Over twitter, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, recently opined the same thing. Evgeny Morozov, professional naysayer, asked for a graph.

So here is a graph and a list. I used PolityIV's democratization scores from 2002 and 2011. I used the World Bank/ITU data on internet users. I merged the data and made a basic graph. On the vertical axis is the change in percent of a country's population online over the last decade. The horizontal axis reflects any change in the democratization score — any slide towards authoritarianism is represented by a negative number. For Morozov to be right, the top left corner of this graph needs to have some cases in it.

Change in Percentage Internet Users and Democracy Scores, By Country, 2002-2011
(Look at the Raw Data)

Are there any countries with high internet diffusion rates, where the regime got more authoritarian? The countries that would satisfy this condition should appear in the top left of the graph. Alas, the only candidates that might satisfy these two conditions are Iran, Fiji, and Venezuela. Over the last decade, the regimes governing these countries have become dramatically more authoritarian. Unfortunately for this claim, their technology diffusion rates are not particularly high.

This was a quick sketch, and much more could be done with this data. Some researchers don't like the PolityIV scores, and there are plenty of reasons to dislike the internet user numbers. Missing data could be imputed, and there may be more meaningful ways to compare over time. Some countries may have moved in one direction and then changed course, all within the last decade. Some only moved one or two points, and really just became slightly more or less democratic. But I've done that work too, without finding the cases Morozov wishes he had.

There are concerning stories of censorship and surveillance coming from many countries. Have the stories added up to dramatic authoritarian tendencies, or do they cancel out the benefits of having more and more civic engagement over digital media? Fancier graphic design might help bring home the punchline. There are still no good examples of countries with rapidly growing internet populations and increasingly authoritarian governments.

Written by Philip N. Howard, Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington

Germany, France, Spain, and Finland have already reduced their funding to the ITU, as have a number of major corporations that used to be sector members. If all 55 of the countries that stood with the Internet at the WCIT follow suit, the ITU's member contributions will be reduced by 74%, and everyone will have a lot more time and attention to spend on productive work.

Please consider signing the petition. 25,000 signatures are needed to move it forward, and give the State Department the public mandate they need to act.

Written by Bill Woodcock, Research Director, Packet Clearing House

Top Ten Featured Blogs from the community in 2012:

#1		DNS Changerby Paul Vixie | Mar 27, 2012 | Viewed 66,094 times
#2		Trademarking .generics - the .bank Fiasco!by Konstantinos Komaitis | Jan 18, 2012 | Viewed 17,124 times
#3		Refusing REFUSEDby Paul Vixie | Jan 11, 2012 | Viewed 11,860 times
#4		MegaBust's MegaQuestions Cloud the Net's Futureby Philip S Corwin | Feb 13, 2012 | Viewed 10,430 times
#5		Anonymous Plans to Go After DNS Root Servers. What Will Be the US's Response?by Terry Zink | Feb 15, 2012 | Viewed 9,813 times
#6		Why the Dot Com Kingdom Will Continue to Rule Post New gTLDsby Naseem Javed | Jul 24, 2012 | Viewed 9,771 times
#7		Fake Bank Site, Fake Registrarby Garth Bruen | Mar 27, 2012 | Viewed 8,977 times
#8		Why Vint Cerf is Wrongby Wout de Natris | Nov 21, 2012 | Viewed 8,891 times
#9		Internet Governance and the Public Interestby Paul Diaz | Mar 19, 2012 | Viewed 8,384 times
#10		IPv6 Subnetting - The Paradigm Shiftby Chris Grundemann | Jul 19, 2012 | Viewed 8,380 times

Top 10 News in 2012:

#1		ISPs Are Not Broadcasters, Says Supreme Court of CanadaFeb 10, 2012 | Viewed 35,128 times
#2		Iran Blocks HTTPS, 30 Million Reported Losing Email AccessFeb 11, 2012 | Viewed 11,016 times
#3		Vint Cerf: The Launch of a New Larger InternetJun 05, 2012 | Viewed 8,257 times
#4		The Digital Marketing & gTLD Strategy Congress Announces Keynote, Speakers, Initial PartnershipsJan 08, 2013 | Viewed 7,841 times
#5		Akamai Reports 460 Times Increase in IPv6 Requests Over Its Platform Since Last YearOct 22, 2012 | Viewed 6,976 times
#6		Saudi Arabia Objects to Certain Proposed New gTLD Strings Such as .Gay and .WineAug 15, 2012 | Viewed 6,764 times
#7		Department of Commerce Cancels IANA Contract RFPMar 09, 2012 | Viewed 6,343 times
#8		SPECIAL: Updates from the ICANN Meetings in TorontoOct 17, 2012 | Viewed 5,802 times
#9		Most U.S. Agencies Expected to Miss IPv6 DeadlineSep 28, 2012 | Viewed 5,411 times
#10		Websites Go Dark Protesting SOPA and PIPA, Senators Change CourseJan 18, 2012 | Viewed 5,299 times

Top 10 Industry News in 2012 (sponsored posts):

#1		MarkMonitor Offers New gTLD Application Databaseby MarkMonitor | Jun 15, 2012 | Viewed 6,992 times
#2		DotConnectAfrica Participates in ICANN-45 Toronto, Unveils New IBCA Initiative at ICANN Public Forumby DotConnectAfrica | Oct 23, 2012 | Viewed 6,822 times
#3		ICANN 45: New gTLDs Not Far Away Nowby Afilias | Oct 25, 2012 | Viewed 5,676 times
#4		MarkMonitor to Exhibit at Internet Tech Policy Exhibition and Reception to be Held on Capitol Hillby MarkMonitor | Jan 24, 2012 | Viewed 5,355 times
#5		CentralNic and REG.RU Confirm Strategic Partnershipby CentralNic | Jul 30, 2012 | Viewed 5,244 times
#6		MarkMonitor Fraud Intelligence Report, Q4 2011by MarkMonitor | Feb 17, 2012 | Viewed 5,037 times
#7		Afilias Participates in Global Test of Multilingual IDN Emailby Afilias | Jun 28, 2012 | Viewed 4,857 times
#8		Implementing a Cyber-Security Code of Conduct: Real-Life Lessons From Australia (Webinar)by Nominum | Apr 30, 2012 | Viewed 4,665 times
#9		Top-Level Domain Survey Findings Not Surprising, But Still Concerningby MarkMonitor | Sep 05, 2012 | Viewed 4,509 times
#10		Public Interest Registry Releases Results of Bi-Annual Domain Name Reportby PIR | Aug 14, 2012 | Viewed 4,462 times

Additionally, you can also check the leaderboards for CircleID's overall top 100 community and industry participants.

Written by CircleID Reporter

From the report: "Government surveillance is on the rise. ... [G]overnment demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report. In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 34,614 accounts."

Read full story: BBC

A lot has been said about this, but it seems that many people got it wrong, so let's recap some of the misinterpretations that circulated, specially those at the EFF website:

1 – The court decision was not produced as a consequence of an absence of intermediary safe harbor laws

In the EFF article, it was said that "after someone had posted questionable videos, the law came down on none other than the middleman. Simply for hosting an allegedly defamatory video, it seems absurd for a judge to order Google to be shut down for a day — and on top of that for an executive to get arrested. Brazil proves once again why countries around the world need strong intermediary safe harbor laws like those in the United States"

This is simply not true. One can read everywhere, even on the quoted article, that the arrest order was not due the defamatory content, but simply for not act according to a court order. Safe Harbor regulations, such as the one present on the European E-Commerce Directive, generally exempts the content provider, unless it fails to remove the offending content if summoned to do so.

Brazil's dominant jurisprudence is in the sense that there is no immediate responsibility of an online content provider, unless it fails to remove offending content when informed about it. Of course, some first instance decisions still apply a strict liability principle when ruling cases, specially when it is about consumer protection. But this is ceding to a general understanding that the providers are only responsible if previously informed about the harming material.

2 – Freedom of Speech is protected in Brazil, except when it isn't.

Brazil has, indeed, draconian rules when it comes to elections. Electors cannot even wear t-shirts with names of political parties or candidates during the three previous months of the polls. On the day of the elections, it is forbidden to make any publicity or campaign on behalf of any candidate. Special effects on TV commercials are almost prohibited if to ridicule a candidate, or to give a false impression of reality.

Some of these rules are inherited from the dictatorship times, and some of them are a misguided attempt to curb the abuse of economic power. Either way, what Brazilian congressmen and electoral magistrates (who have a great deal of power regarding the interpretation of the prohibitions, to such extent that it has been debated whether the electoral judges were in fact legislating) still don't get is that the problem of location in cyberspace makes the question of enforceability a bit more complicate.

The electoral laws, however, aim to address two problems: one, to avoid the abuse of economic power (as said above), and to avoid that a slow judicial process renders fruitless a late decision. That is why the issues cannot be treated in the sphere of punitive damages. Receiving some money after the elections for an offense made during the political campaign would not compensate the harm done by an illicit advertising that lead a candidate to loose votes.

This is the rationale of the system. It is not defendable vis-a-vis the freedom of expression contained in Art. 5 of Brazilian Constitution (quoted on every lawyer's defense on behalf of sued candidates in elections' period), but so far the understanding of the Superior Courts has been that the legislation is constitutional.

As draconian as it sounds, it does not imply that Brazil has a scenario where freedom of speech is threatened. This is a very punctual situation, and since it harms politicians, there has not been much uproar from the civil society about it, since the general mindset in Brazil is that if something harms politicians, it must be a good thing…

Written by Francis Augusto Medeiros, Research Assistant

Read full story: Computerworld

I left a comment on the article that I've copied and pasted here, as it is just about long enough to qualify as a CircleID post by itself.

* * *

The problem is that peering isn't always settlement free — and even if it is, if and only if there's an equitable amount of traffic exchanged between two ISPs. And then there's transit, where you pay another network to carry your packets for you.

Peering and transit economics are rather more complex than settlement free handshake deals, and at least these days, they're more often than not based on contracts with every i dotted and t crossed, rather than handshake deals (though those too aren't unknown).

This generally means that networks that have much more eyeballs than content will inevitably spend a lot of money, on international bandwidth capacity over undersea cables, transit etc, just so that their customers can reach all the content provider sites (google, fb etc), which are hosted elsewhere. This is mitigated to some extent by the use of CDNs like Akamai, local mirrors of popular sites etc, but isn't exactly cheap.

The content providers of course are entirely against any such measure as it'd dent their profits if they were to actually pay a lot more for connectivity than they already do — and so spend quite a lot of time and money to lobby internationally, as well as hire respected names in the internet industry who, [possibly in several cases convinced that these measures are an attack on the essential freedoms of the Internet] blog, tweet, give interviews and influence articles about how pernicious these measures are, and how they'll lead to the ultimate destruction of the Internet as we know it.

Meanwhile, the largest content providers also buy (and in some cases, even build) substantial internet bandwidth capacity between different countries and set up datacenters around the world — effectively becoming their own ISP to cut costs from what it'd cost them to buy large quantities of connectivity at retail prices.

An excellent (though rather old) paper on this was written by Geoff Huston, formerly from Telstra and now at APNIC, published in the respected Internet Protocol Journal.

Another elephant in the room is that the internet's coordinating bodies are, at least on paper, under the control of a US government agency — the department of commerce.

While there has been a largely hands off approach on behalf of the USG so far, more than one country that doesn't torture and censor its citizens is not quite comfortable with relying heavily on and treating as a critical resource something that is actually under firm control by the USG, should they choose to exercise it.

There is of course the traditionally utopian idea of a free and wide open internet "frontier" (as in space, the final frontier, as in that fine old time when men were men and shot their own meat, sewed their own clothes on the american frontier, as in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its declaration of independence of cyberspace), with no rules, regulations or anything other than the "Code Is Law" concept that Lawrence Lessig once proposed… an article of faith among true believers in internet freedom.

This faith unfortunately tends to collide with reality on several occasions.

There is the extremely broad crossover between international civil and criminal law and the Internet. Someone in russia or brazil is just as capable of emptying out your bank account with a banking trojan as is a hood with a shotgun sticking up your local branch.

The virus writer (quite often with organized crime backing these days instead of just being a pimply kid hunched over an old PC in his parents' basement) is far far less likely to get caught than the hood is, and electronic money transfers are far less easy to trace and claw back than actual banknotes are.

That's just one case — where the concept of dual criminality (illegal in both the criminal's and the victim's jurisdictions) makes it relatively easy to prosecute [if there happens to be a MLAT and an extradiation treaty in place, without which prosecutors have been known to lure criminals out of their country with a phone call that says the criminal won a paid holiday in a casino resort]

And in civil law — peering and transit are, as I said, business agreements between companies, and there is a huge mass of litigation in front of various courts and regulators around the world. The same thing with say libel and defamation, tort law.

There have been several other frameworks before — such as the Council of Europe's Budapest convention on cybercrime, which the USA and several other countries are already signatories to (though not, I think, Russia or China, or any of the Arab states). You would also find that a lot of cybercrime happens because of vacuums in law enforcement — criminals can operate best where they fear arrest and jail and/or extradition at the least.

Back to the current governance (or shall we say coordination?) model, there's always ICANN, not particularly a poster child for good governance. Its governance has generally been driven primarily by commercial interests, with sort of nominal participation from its Government Advisory Committee (GAC) and its Non Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) — and there has been enough criticism, within ICANN itself, and in the media (including in previous Forbes articles).

Proposals floated in ICANN, just like proposals in the WCIT or before other ITU groups in the past, or like weird and wonderful bills tabled in Congress, have been open to quite a lot of criticism in the past. Some get through and some never do see the light of day after they are tabled.

So it is unfortunately not just about rapacious telcos, repressive regimes and ITU apologists. There's a much more complex backstory that has been completely glossed over (though to be fair it isn't quite easy to compress over a decade's worth of politics into a three or four page article).

In fact, that NY Times article you linked to as "by an ITU apologist", is hardly what I'd describe as an apologia. For example, in the several years that I've known Milton Mueller from Syracuse University, quoted in the article, he has been a longstanding critic of ICANN, and of the ITU — and a longtime member of ICANN's NCUC — and his views don't tend to make him the favorite of several participants in ICANN — nor is he all that popular with several stakeholders in the ITU process.

BTW full disclosures in case they're necessary:
1) I'm speaking entirely for myself and not for my employer.
2) I am good friends and in some cases, peers / colleagues with several people on the "other side" — registrars, content providers, civil society activists
3) I've written a paper on botnet mitigation for the ITU in 2007 and spoken at some of their workshops on cybercrime, the last time in I think early 2009.

Written by Suresh Ramasubramanian, Architect, Antispam and Compliance

The error code: 451.

From the Internet Draft, if the user tries to access a page, but access to the page is restricted by the government, display the following (for example):

HTTP/1.1 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons

Unavailable For Legal Reasons

This request may not be serviced in the Roman Province of Judea due to Lex3515, the Legem Ne Subversionem Act of AUC755, which disallows access to resources hosted on servers deemed to be operated by the Judean Liberation Front.

The IETF draft is a head nod to Ray Bradbury's book Fahrenheit 451, a novel about someone living in society where books are censored by the government.

While this is a common interpretation of the book — government seizure of books — it is not one that Bradbury himself identified as the main theme. Quoting from Wikipedia:

The novel is frequently interpreted as being critical of state-sponsored censorship, but Bradbury has disputed this interpretation. He said in a 2007 interview that the book explored the effects of television and mass media on the reading of literature. Bradbury went even further to elaborate his meaning, saying specifically that the culprit in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state — it is the people. Yet in the paperback edition released in 1979, Bradbury wrote a new coda for the book containing multiple comments on censorship and its relation to the novel.

In other words, the 451-degrees-Fahrenheit-at-which-paper-burns refers to people's disinterest in books and literature, and more interest towards easier, shorter forms of communication such as radio and television (and today would be Facebook, instant messaging, Twitter… but not blogs, of course). He reiterated this opinion in a New York Times article in 2009.

On the other hand, what everyone thinks that the book is about, even if you haven't read it, is government censorship of books, and blocking access to material that the state feels its citizens shouldn't read. Given how pervasive that perception is, I think that the IETF draft is a clever play on the idea, even if the original writer of the book wouldn't approve.

Written by Terry Zink, Program Manager

Most international Medias picked the story wrong. And I see it being repeated. It is true that there is some legislative initiative regarding the regulation of VoIP calls and mainly the telecommunication sector in Ethiopia. But the initiative is just a draft, noting more. Besides there is no such a thing as 15 years punishment in the draft law for using Skype. Here are the provisions in the draft law that are stretched in many news headlines to bemoan that the use of Skype in Ethiopia entails 15 years punishment.

Article 10(3) – Whosoever provides Telephone call or fax services through the internet commits an offence and shall be punishable with rigorous imprisonment from 3 to 8 years and with fine equal to five times the revenue estimated to have been earned by him during the period of time he provided the service.

Article 10(4) – Whosoever intentionally or by negligence obtains the service stipulated under sub-article (3) of this article commits an offence and shall be punishable with imprisonment from 3 months to 3 years and with fine from Birr 2,500 to Birr 20,000.

Hope now you know that there is no 15 years punishment for using Skype in Ethiopia. Indeed the above draft provisions in someway prohibits the use of Skype. But it is worth recalling that there is a 2002 law Telecommunication Proclamation No. 281/2002 that states:

'The use or provision of voice communication or fax services through the internet are prohibited [punishable with imprisonments]'.

So in the eyes of the 2002's legislation the new draft legislation is way too liberal. The 2002 legislation was a blank prohibition to any internet based calls including PC to PC but the new draft law prohibits only telephone calls (to a landline or mobile phone) and fax services using the internet. The addition of the term 'telephone call' in the new draft legislation couldn't be accidental. More importantly, there has been no reports of prosecutions based on the 2002 legislation to date. But there are reports that businesses providing international calls using various technologies, without authorization, have faced closure and criminal charges since the law is enacted. The story unfolds this way not because the government wanted it to be but due to arduous task of monitoring individuals' internet traffic. But with businesses, the government can resort to intensive unautomated monitoring and inspection mechanisms. The government was, thus, mainly targeting businesses offering such services. I see no difference this time.

Whether this should be the case in the first place is another story that can be debated. I personally do not see the reasons cited by the government (the concerns of security and cut into the government revenue in telecom business) are better off with the current draft law. I doubt that the current Internet use in the country is posing such threat. According to 2011 Internet World Statistics, Ethiopia is home only to 622,122 Internet users, which is 0.7% of the total population. The lion share of this number, 511,240, goes to Facebook users. Thus, there is no adequate data indicating that the government is losing revenue for the wider usage of VoIP communications. This is even so assuming that with the existing poor connection someone is able to download Skype and to make calls.

Concomitantly, at the risk of stating the obvious, the government should be reminded the cost of implementing such legislation instead. The Internet architecture is designed in a way to treat packets indiscriminately. It does not distinguish a Skype call from e-mail, fax from YouTube video. Consequently, the government has to retain and inspect every packet of the Internet traffic inorder to know who is making Skype call or fax services over the Internet. Trying to achieve this, with the lack of expertise we have, is unbearable costly, if bearable at all. I am afraid the revenue of the telecom would end up just covering the expenses of Chinese expertise rather. Let's not forget also the devastating consequence it could have on attracting foreign investors. Imagine an investor who is lured by the generous land grab in Ethiopia coming across the news, as picked by many International Medias, that he or she could be busted for up to 15 years for using Skype in Ethiopia, no matter how true that is in fact.

In addition, it is undeniably true that VoIP services have associated security risks. But I personally believe that security concerns can better be dealt by liberalizing the sector. That would enable the government to share the burden of retaining, monitoring and tracking culprits with the providers. The Ethiopian government's approach seems the wrong way of dealing with it. It is like killing to cure approach. The use of Internet in general have similar kind of risks, if that could justify its ban. But in the 21st century, you can't afford to ban the internet for fear of security risks as you don't ban sex for fear of HIV. We have to manage the risk how difficult that might be.

Meanwhile stretching that Ethiopia's regulation of VoIP services and Telecommunication, should the law is implemented, can reinforce the UN takeover of the Internet is too far. If Ethiopia could show the Congress and perhaps the Internet community is Right to Be Worried about UN Control of the Internet, it should have been through the harsher 2002 legislation, not now. If that could have a clout in the global Internet governance, many governments have done that. Yet noting is changed in that respect.

For your view here is the draft legislation:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bxje6_I1ftWCZnZURnBTbVhjRGc/edit

Written by Samson Yoseph Esayas, Research Assistant

Last month, UN voting member Ethiopia made it a crime — punishable by 15 years in prison — to make calls over the Internet. The Ethiopian government cited national security concerns, but also made it clear that it wants to protect the revenues of the state-owned telecom monopoly. (those guys really hate it when people use free Internet calling services like Skype and Google Talk)

The news out of Ethiopia is just the latest indication that many UN members don't think too highly of the free and open Internet, or of its multi-stakeholder governance model. Aside from the Ethiopian law, we've heard a drumbeat of news about governments seeking to regulate and tax the Internet through the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai.

So while some Internet insiders snicker at Congress and its nonbinding resolution, I give props to those lawmakers for having the courage and savvy to focus on this issue.

Over and over again in recent months, United Nations supporters — including ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Toure — have publicly scoffed at the notion that the WCIT and the renegotiation of the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITR) treaty will lead to UN control of the Internet.

But the words and actions of ITU member states, not to mention the text of the proposals they are offering in advance of WCIT, reveal that governments and multi-governmental bodies openly covet a bigger role in Internet governance.

One of the key areas for debate at WCIT will be how developing country telecom monopolies can regain the revenue they lose when their citizens use free internet calling services. With the news out of Ethiopia, we've seen how at least one ITU member proposes to solve that problem.

It's frightening to consider applying wire-line telecom regulations and tariffs to international Internet traffic. Those regulations have the potential to dramatically impact traffic flows, censor content, and raise access costs for precisely the same populations that stand to benefit most from a free and open Internet.

In fact, states like Ethiopia should embrace the broad economic upside of letting their businesses and citizens take advantage of convenient and inexpensive Internet communications. That could mean less revenue for a state-owned telecom monopoly, but to maximize GDP you want to encourage Gross Domestic Product — not Government-Directed Profits.

Now, these tariffs and regulations become even more insidious when you consider the byzantine ITU and UN policymaking process, as I described here.

The name of the game in big multi-governmental bodies is coalition building, or what we used to call "horse trading". In the one nation/one vote world, the only way for powerful countries like China to get anything done is to buy allies by offering to support issues like economic aid and — you guessed it — telecom tariffs.

So picture a world where some portion of Internet oversight resides with the UN, ITU, or some new multinational body. Now imagine how easy it will be for China to scratch Ethiopia's back on something like telecom tariffs, in exchange for a vote favoring Internet censorship. Not only is this possible, it's precisely what countries like China and Russia want to see happen.

Before we embrace the rule of 'one nation/one vote' to govern the Internet, let's understand how many of those governments will vote once the UN makes the rules. And they're not being all that secretive about it — Vladimir Putin wants to vest the UN with "International control of the Internet."

In the International environment, the United States is an easy target and nonbinding Congressional resolutions are causally dismissed. But wherever in the world you live, it's worth hearing Washington's alarm and knowing that the threat is real.

Written by Steve DelBianco, Executive Director at NetChoice

Over the last 25 years the industry has moved from being mainly telephony-based to being mainly IP-based, and many say that what is now at stake is the future of the internet as we know it at this point in time.

On the one hand we were lucky that the internet in its current format was invented by academics and innovative independent entrepreneurs rather than by governments and the vested commercial interests. Furthermore, the various elements of the internet are built by private companies and as such are also owned by them — very little 'internet ownership' is in the hands of governments. The internet would never have been developed if it had been left to governments, telcos or the international institutions around them.

The reality now is that the political stakes of the internet have risen significantly. On the one side there are the community forces that would like to keep it free, as in free of (excessive) government interference; while on the other side there are the conservative and less democratic forces who want to see more control over the internet — with the clear undercurrent that they want to limit the (perceived or real) control of the internet held by the USA.

In this politically charged environment there are several forces at work in and around the internet:

• Vested interests want greater regulation on content and copyright (SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, ACTA, TPP)
• Technologically-advanced nations are now also using it for cyber warfare;
• Several developing economies and in particular non-democratic countries want to assert greater control over it
• Other countries want greater protection for children and other vulnerable people in their societies
• The internet community wants to keep it as free as possible from national or international interference
• Commercial interests in this trillion-dollar industry

So, in looking at the future of the internet, and to establish whether the current political interference in it puts the internet at risk, we have to unravel these issues, since in many cases they have been deliberately interwoven in order to disguise hidden agendas or other underlying issues. There are a range of interests at play here; they include: the internet community, American interests, commercial interests, other developed economies, developing economies and international institutions.

A positive outcome of these discussions could be to look at the internet community and see how these organisations can be used to play more of a leadership role. Once the internet community organisation is properly funded and stocked with the right international people to manage what is needed to watch over internet governance it will be an excellent partner in the broader community of international organisations.

There could be arrangements that, for example, could see organisations such as UN, UNESCO, ITU, WTO, WIPO and others to either become directly involved in, or affiliated with, the internet body, and they could work together to address the many different elements involved in internet governance, including issues around copyright, privacy, child pornography, cyber crime, cyber warfare and so on.

Within such an environment it is also possible to untangle the debate and assess:

• The control issue — does that indeed exist, and if so who has control and who does not, and does it matter?
• Properly separate issues such as infrastructure, content, cultural differences, etc. and organise proper management of those issues by the most relevant organisations.
• Assess what falls under local jurisdictions and what requires international arrangements.

Most issues do not require international consensus, and processes that do require it should be kept to a minimum anyway. But the overarching aim should be to keep the internet as free as possible within the international fabric that it has created around it.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

The proposal, entitled, "DNS Extension for Autonomous Internet (AIP)," describes a way to give each nation, which the proposal cleverly calls an AIP, "its own independent domain name hierarchy and root DNS servers." That would allow them to create their own top level domains without any need to coordinate them with ICANN or any other global entity. In other words, each country runs its own domain name space and decides for itself what TLDs exist and which domain names from outside will resolve in that space. But there would still be a role for ICANN. The IANA, which is a subsidiary of ICANN, would have to assign a unique identifier to each AIP gateway to facilitate international resolution of domain names. Say China was assigned B and the U.S. was assigned A. China could create its own google.com to catch any Chinese-domestic traffic to that site. If people outside the Chinese network wanted to access the Chinese version of google.com, and if China wanted to let them, its gateway would attach its AIP identifier to the end of the domain name. So the Chinese google site would be google.com.b and the other google, which is run by, um, foreign devils, would be google.com.a. Voila! Global compatibility! But it would also be possible for China to configure its gateway to tell people inside its network that the "other google.com" didn't exist. As the proposal puts it, "In order to realize the transition from Internet to Autonomous Internet, each partition of current Internet should first realize possible self-government and gradually reduce its dependence on the foreign domain names, such as COM, NET et al."

This proposed standard actually describes what China already did when it created new top-level domains that were Chinese-character versions of .COM and .NET. It created the new domains unilaterally, and when those domains were accessed by users outside China it appended its ASCII country code to the end of the names of any web sites under them to make them compatible with the global Internet. What China is proposing here is to universalize the practice, so that every country can 'enjoy' the same autonomy.

It would make the DNS a bit like the pre-liberalization telephone numbering system. Speaking of telephones, Kevin Murphy's Domain Incite blog wrote that "the ITU's World Conference on International Telecommunications [is] expected to propose a greater degree of government control over the internet." Actually, he's got it backwards. No modification of the ITRs could give national governments more control over the Internet than this IETF standards proposal would, if it were adopted universally by Internet operators. What's next, House Committee hearings on the dangers of the IETF process?

Fortunately this proposal, involving as it does a new DNS, the complete breakup of the global internet into a series of national intranets and a complete transformation of the role of ICANN and its IANA, is unlikely to make it through the IETF (just as most of the really bad proposals for the ITRs won't make it through, either). The only good thing about this proposal is that it might finally be enough to get the US and other relatively liberal states to start taking more seriously the idea that DNS blocking can be a trade restriction as well as a human rights restriction.

Written by Milton Mueller, Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies

Read full story: Wall Street Journal