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Global Internet Governance Fight Looms
QuietLagoon writes "The global fight among governments over control of the Internet is heating up amid a flurry of documents, the opening of the United Nations' General Assembly (GA) and next week's Internet Governance Forum (IGF). Will the change in Internet governance result in states like China and Russia exerting more control over what is allowed on the Internet? The United States has so far comprehensively outmaneuvered attempts by other governments to seize control of the Internet, helped by the fact that it holds the keys and represents the status quo. But how long will it continue to be able to do so?"
The US will be able to retain control as long as the rest of the world continues to be bigger shitheads than the US government. This will be a long time.
The internet was better when engineers ran it, not politicians.
The world will be made up of Internets.
Life is not for the lazy.
U.S. is still one of the best places for free speech.
The criteria for any expansion of governance in an international context should be directly linked to a country's free speech laws. So theoretically countries like Estonia and Norway deserve some power, but in reality, the only people who care about internet governance are those who want to suppress free speech.
Rest of the world, please butt out.
Sincerely,
The United States of America, The richest, mightiest, most powerful and influential nation in the history of mankind.
It's the only way to defeat 'governance'.. Nothing personal, mind you. It's strictly business..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
But how long will it continue to be able to do so?
As long as it doesn't start seizing domains arbitrarily, domains that have been ruled perfectly legal in their countries. Like rojadirecta.me. As long as people do not feel the need to create Firefox extensions to circumvent some stupid domain seizures, and as long as your government doesn't fuck with Mozilla to try and fail to get the extension removed.
Oh wait...
Give each country its own DNS. Then create a simple, automated, neutral central hub that connects all those servers together.
That way, they can all play their own little games, and who the hell cares? The free and open parts of the network will still win out in the long run.
1) Deprecate SSL in favor of a web of trust; a decentralized pool of user verifiable certifiers as mentioned before on this site.
2) Use the above to encrypt all your web sites.
3) Watch as the concept spreads and a significant percentage of personal content on the web is encrypted as such, after which businesses and browser makers follow through by popular demand.
4) See the old status quo become deprecated. Meanwhile, all countries filtering this "illegal technology" see their internet go stale, and eventually give in to an increasingly discontent populace.
Of the above (1) and especially (2) face the worst odds, but they're also the points where you, Slashdot nerds, have the greatest power to make a difference.
Who are all these groups and people who think THEY have the right to control the internet? What happened to the idea that the Internet was going to be self-governing? The UN can't even manage its own budget.
The best thing about the Internet was the tearing down of borders and connecting the world as one big place.
Governments (and some corporations) want to put borders back up. It's in their nature to attempt for more and more control over their fiefdoms.
Fortunately, most citizens are used to the concept of the Internet as it stands right now and governments are facing a lot of accumulated inertia.
Of course, the US government is tapped into a lot of their portion of the pie and China firewalls their nation. True global cooperation to control the Internet as a single entity is... unlikely anytime soon.
Personally, I really hope someone develops technology that can take control of the Internet out of the hands of governments altogether, creating a virtual country in its own right. Again, unlikely, but I can dream, can't I?
U.S. is still one of the best places for free speech.
Mod parent + 1 Funny
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
The US and EU have similar plans under NSTIC and Eurim_IdEa, which are public-private partnerships meant to shift casual web browsing into an identified state that's government-friendly. Watch what Microsoft and G+ do: probably they will both try to get a piece of this pie.
I'm not happy with "over there" smugness about China and Russia: western governments are also building serious tools to increase their power at the expense of civil liberties, and in the end I think the more subtle tools they're building are probably more powerful ones for manipulating political discussion than blunt blacklists.
"...But how long will it continue to be able to do so?"
When the general view of "Freedom" is defined better by some other state, then I feel the power will shift. Right now, we hold the best definition, which is why we are favored. Whether that shifts or not entirely depends on our Governments continuance of tasteless discourse to destroy what many have given their life to defend. Our Military proves we are no match, but it will be the cancer of Government that will ultimately eat us to the bone.
You are welcome to setup your own DNS hierarchy, IP address assignments, etc.
Sincerely,
The United States of America, a wholly owned subsidiary of CorpCo.
P.S. Get OFF MY LAWN!!!!
And it is far too entrenched into reality to be radically and suddenly changed.
An election is coming up. Nobody is going to rock this boat.
There is a recession on and nobody is going to spend money.
This just is not going to happen.
Are these guys clueless? Why not take McDonald's or Coca Cola on? That would be much more realistic.
What is with all the push to tear up the IT industry by the roots, and start from scratch lately? I mean the BIOS, the Post PC world and now changing the basic structure of the internet.
And I will bet that these grand changers of the internet would squeal like bloody stuck pigs, if their email went down for just one second while they tore it up and redesigned the whole thing in their image.
If any group or nation WANTS control, that's a pretty serious indication that they're the last people who should be ENTRUSTED with control.
The Internet needs to remain as free as possible. Anyone who uses "control" in the same sentence as "the Internet" should not under any circumstances be given any power over the Internet.
The UN would be the best way to protect from any bad government. And you have to admit it.
Really? The same U.N. that chose North Korea to head the U.N. Conference on Disarmament? The same U.N. that chose Gaddafi's Libya to chair the U.N. Human Rights Commission?
Technology moves faster than law. As long as the Internet can route packets from point A to point B, the lawmakers will have little say over what those packets contain. We may be driven to encryption, darknets, or something besides DNS, but it won't really matter in the end.
Quite frankly, I think that it is excellent news that China and Russia will be allowed to dictate what is allowed on the Internet.
I can't think of better punishment for the anti-US trolls than to give them exactly what they demand.
Since Germany does not let you publish anything related to Nazis, and is rated in your list as higher in "freedom" than the US, it's obviously a meaningless list slanted politically to try and put the U.S. in a bad light.
A truly free press can publish anything. What other criteria should you use? Yet they appear to have a lot of other criteria that do not relate to actual freedom of speech or press.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
At least casinos will be up front about it and give you your odds of winning
The United States and to a lesser extent the European Union will continue to exert absolute dominance over the internet. If anything has been proven is that the internet is a loose association of cities (hubs) and highways (pathways). Non-English speaking countries essentially don't matter to the English-speaking internet except for Academia and Government reasons and both of those can rely on translation. What we may see occur is attacks on our hubs to try and break down the barriers or shut down our attacks rather than any sort of feudal control over the internet.
In other the words the future lays in whether or not China or Russia want to slap the English-speaking behemoth or whether we will quietly let them control the flow of free speech in their sphere of influence. If the past decade is any indication we're probably heading down the former rather than the latter as China gets more assertive and has to deal with a burgeoning middle-class that seeks outside information. Materialism can only quell the masses so far. Much like Voice of America is our propaganda over the radio the internet will become an inevitable battleground of ideologies. Short of China cutting the actual lines to the English-speaking western internet we're bound to filter in slowly if only rudimentary. But a crack in the dyke will eventually turn into a flood.
Then again perhaps I am merely an ultra-nationalist who supports some sort of fictional United States and desire a benevolent democracy of supreme power. But no, China and Russia are never going to dominate any part of the internet beyond their own language and with nearly half the planet speaking English the United States will continue to have an outsized position on the internet. Welcome to the 21st century, we're still kings.
The idea of states controlling even parts of the Internet is grotesque. The Internet is a network where almost any two computers can communicate, and it doesn't care about national borders. Globalization makes single states and their governments less and less important, so they try to seize new forms of power: power over communication.
When people mentioned that Tor and the likes were a failed idea, that P2P DNS was a failed idea.
These will end up being the only safe place away from corrupt countries throwing their weight around too much.
No, encryption won't work, nobody will enforce it to the levels that is secure enough not to be cracked due to the huge increase in server load.
If every site could run through SSL, scratch that, even stronger encryption, they WOULD, but they can't afford it.
And this is if they don't all have a shitfit and just disconnect the lines entirely. I know that won't happen with most countries, the internet is big business, but it is still a possible future.
what keys? Since when did dns become 'keys' to the internet? Only reason the u.s has the root servers is cause they do the job, as soon as that ends, the so called 'control' ends.
Can I stand up on a soapbox promoting the Nazi platform in Germany?
Can I deny the Holocaust in France?
Can I express a belief that homosexuality is shameful and to be condemned in Canada?
Can I criticize the government or its treatment of religions in China?
Can I make fun of the king in Thailand?
Can I preach Christianity on a street corner in Riyadh?
The First Amendment makes the equivalent of any of these possible in the US. You have to cross a line from expousing an ideology or opinion into actually committing crimes in order to be prosecuted.
Yes, abuses have happened, and they have shaped our laws to what they are today. Attempts to suppress street preachers and Nazis alike have been successfully thwarted. The only place I see the censors currently winning is the gag orders on Patriot Act record requests -- and that's being worked on.
Even our libel laws are better than the UK. Here, truth is an absolute defense.
There has long been a problem with "rogue states" allowing servers to host content illegal in the "civilized world." Now we think of this in terms of copyright and illegal porn, but in the future the US might be the "rogue state" allowing servers to host criticism of repressive regimes.
Since we're there, treatment of press is considered our responsibility. Historically, press has been generally restricted in war zones. That's also a generally dangerous place, so when a reporter gets killed it goes on our tally.
They are also political. Mumia Abu Jamal is in prison because he murdered a police officer. However, since he also plays journalist they are on his side, and consider his incarceration to be an attack on journalism.
Quite valid IMHO.
We have control by virtue that we invented it. We're just asking for status quo. THEY want to seize the power.
What did Bobbin Threadbare ever do to you, Internet?
This is truly a turning point. No longer are NGOs, Corps, and Governments lurking behind the scenes trying to make deals; the fact that they are aggressively out in the open, attempting to consolidate power, shows just how far they have turned the Internet to favor them. There are already reports of monitoring and intercepts for no goddamn good reason...this is indeed our Rubicon crossing. There is no going back, there will be no way to stop the advance (it had already begun some time ago) and now that we see it, we're (as a community) surprised?
What's amazing to me is that people took for granted that "thar Intarnetz" would continue to be "untamed", a.k.a. out of the hands of some authority or institution. Then again, this is the same fucking generation that said "we trust Google/Facebook/MySpace/Twitter enough to say things we wouldn't say in public", and now you wonder what will become of you? You're too fucking late. Google and Facebook are already getting cozy with the local governments, and while Twitter has "tried" to help the Iranian situation, I'm not sure that it really did (although I'm sure it made it easier to target people). MySpace apparently got drunk, wandered off, and got mugged in an alley, another victim of underage drinking. You all dumped on Diaspora for the silly security mistakes they made, but didn't do a goddamn thing to lift a finger to write some fucking code, or beta test, or give constructive feedback, or do jack-all...after all, why have software that protects you from TPTB when you can sell your soul for some shitty Farmville apps? This guy had it right. You're all pretty well fucked, and you don't even know it, yet when Google rams a cock up your ass with no lube, you don't understand the burning sensation you're getting. This isn't the tip of the camel's nose, it's the tip of authority's cock, and the pressure is just building...
So we're gonna get screwed on two fronts - it's not enough that your private life is chronicled *by yourself* and ready to be presented for evidence against you, no ... instead, your communications, all of them, will simply be monitored, just like in the good old days. Enjoy your prison rape 10 years from now as the world continues to slide into shit, and the Governments become so desperate and so powerful that anyone speaking out of turn ends up in jail...including people here. In the U.S. we've already effectively suspended rights that were guaranteed in the constitution waaaay back during the Patriot act, so tell me, how do you plan to have any freedoms when you can't even speak your mind for fear of being arrested?
Misread this headline as "Global Internet Government to Fight Loons" I am now disappointed that nobody will be punching birds.
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As we come up on the dawn of IPv6, it will be simpler and less resource intensive for ISP's to block regions of the world due to the geographical hierarchy of the addressing structure. The truth of the matter is that we're better off letting China, Russia, Iran, etc. splinter off their internet. Let them filter and remove the entire essence of the internet - freedom of speech and choice - from their people/slaves/sheep, and succeed at one thing - making THEIR internet completely irrelevant to the rest of the world and even their people/slaves/sheep. Even better, it will give the US and whatever other nations of the world valid reason to finally just block IP ranges from China, Russia, Iran, etc which house the majority of all botnet herders, spammers, and blackhat hackers of the world - especially China and Russia who have been known to fund these endeavors with government funds. The politicians are too entrenched in diplomacy to just go ahead and cut the cord, so we continue to be hacked and spammed without even a slap on the wrists to the culprit. When was the last time you were on a Russian or Chinese hosted website (and weren't browser hijacked to redirect to it)? This is not a revolutionary idea. In the lower ISP levels, things like this are done at customer request all the time. I've had customers of mine actually request to have an entire foreign nation/continent blocked at the border router level from accessing specifically their systems, due to repeated Nigerian scammers flooding their site with fake orders, Russian based DDoS attacks, etc. The end result was that our customers stopped getting hit with scams, and they didn't care much about their lack of ability to reach African or Russian hosted websites. The western world built the initial internet based on freedom of speech and choice. It was, and still is, a disparate mesh of parts that no one entity controls. Most of this debate in the UN is purely masterbatory, similar to most of what the UN does. The truth is that these ill-educated politicians think there's a mainframe somewhere that controls it all, and therefore THEY should control it. Strangling free speech on the internet in the name of "decency" would just strangle it into a slow obscure death, followed by the rise of a more disparate network of computers where free speech will reign and the next iteration will begin.
Are you saying there was NO censorship in Germany before 1945, when the U.S. Army arrived? Because I'm pretty sure there was some going on before that.
Looks like it's time for everybody to build a node (like so) to join a new free internet, free from all the paranoia and injustice.
Everything the US did there was agreed upon by the allied powers, and the real orders for censorship came from European powers, who couldn't be bothered to have their own soldiers enforce them. So the US did. That does not mean the US liked those impositions on Germany by the allied powers, only that it thought it could prevent matters getting out of hand -again- by having a large force stationed there observing and enforcing international treaties. It worked -thank God-.
Or that's what I was taught in school anyway. Granted that was Belgium. Although, given what happened in Belgium right after the war, I must admit I am in full agreement with that assessment : had it been up to Belgian soldiers, Germans -normal Germans- would have had the choice : executions based on flimsy evidence, everything they own disappearing and humliation, or another war, which was the fate that awaited many in Belgium for real or imagined collaboration.
Similar things happened in other countries, most notably in the Netherlands, but it happened everywhere from Portugal to Poland and Iceland to Greece.
So frankly, what you should blame the US for is for not standing up enough for those poor ex-Nazi's. That might also put things in perspective.
Where does everybody get the ridiculous idea that when things really hit the fan, people (not soldiers) will still care about the difference between civilians and armed forces ? That conflicts play out between armed forces exclusively is an illusion shared only by those living 15000 km away from the nearest small-scale civil unrest.