Brazil's controversial plan to extricate the Internet from US control

theguardian.com

10 points·lemming··3 comments

It's not that controversial - as we have detected that there's hostile wiretapping happening, a rational mitigation strategy requires (in the long-term) infrastructure that would route data between, say, Brazil and EU in a way that doesn't involve USA.

In a sense, not trying to isolate Brazil, but making it technically possible to avoid USA if the rest of the world needs to. A few years earlier it could be argued that it can work something like 'benevolent dicatorship', but now it's clear that letting USA hold full control of the Internet is nearly as dangerous as letting, say, Russia or China do so. Currently Internet is not really independent, too much of core infrastructure goes through USA - and it obviously needs to change.

It is presented as a "distributed network" but it is highly centralised, and therefore (as has been shown) controlled by one player, and yet when someone (Brazil in this case) moves to making it more distributed a it should be, it is painted as "controversial".

Eric Schmidt: "[Balkanization] would be a very bad thing, it would really break the way the internet works, and I think that's what I worry about."

Er, balkanization would really break the way Google et al. make money from the internet, and that's what he worries about.

Yeah, I prefer a free and open internet, but the US and NSA's fiddling with the internet shows why we can't have nice things.

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