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ICANN's Ex CEO Fronts Chinese Initiative On Running the Internet (theregister.co.uk)
Earthquake Retrofit points out this story at the Register which discusses what could be some big changes for the future of the internet. "On the last day of the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, the conference organizers unexpectedly announced they had set up a new 'high-level advisory committee' that would guide the agenda of future conferences and 'contribute ideas for the development of the Internet.' The committee has already had its first meeting, the organizers stated, naming ICANN's Fadi Chehade and Alibaba CEO Jack Ma as its founders and noting that it had 'invited 31 leading Internet figures from governments, enterprises, academic institutions, and technological communities to be members of the first high-level advisory committee.' Those 'figures' have not been named but we understand they include government representatives from a number of authoritarian governments, including Russia, and do not include lead names from the internet community."
Here's the thing. There are three forces conspiring to centralize control of the internet:
(1) Major governments, who don't like that anyone could say anything on it.
(2) Major corporations.
(3) The general public, who has been complicit in moving all their communications away from decentralized, open, and uncensored protocols onto proprietary, centralized, and censored ones.
Arrayed against that are a motley crew of mostly old timers who remember what the net was like when it was free and open. But those people are dying off, giving up, or just plain deciding the fight isn't worth it when most people are working against them by using FB and the like.
This is a fight that can only be lost. It might be different if the general public would stand up and act against centralization of control, but they do just the opposite. They prefer Facebook to email. Closed IM services to open ones where anyone can run a node.
What was once the freest global means of communication ever invented by humans, something that might have given freedom to the world, will become the most Orwellian. Oh, it'll all be fine if you want Facebook-style control of everything you do, see, say, and read on your locked down tablet. That kind of "freedom" will never be taken away.
It's already under way. Another 25 years and we should be almost all the way there, with the people who want a free internet shoved to the fringes when nothing works for them any more.