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Commerce Secretary: US Wants Multi-Stakeholder Process To Preserve Internet
Ted_Margaris_Chicago writes The United States will resist all efforts to give "any person, entity or nation" control of the Internet rather than the "global multi-stakeholder communities," said Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker in a Oct. 13 speech. "Next week, at the International Telecommunication Union Conference in Korea, we will see proposals to put governments in charge of Internet governance. You can rest assured that the United States will oppose these efforts at every turn," she said in prepared remarks to an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, meeting in Los Angeles.
Actually, the US grants much more latitude towards service providers online, in regards to copyright law, than other countries. Compare it to, say, much of non-Anglophonic Europe, which wants Google to be paying royalties for search indexing and news aggregation. Also, the US has the nice law where service providers get off scot free for making what basically amounts to copyright infringement tools, so long as they respond to takedown requests and don't infringe themselves.
Spying is actually impaired by a balkanized Internet. Much of the targets the NSA is actually interested in are foreign - and they benefit politically from the fact that much international traffic goes through US soil. If other countries were to require balkanization - that is, storage of their citizens' data on their soil, and bans on routing data through third-party countries - then the NSA would have to actually ask permission from those countries in order to spy, or engage in actual espionage (e.g. break into data centers). This increases the costs of spying, and the whole point of NSA data grabbing is to make it as quick, painless, and cheap as humanly possible.