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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
Yes, you're right. It was much better when it was nothing but usenet chatter about Star Trek and ASCII-art versions of Playboy centerfolds.
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.
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.
Now eternal september is upon the face of the net, and all is woe (hand wring).
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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?
Parent is correct. The US is one of the best places for free speech. The general situation is just that much worse.
We (the 96%) consequently don't intend to entrust ourselves to such an organisation - better for it to be left to no-one, or otherwise the UN, who will, at least recognise my inherent rights and make some effort to uphold them. The US government does not, and would simply rollover and screw me if requested to do so by the Chinese or the Russians.
The UN isn't elected by people, it is made up of governments - many or most of which rule by fear rather than by legitimate democratic means.
A UN convention is more often a taint than an indicator of good intentions.
"otherwise the UN, who will, at least recognise my inherent rights" Is this the same UN that recognizes the inherent right of the People's Republic of China to do whatever is necessary to take away the freedoms of the people of Taiwan?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
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?
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.
The US is not a signatory to various important UN conventions on human rights. This means that while the US government might make a nominal effort to protect the free speech of it's own citizens, it has no obligation to protect the rights of the other 96% of the worlds population - and consequently, it makes no discernable effort to do so.
We (the 96%) consequently don't intend to entrust ourselves to such an organisation - better for it to be left to no-one, or otherwise the UN, who will, at least recognise my inherent rights and make some effort to uphold them. The US government does not, and would simply rollover and screw me if requested to do so by the Chinese or the Russians.
This would the same UN that had bloody Libya, Iran and Syria, among other bastions of freedom, on their Commission on Human Rights (now the Human Rights Council). You really think turning over the keys to the kingdom to that bunch of morons is a good idea? Really?
And if you really think the US would just do whatever China or Russia wanted with the Internet just because they asked I want some of what you're smoking.
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
This is actually quite true. The Internet already exists in a state where it could be dismantled even in pieces. Botnets, or even organized effort, directly against the root DNS servers would already cripple the Internet in every meaningful way. Or DoSing certain important routers/switches in the network.
The point being, in this particular situation, governments can more easily censor, but people wield the WMDs. Self-destruction isn't a particularly good method of fighting, but suppose things began to change, ever so slight, in steps. How long do you suppose it would take for organized parties to cripple a key government network (externally of course, nothing that compromises safety would get enough people behind it)?
There is no off switch, there is not going back. At least not in the United States. They can certainly errode things... have the NSA or FBI pick up server records, suspend domain names of sites that perform 'undesirable' functions... but in the end, a threat to the basic tenet of freedom of speech on the Internet would result in the largest riots we've ever had in human history, most of them digital riots.
I think the US might have figured that out already. They've opened Pandora's Box, there's no keeping society completely in the dark any more. But the rest of the world has almost certainly not, and if the rest of the world forces things to come to a head, it would likely be the most widespread series of counter-governmental actions we've ever experienced in recorded history. You think that all your little drones in Democratic Banana Republic are nice little docile things? Wait until you take away the Internet. It has, in very short order, become one of the things that the masses have unconsciously said "No, this you cannot take away or things get bad".
I don't think people would jump straight to conflict or revolution, but if you gave it time, and things persisted, we'd either have a huge number of governments deposed, or we'd have at least one large-scale war between people who hijack their county's political process to use force on other people who are doing things they don't like.
At this point, the Internet in its "free speech" form has become an unremoveable part of human infrastructure. Its absence would cause major chaos and destabilization of the status quo, and guess what all the people who call the shots want? The status quo.
In the end, so long as they understand even the most basic concepts of cause and effect, I don't believe we'll ever see the entire Internet lose its free speech on large scales. We'll have to fight little brush fires here and there, where such-and-such website gets into a legal battle with the government, but not wholesale authoritarianism. Simply taking away the "right" to the Internet from everyone would be the surest way to insure that the status quo doesn't last very long.
FanFictionRecs.net
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.