The Internet is freest in US hands
acorn.nationalinterest.in
acorn.nationalinterest.in
Of course, in many ways, decentralized systems are rather counter-intuitive. They're possible technically, and the math is often elegant, but very few non-technical people encounter enough systems like this to be comfortable with the idea. Of course, a market is a perfect example of a decentralized system, but most people don't think of a market as a system per se.
So perhaps this argument comes because the author does not realize or intuitively grasp the possibility that nobody need control the internet. And sure, when given the choice of whom to trust, the US is much better than many countries! Certainly better than Russia or China. And these countries have serious sway in the UN. Moreover, his point that the UN is not accountable to anyone is actually very important: while a democratic country like the US[1] is accountable to the people, the UN is only accountable to governments. Even in the US, we don't vote for our UN representative! (Do we?) So it's very indirect.
But what if nobody really controls the internet--what if we manage some decentralized, consensus based system? Or something. (As I said before, I haven't thought of the details, so let's keep it hypothetical.) Well, that's a different ball game. Yet people may not even realize this is an option.
[1]: Yeah, yeah, there's all sorts of pedantic argument to be made here, but I think it's besides the point: the US government is, to some finite extent, accountable to the people in a way that even China's isn't.
Hopefully when we look back in history, from a place where the internet works that way. We'll wonder how it was ever a single government / set of corporations that was 'in charge of it.'
Correct. The UN representative is a diplomatic ambassador. Just like every other diplomatic ambassador. Also, similarly, the SCOTUS appointments.
> while a democratic country like the US[1] is accountable to the people
Different to the point you're making, but the US is accountable to the people in the same way. In the US, the federal government is appointed through the states: the district you live in determines which Representative seat you vote for, the state you live in determines which Senators you vote for and how much of an impact you make to the POTUS run-off based on the electoral college.
In other words, the United States federal government isn't accountable to "the people": distinct parts of it are distinctly accountable to distinct parts of the people. And that's just the legislature plus one public office. The judicial isn't accountable at all, nor is any other part of the the executive. The rest of what you vote on in the ballot is state-level, county-level, and local-level.
All of this is to say that the level of indirection you're talking about isn't a black-and-white binary. It's just one more iteration of an already very indirect chain.
If China, or Russia, or Australia, or France, or whatever other country was doing what the US is doing now, we'd object just as much. Or if the UN was in control. That's not the point. What we want when we object to US control isn't foreign control, it's no control.
That is why as a non-american I don't sign any of those petitions condemning NSA for spying on Americans.
We may pass the low bar set by China and Russia, but each of these claims needs a citation.
Did everyone just forget that a relatively small special interest just shut down the country for 16 days? does no one else see the ridiculousness of a system where elections take 2+ years and cost billions of dollars meaning there is no effective way to dissolve and re-elect government even when this kind of thing occurs?
Yes, they have a constitution that enshrines freedom of speech. So what, it means nothing when the rest of the governance is archaic and inept.
Then why did Snowden have to run away to a foreign country? Why is Manning in jail for 35 years?
On the other hand, the fact that the Washington Post can still publish what he "stole"(from the gov's view) is telling about US respect for free speech.
What Snowden did, in terms of the actual act of disclosing massive amounts of classified data, was in and of it self very illegal. And it's that actual act that the government takes issue with, so the situation is completely different.
Of course, a major question is do Snowden's motivations grant him an exception to that law or at least grounds of a pardon or such. I'd say yes, though it also depends on what he leaks.
Plus, if he was acting in the interest of the US people, there should have been some protection.
There are many other possible options for internet governance (or non-governance and de-governance), some of which we haven't yet devised. I suspect this forum may come up with some decent new ideas.
If we want other alternatives, we actually have to devise and validate them before they become real.
He writes "Indians are much better off putting their faith in their freedom-loving American counterparts than participating in grandiose international internet governance schemes." -> that's pretty powerful rhetoric, suggesting a black/white scenario. This probably isn't accidental.
Support darknets.
The whole point of darknets is that no one person is in control of them.
A complete non-sequitur.
1. Have no bad blood (so there's no reason to sabotage specs), and
2. Aren't too closely related, either; collaboration can result in a return to the current state of the web.
Certainly not the U.S, Russia or China.
That article just wasted 2 mins of my life.
Silly this.
1. Other countries like China, Iran, Russia etc. will use Snowden's revelations (and likes) to lobby for a system where these countries get an "equal" say in how internet is being run.
2. If at all any government wants to "control" internet it better be US alone than some other nation of mixture of others nations.
2. If at all any government wants to "control" internet it better be US alone than some other nation of mixture of others nations.
Of course this is what light the article is being read in, isn't it the title?
What is equal say? Is it that each country gets a vote, or is it that each human being gets a vote, or is it that each privileged (definition variant on circumstance) human being gets a vote?
"Equal" is an ideal that sounds great until you realize other people may define it differently. It's easy to say that their definition is wrong, but that's the point at which you realize you don't actually have a say.
Correct, and this is a paraphrase of the Wikipedia definition of "scare quotes." However, all scare quotes imply an unstated different usage, which, if you re-read, is what I was asking about.
Generally, the solution for this invitation for misunderstanding is to use the proper words to convey the writer's meaning, or at least to use more words. I was simply asking for clarification before proceeding under a misunderstanding.
The scare quote around "equal" :
It means country X's opinion about how internet is to evolve and run would matter as much as country Y. Which is to say some countries such as United States who have contributed to growth of internet would be under represented and some countries like Sri Lanka will be over represented. This often happens in UN and eventually the large countries like US or China have to use different tactics to gain favorable opinion.
Is the author aware that Glenn Greenwald (the reporter who first reported about Snowden) ACTUALLY LIVES IN BRAZIL???
This article is just a nationalistic piece written with a very specific agenda.
We have a technology problem. The technology we built was made (on purpose) by us to track people like lab rats in an elaborate zoo. This capability exists completely outside of where your server is, where your data resides, or any of that. It's a feature of modern life.
It's this feature of modern life that is the problem. All Snowden did was show that some Americans aren't going to sit idly by while their government screws over the world. Defunding the NSA or moving your stuff to an offshore cloud, or making it illegal for the U.S. government to track you? That's going to do exactly nothing in the way of protecting your privacy and anonymity.
So yes, let's rise up and take action. But by all means, we should know what the hell we're talking about. If you want to really see draconian state surveillance, let each individual country have it's way with the citizens. What we've seen so far is a cakewalk compared to that possible future.
But as long as US keeps giving itself "freebies" with every foreigner's data, I'm not trusting it. I want some well established rules for how US can access my data, and only with the agreement my government.
That there are, at least, cogent arguments on both sides against it suggests to me that someone's campaign somewhere is considering it.
The US is the largest monitor of the internet because most of the traffic passes through points it can monitor. Changing this would restrict US spying, but it would make it easier for other countries to do it (consider, given the announced Olympic surveillance plans) if all the traffic went through Russia). So you'd have to simply hope traffic doesn't get routed through countries who want to spy on each-other(remember, few if any countries have legal restrictions on foreign surveillance). It seems the only real solution to prevent surveillance is end to end cryptography.
The part where it gets dicier is that many of the countries trying to get control of the internet have much poorer legal protections for freedom of speech or social acceptance of it than the US (e.g. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil).
This might be akin to the way that RMS suggests that saying "intellectual property" (instead of "copyright", "patent", "trademark", "trade secret", and several sui generis regimes) leads to conceptual muddles. "Internet governance" may have the same problem; maybe it's a term in need of some disaggregation!
Spoken as only a sheltered American could believe.
When comparing to China, or maybe North Korea or the USSR, or even Nazi Germany, sure, those things are great and you should be proud.
In the year 2013, there are at least 20 countries that have all of that and more, and don't spend their days rambling on about how great it all is.
All of that stuff doesn't in any way make America special.
That and all the terrible stuff they do.