London: Internet activists accused governments of making it difficult for users of the Web, rights campaigners and private businesses to carry out their work through state attempts to seize control of the Web. They said state officials were getting bolder in their drive to regulate the Web that has fueled Arab revolutions, enabled mass leaks of US diplomatic cables and allowed online piracy to thrive.
"What we have seen in the last three years is that no longer do governments shy away from attempting to regulate Internet content," said Joy Liddicoat, project coordinator at New Zealand-based Association for Progressive Communications, which seeks to protect people's rights on and to the Internet. They were speaking at the Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi on Tuesday, an annual event that brings together companies, non-profit groups, academics, engineers, government representatives and ordinary citizens.
Participants at the meeting said governments were increasingly filtering and blocking content on the Web, carrying out surveillance and making requests for data and privacy information in countries like Egypt and Pakistan. "These are the sort of issues we would like to see discussed at the IGF and we think we need much more open and transparent discussions on how we should respond to these challenges," Liddicoat said.
They hope to show they are best placed to write the rules of the road ahead for the World Wide Web, an increasingly important driver of economic growth in a world on the brink of recession. Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, deputy secretary general at Council of Europe, a 47-nation group that is mainly concerned about human rights, said that the growing relevance of the Web to millions of people as a tool of communication and commerce added impetus to the need for agreements on Internet governance. "It is an important moment to come to some sort of principles that should govern the Internet at the level of those who govern the Internet," de Boer-Buquicchio said.
In a study published this year, consultancy McKinsey found the Internet accounted for 21 per cent of GDP growth in mature countries, and that almost $8 trillion changes hands through e-commerce each year. "Stronger influence of governments seems inevitable. The Internet has simply become too important for them to ignore it. They prefer a top-down approach," Markus Kummer of the Internet Society, which campaigns for the open Internet, told a recent London seminar.
Groups like the Internet Society fear the creeping use by governments of tools like "three strikes and you're out" laws to cut off Internet access from citizens caught breaking copyright rules, already passed by France and being considered in several other European countries. Some countries have tried more radical measures, like Egypt cutting itself off from the Internet during the Arab Spring to stop flash protests being coordinated on websites like Twitter.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who applauded the Arab Spring, hosted the e-G8 in Paris this year, a conference of political leaders and Internet company bosses at which he put the case for more government regulation while paying lip service to an inclusive approach to governing the Internet. "It was very exclusionary. For women and the global South there was virtually no consultation. It was a hand-picked group of white, male billionaires," Internet lawyer and consumer advocate Jeremy Malcolm told Reuters.
"The IGF is really the last best hope for this process. If it fails, what we're going to get is India, Brazil, South Africa, China, Kazakhstan, Russia and so on putting forward the idea that we need an intergovernmental process." The Internet's potential to raise living standards is under-exploited in the developing world where just 21 per cent of the population have access, compared with 69 per cent in the developed world.
Its role as a catalyst for development will be a key theme of the IGF, a United Nations-sponsored event where speakers will include World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and EU digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes. If it is to succeed in keeping governments at arm's length, the IGF will also have to show it is serious about cybersecurity which companies now view as a bigger threat than traditional crime, natural disasters and terrorism.
The forum comes at a time of technical upheaval for the Internet where top-level domains such as .com or .org are about to be liberalised, enabling companies and communities to buy, create, name and run their own domains. Web addresses in languages like Arabic and Russian have also recently been made possible, a move expected to transform the Internet and give more power to non-English speakers. "The technology continuing to change is a given that we have to accept," said Jeff Brueggeman, who runs public policy for US telecoms operator AT&T and will attend the IGF. "The idea is always to be looking ahead at the next issue."
Comments
0 comment