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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 internet was better when engineers ran it, not politicians.
The world will be made up of Internets.
Life is not for the lazy.
Or until the dollar collapses.
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.
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.
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.
American based Infrastructure can be routed around. the only control you should have over the internet is what is held within your borders. and you've already shown you can't be trusted hosting .com domains.
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.
"Rest of the world, please butt out.
Sincerely,
The United States of America, The richest, mightiest, most powerful and influential at the moment, until the dollar ceases to be the reserve currency"
There, fixed it for ya!
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.
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.
Amen Brother.
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.
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.
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.
No, he's saying that German censorship laws as they are today - which is something that many Americans routinely criticize Germany about, as an evidence of them being "not sufficiently free" - were instituted under pressure of, and to some extent dictated by, the occupying Allied powers - and specifically U.S.
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.