tréguer write, in a sector where innovation is fast-paced, "[political] motives are not in and of themselves sufficient for the network to scale up beyond a restrained community of highly engaged individuals with strong ideological values." In order to survive and grow, "these community networks must also provide a service that is considered at least as good and preferably better than that of mainstream ISPs" (2015, p. 4).

<figure><img src="image_77.png" /></figure>
# 5 General Conclusion: Drawing Parallels and Lessons From the History of Alternative Communication Technologies

As a general conclusion to this report, we propose to develop general insights that can inform contemporary debates on alternets by drawing parallels between our eight historical case studies and the issues faced by today's CNs. Of course, such exercise is risky business. If communication technologies are shaped by their environment, it necessarily implies that all case studies are somehow unique as they belong to very specific contexts. In this sense, all parallels we can offer are nothing much than parallels as the past and the present never quite coincide. But the latter is eventually the starting point of endeavor. In that spirit, French historian Nicole Loraux advocate for a "reasoned use of anachronism" insisting that, when working in a regime of anachronism, there is much "to be learned from the process of returning to the present" (2005, p. 135). In that spirit, while remaining wary of the risk of overemphasizing historical continuity, we seek to enlighten present staked by drawing lessons from the past.

## 5.1 Local and Global Components in Alternets

A first lesson that can be drawn from our journey in the history of alternative networks is the tension between the local on the one hand, and the national and global dimension on the other. Today, different framings can be found in European CNs, and the tension between the local and the global unfolds in at least two distinct ways. First, in the role that the network plays for a local community. CNs like Santaporo.gr (analyzed by netCommons in deliverable 1.2) are built by a small rural community in Greek mountains, and is primarily used for local applications (knowledge and skill sharing within the village, for instance). Others like FDN think of themselves as a community and work as such, but the use of the network mimics that which can be made of the global Internet. In a way, these differences echo the way some Independent telephone companies in the late-19th century U.S. used this new technology, with the network serving to strengthen communities ties (for instance through part lines). On the other hand, many of them quickly felt ne need to provide long-distance connectivity, much in the same way as AT&T.

Second, there is tension found in the political economy of the global Internet. When CNs send out their traffic to transit operators connecting them to the rest of the world, they have to pass agreements with large-scale corporations that do not respect the values they hold dear. Even through global (or transit) telecom markets are much more competitive and diverse than last-mile networks (often run by small oligopolies) – and do not therefore represent an imminent threat –, history teaches us that scaling up is fundamental in ensuring the sustainability of these promising endeavors

<figure><img src="image_78.png" /></figure>
(see, for instance, how the U.S. telephone independents' failure to cooperate to build long distance networks weakened their utility and enabled AT&T to frame itself as a legitimate hegemon to realize the full potential of the telephone; how the compromise made by local telephone networks in France with the central state eventually led the latter to recentralize the network around Paris rather than developing regional connectivity around regional urban centers; or conversely, the success of the Swedish cooperatives in scaling up at the inter-urban level by setting up appropriate coordination mechanisms between them).

These tensions between the local, national the global geographies of alternative networks begs important questions on how to articulate these various scales. At the organization level, CNs should seek to nurture and maintain strong communities ties, using the communications infrastructure to transform and improve community life, enable alternative urban or rural experiences that binds together local polities. On the other, they also need to spread and grow to satisfy their participant's desires for national and global connectivity through arrangements that preserve their values, or risk being outcompeted by traditional actors. Consume.net and other early wireless CNs succeeding in imagining a way to reconcile the best of both worlds, from the local and to the global, through the PicoPeering Agreement. As we have seen, the latter is now providing a model for the federation of local networks at the national scale, but also to the trans-nationalization of alternative networks. These endeavors should be encouraged, and existing local and national CNs interlinked at the European scale. Not only will these larger networks contribute to further contest the centralized political economy of communications networks. They will also spark increased dialogue between local and national CNs and contribute strengthen this emerging political movement.

## 5.2 Legal and Technical Codes' Effects on the Fate of Alternets

This history of alternative networks point to the importance of the process of co-shaping between the law and technology for the fate of alternative networks. These two different forms of code create and constrain the affordances for them.

Let us cite a few examples where the law and technology interpenetrated to open (or foreclose) a path for alternets. The case of early telephone networks show the importance of patents (or their absence) in hindering (or providing) small alternative players access to key technologies and shaping telecommunications markets. In the early 1970s, the end of the state monopoly over broadcasting in Italy let to a strong demand for radio broadcasting equipment, which in turn made such equipment available to activist groups in France and led to a movement that would eventually end the state monopoly there too. Later, the Free Radio movement would however become marginalized through legal reforms leading to licensing schemes that systematically favored commercial players over grassroots groups. In the 1990s, the ITU decision to open up WiFi frequencies to unlicensed use led to the introduction of new radio devices that allowed for

<figure><img src="image_79.png" /></figure>
significant changes in the political economy of last-mile networks, sparking the so-called WiFi revolution that gave birth to the first Wireless Community Networks. Today, regulations like the 2014 European directive on radio equipment changes the liability regime for equipment providers and endangers the freedom of CNs to install new software on these device and serve their specific needs and values.

Sometimes, technology can be a substitute to the law or force changes to the law. In Sweden, where the absence of patents spurred the movement of Swedish cooperatives, it was a “technological ruse” of the Telegraph Board (rather than strict regulation that eventually put an end to the movement. In other cases, it allows to escape the law altogether. Pirate and free radios used radio to subvert the state monopoly from international waters or terrestrial hideouts. Consume.net could develop in the realm of legality because the U.K. 1984 Telecommunications Act did not foresee that radio links would soon be used for telecommunications networks and only banned the roll-out of landline networks on public land. In other words, technology might be use to exploit some of the cracks of the legal system or serve as a way to circumvent it altogether, either in favor or against the interests of alternets.

These general remarks point to the fact that law and technology are “master regulators” of alternets, with law being the most important because it can mandate technological change, but technology being the primary driver as it is out of technical feasibility and economic convenience that alternative communication means and strategies emerge. They suggest that CNs should organize to make, establish, and maintain reflexive strategies than can help them influence technological and legal developments. As a side note, the influence of alternatives on law and technology is warranted by the simple fact of introducing new communications practices. As Mattoni (2013) points out, communication technologies give social movements new possibilities of expression and organization, and as such are shaped and appropriated by social movements in innovative ways which sometimes anticipate future uses. The introduction of flat-rate pricing schemes by the U.S. independents or FDN, which were later appropriated by the market, is one illustration.

## 5.3 Avoiding the Co-optation of Alternets

This last point leads to another insight, namely the fact that alternets are likely to be co-opted by market actors or the State. Again and again, we have seen alternative networks or some of their key players being swallowed up by the very actors, structures or economic logics they were serving as an alternative for.

Co-optation can take many forms. The first U.S. independents that sold out to AT&T weakened the whole movement and provided further justifications for lawmakers to sanction what was becoming AT&T's de facto monopoly. Local authorities in France were from the start ready to devolve their

<figure><img src="image_80.png" /></figure>
telephone networks to the State, but they eventually found out that the later performed much poorly in maintaining and expanding these networks and that co-optation by central authorities came with important drawbacks. For Radio Caroline, as soon as the BBC launched new channels, they hired former star hosts of the pirate stations. For Radio Verte and was not co-opted by market actors, one could say that the movement is responsible for breaking the state monopoly over radio and for the creation of several private stations. The “self co-optation” of many of Consume.net and FDN’s founders also suggests that when volunteer-based, a network commons will find it difficult to sustain itself and grow.

For contemporary CNs, this shows the need to develop the adequate resources to ensure their resilience in the face of an often very hostile economic and political environment. Unfortunately, our case studies do not necessarily show the right way to tackle this challenge. But fortunately, existing CNs are proving innovating in their approach to these issues. Guifi has already proved very innovative in their partnership with both private and public entities, leveraging taxpayers support as well as business incentives as a way to grow the commons. Today’s CNs often rely on the generosity of some of their active participants, some of which are small-and-medium size businesses to have material and technical support. Others manage to extract significant resources for investing in the networks even as they provide very cheap service to their member-subscribers. But overtime, if these networks are to grow, they need to become more professionalized, at least at some levels of their multi-layered organizations. A forthcoming netCommons, The Multiple Aspects of Politics and Sustainability in Cns: Definitions, Challenges, and Countermeasures (D2.2) will delve further into the challenge of building sustainable commons-based governance framework for alternative networks.

The historic analysis confirms and highlights the severity of the co-optation challenge, and our case studies on the telephone system point to the pivotal role of local authorities: in the U.S. for instance, local governments were hostile to Bell's monopoly and did use their powers to the independent's advantage. The strategy only failed when AT&T successfully teamed up with the Federal government and was granted the right to buy its competitors. Now, in her study of *Île Sans Fil*, a Montreal-based community Internet provider, Alison Powell (2008) convincingly describes how the establishment of a partnership between the city and *Île Sans Fil* constituted a turning point as it provided “sustainable funding and a more conventional organizational structure” (p. 1069). Guifi's partnerships with local authorities also confirms the point. Getting the support of public authorities may offer interesting assemblage between the public service logic that the latter are supposed to embody, and the citizen-owned and managed nature of the commons. Building such “public commons partnerships” between the commons and a “partner state” (Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014) point to the need to overcome the latent distrust of many alternets actors towards state authorities, and more generally begs the question of the relationship of alternets to institutional politics and to the law.

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## 5.4 Building Collective Cohesion When Facing Policy-Makers and Hostile Market Actors

Though often operating at a macro-scale, some of our case studies point at the formidable ideological diversities of alternets, as well as to the various relationships and strategies of alternet participants with regards to the political sphere and the action repertoires developed to influence them (the French Free Radio movement being particularly telling in this regard). As we have just seen, they also show the importance of the regulatory environment in creating the conditions for the rise and fall of alternets.

Stefania Milan (2013) provides an interesting typology to understand these varying approaches to politics in her analysis of “emancipatory communication practices”:

* *Beyonders* acknowledge the failure of dominant institution to answer their needs, and prefer to remain beyond the political system by focusing on the building of self-organized, decentralized and citizen-owned communications networks, the setting up alternative socio-political and technical arrangements which are framed as substitutes for the traditional top-down power dynamics.

* Another solution is to fight the problem as *outsiders*, pressuring both regulators and incumbents from outside the political system, by means of protests, demonstrations and other campaigning tactics aimed at voicing dissent against the practices of commercial ISPs and against the lack of appropriate regulation for community networks.

* Lastly, against the oppositional approach of outsiders, alternets can be defended from within the political system, as *insiders*, formally interacting public officials in order to make them support the deployment of community networks. This approach calls for the development and use of capacities for advocacy and mobilization, and the willingness to enter into negotiations with power-holders.

As our case-studies suggest, alternets originally start as initiatives developing *beyonder* strategies, taking the matter into their own hands to meet their need for communications. When the context turns more hostile, for instance when market and state actors coalesce to hinder their development or repress them, they develop oppositional strategies aimed at resisting this trend (legally and technically) and, in such context, generally manage to overcome their political differences. The harder part is to maintain some degree of cohesion when alternets need to articulate a positive agenda to policymakers. In France for instance, the Free Radio movement fractured over the question of capitalism and advertising. It is unclear if similar disagreements would surface if today's European CNs were asked to articulate common visions and policy proposals regarding the future of the telecom sector and the role of the network commons.

What is for sure, however, is that all of our “lessons” so far point to the need for building forms of

<figure><img src="image_82.png" /></figure>
political organization that can turn CNs into an actual social movement, with some degree of coordination and a common agenda. The question of how to achieve this will be further explored in task 1.3. For now, let us simply say that the history of alternets is an invitation for today's CN to proactively tackle these challenges. Like the European Union, they are "united in diversity," and they too need to create ad hoc organization mechanisms to strategically articulate various actions repertoires and build a common vision of what they want to achieve. Ideally, both ends of traditional "mediactivism" should be reinterpreted for their specific context: the critique that aims to empower individuals and collectives to disseminate their own voices and find way to meet their specific needs by mastering the roll-out of alternative networks, and the counter-hegemonic critique that tackle big structural issues, using these alternets as a symbolic resource to ward off the forms of domination and collusion diverting telecommunications and media policies from the public interest.

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