Keep the Worldwide Net Open
Human history is replete with stories of nations in conflict but it is rare for a huge national government to do battle with an influential global business firm. The tale of China versus Google is something new, and it threatens to upset many existing arrangements necessary to maintaining peaceful relationships among people.
As a conflict between a government with a 14% share of the world's population and a company with 40% share of the world's Internet searchers, China vs Google resembles a battle across spheres, like a lion versus an eagle. Yet China has used an array of modern and traditional weapons in order to bring Google to heel. It has allegedly mobilized distributed computing to launch cyberattacks against Google. It has imposed on the company legal restrictions inimical to the culture of many countries, including the United States. And it has engaged in a war of words against the company. Google now has at best a precarious hold on the biggest Internet market in the world.
This conflict, the harbinger of 21st century geo-commercial disputes, tells us two new things about the world today. First, even Internet-based firms are not necessarily going to be able to do business across national boundaries. Second, the world lacks enough arrangements among nations, firms, and people to assure shared economic growth in a global information economy.
Meanwhile, the problems are proliferating. State Department official Alec Ross recently cited 2009 as the worst year in history for freedom on the Internet, naming Turkey and countries in North Africa, Latin America and Asia that have placed restrictions on the Internet. And as the problems increase, so do the numbers affected. The Internet community in China grew about 50% in the last year, to the phenomenal number of 400 million, and will likely triple in the decade ahead.
Perhaps some governments believe they must control their networks in order to control the society and economy. Better we should all conclude that as the Internet enables a radically new form of human action and interaction, so it will require, sooner or later, new forms of governance.
For this reason, the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program is launching a year-long forum drawn from public, private and government sectors to suggest new ways to preserve the values and potential of the global Internet. This project will address ways to guarantee the freedom to connect, the need for open, end-to-end networks, and the free flow of data and communications across borders on a unified Internet.
The starting point for this forum is not a search for control. Our view is that no government can or should dictate the destiny of the Internet. On any given day, over the Internet, dissidents in Iran publicize their protest marches, the poorest people on the planet visit the Louvre, and the most remote villagers sell handicrafts in the electronic metropolises of the richest countries. These are acts of freedom, not calls for control or suppression.
Yet, like all large-scale communications networks, the Internet does not work without governance. A series of laws, rules and standards have, by and large, supported a system of end-to-end communication: the message can travel from sender to recipient without interference.
This principle is consistent with one of the strong recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy: the need for open networks. Similarly, the recent National Broadband Plan issued by the Federal Communications Commission, setting forth a path for universal broadband in the U.S., was premised on the concept of open networks.
The battle of China versus Google tells us not that existing institutions have failed, but rather that new issues require new consideration of appropriate ways to assure the freedoms of the Internet.
The results may take the form of an accord, a kind of Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty for the Internet. But we also need to address whether the World Trade Organization Treaty is still sufficient when it was premised on pre-Internet assumptions. We need institutions that can work as well as the Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for other broadband topics. And we need industry norms, standards, and means for consumer recourse that can cut across nation state boundaries comparably to the way the Internet does.
The growth of the Internet is not slowing down. Whether that growth includes all the peoples of the world on a free and equal basis is what is at stake. We have no time to waste in rethinking the terms of engagement.
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Reed Hundt is CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital and former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Charles Firestone is the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, which oversaw the operations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.
China and western ideas of freedom are like oil and water. Moreover it seems China is playing a game of world domination while the western countries act like we are in a friendly game of canasta. Issues about internet freedom are only the opening skirmishes. The giant is awake and hungry.
May 10, 2010 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
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January 24, 2011 8:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
If China controls the internet in the right way it can achieve 3 objectives:
1. avoid the massive waste of human resources expended on entertainment, game playing and social media,
2. maintain peace, tranquility and the social order, and
3. achieve a dominant position in using information bases to build their economy.
The first two are pretty self-explanatory and have been commented on extensively.
A society's centralized bases of information and algorithms will be a key factor in the competitioin between societies. China has a potential competitive advantage because it has a very large number of speakers of a language that is not spoken by many outside of China, while the Chinese are rapidly learning English as a second language. This disparity can be used to bias the information flow, since Chinese language information is less accessible to the world, while English language information is more accessible to the Chinese.
In the current primitive state of the world-wide web, much information is in the form of documents and files. Thus, our impression is that information can flow freely between countries.
In the future, the important resources will be information bases from which information can be queried, but the information base itself and the methods of accessing it will be kept proprietary. For example, in molecular biology, a file containing the human genome is pretty useless. What is needed is the human genome information, along with the genomes of other organisms, in a database which can be queried to locate and match new base-pair sequences with known genes, including hyperlinks to information about the structure and function of the known genes. Users can submit new sequences or query existing sequences, but they cannot copy and replicate the entire database and the associated algorithms.
Going forward, the publication of books, journals and papers will be less important to the advancement of knowledge than the design and content of information bases. The advantage that these will give, along with the ability to keep their contents and algorithms private within the cloud computing infrastructures of specific organizations, will mean that they are unlikely to be "open". Information bases will become a major focus of competition.
May 10, 2010 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting that the President chose to make a point related to your item number 1 in a commencement speech yesterday:
Obama: iPad, Xbox Turn Information Into A 'Distraction'
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/09/obama-ipad-xbox-turn-info_n_569289.html
May 10, 2010 12:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Internet access for schools, for example, is a bad idea.
Everything a child needs to know by the 12th grade easily fits on a terabyte hard drive.
May 10, 2010 4:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Google now has at best a precarious hold on the biggest Internet market in the world.
It's curious that you have stated this this way. I read recently that they basically don't have any hold on it at all, they've lost it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/technology/30baidu.html
May 10, 2010 11:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
I would not expect too much in the way of honest discourse at the Aspen Institute.
May 10, 2010 12:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
In a few years the internet will be obsolete. Knoledge will be relative to what you do. True intelligence will be judged by how little you have been influenced by the iternet.
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Jaf, Amen! I wondered if I was going to have to make the point.
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The net shouldn't be governed by any community / body of individuals.
It's a source of freedom, freedom of speech.
It's a never ending void of data. No one "owns" the internet, it's the collective whole of billions and trillions bytes of data.
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The net should always be open.
I'm all for free internet, I can understand if the internet was "free". If the internet provider wants to censor, you choose another provider. Otherwise if you are paying you get unlimited access to any of the web that you want.
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