Battle over who really runs the web begins...
August 27, 2012 8:13 pm
The internet: Command and
control
By Daniel Thomas, Richard
Waters and James Fontanella-Khan
Future of digital world
subject of intense debate to determine if it really will be for everyone
The man in the middle of
the vast stadium pressed a button on a boxy old computer terminal, causing a
message to flash across the darkness in front of a billion viewers scattered
all over the world. This is for everyone, it said.
This was Sir Tim
Berners-Lee, who helped create the World Wide Web and then surrendered control
of it. The act, staged at the centre of the extravagant opening ceremony of the
London Olympic Games, showed how his invention triggered a digital revolution
as important as preceding scenes of industrial and social upheaval.
More than two decades
after his breakthrough, the future of this digital world is the subject of
intense debate to determine whether it really will be for everyone.
In December, the UN World
Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai will set out a broad
framework of regulations for the internet – the global network of networks that
links more than 2bn people, is gaining more than 500,000 users daily, and is
the platform on which the web was founded. But the meeting’s goals are causing
alarm.
Technically, the
conference focuses on international agreements governing telecommunications,
but some proposals stretch further than many want into internet governance.
The battle is already
being fought behind meeting room doors at the International Telecommunication
Union, an agency of the UN. Western nations – such as the US and the EU – in
particular do not want to give the ITU extra authority that could indirectly benefit
authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, eastern Europe and Asia. They are
accused of seeing an opportunity to enhance their ability to control the web
and crack down on political dissidents.
“If new governance rules
had been set to tighten the control of the web a few years ago we would have
not had an Arab spring,” says one senior EU diplomat. “The internet must be
left free and untouched, the less we tinker with it the better.”
Much of the controversy
will hinge on the language of the regulations to be mapped out in Dubai. Some
proposals published by the ITU and released to member states are seen as
creating a benign environment for state intervention in content and access.
Because of the vague language, that could mean blocking anything from spam to
political material perceived as illegal.
Proponents of a free web
fear broad clauses concerning national sovereignty and security could be used
as smokescreen for legitimising censorship, clandestine monitoring and the
blocking of websites.
“Many of the proposals are
well-intentioned but would also give legitimacy for all sorts of suppression of
free speech,” says Vint Cerf, the so-called “chief internet evangelist” at
Google.
The Internet Society, a
non-profit group, says that seemingly technical proposals over the naming,
numbering and allocation of addresses to web sites could be abused and “impose
detrimental burdens” on freedom and openness.
“The future of the
internet is at stake,” says Mr Cerf. “Some countries are looking for more
national control over the internet. Not surprisingly, authoritarian countries
are behind this, led by China and Russia.”
In truth, guidelines from
Dubai may make little real difference in the most authoritarian regimes. States
such as Iran and North Korea censor or ban the internet. This month, the list
of taboo words in China – that trigger a clampdown on web pages – was updated
to include references to Gu Kailai, who was the wife of Bo Xilai, until
recently one of China’s most senior officials. She was given a suspended death
sentence for murder.
Beyond these concerns over
politics and human rights, the argument over ownership of the internet is also
highly commercial.
Most crucially, delegates
from the 193 nations represented in Dubai will cross swords on whether telecoms
groups should be allowed to charge different rates from suppliers of web
content for access to their networks.
Several telecoms companies
are expressing increasing frustration over the mechanics of how the internet
works. They feel they undertake the hard work of laying the physical
infrastructure but are being left out of the digital gold rush that has built
the fortunes of companies such as Google. In the analogy of one telecoms
executive, they have carried the cost of building the roads so need to see some
return on their investment. In the meantime, the “carmakers” want the network
to be free.
Some telecoms companies
are seeking the right to charge highly profitable content providers in return
for guarantees the infrastructure will work smoothly. Many western politicians
and internet activists are hostile to the idea of charges, viewing it as a
“tax” on the internet. The implicit threat is that telecoms companies could
slow down websites, raising the prospect of second class citizens in the new
digital world.
Given these competing
political and commercial tensions, it is little wonder that Dr Hamadoun Touré,
the secretary-general of ITU, admits that the Dubai meeting will be tough.
He hopes the meeting
should set the “Ten Commandments” or universal concepts for global
communications. Rather than setting prescriptive and specific rules, he says
the commandments would “set the stage for competition, innovation and economic
growth”. But even the mention of economics in the internet debate will be
anathema for many who see the web as a bastion of a free market and guardian of
a free society.
The last time the group
met to revise the International Telecommunication Regulations was in 1988, when
the internet was in its infancy, and Dr Touré says the rules need updating.
“In 1988, there was only
voice,” he told the Financial Times. “Now time, distance and location is
irrelevant ... someone has to build the road.”
He rejects the “talk that
the UN is taking over the internet” and says that everyone needs to work together.
“All stakeholders need to be involved. This is why a phone made in China will
work in Brazil. Even definition is a problem ... so we need to work with the
lowest common denominator [and] a common framework. Failure is not an option.”
But some attendees could
be keen to see failure and maintain the status quo. They see the ITU as
overreaching its authority outside its traditional bailiwick of telecoms and,
in doing so, allowing outside interests a chance to control the internet.
Expanding the ITU’s jurisdiction
into the new sphere of the internet has produced “highly undesirable” results,
according to Tony Rutkowski, an internet expert who helped arrange the previous
WCIT meeting in 1988.
He says some delegates are
pursuing “extreme agendas” at the meeting for various religious, political and
social reasons.
Net neutrality is set to
be the most vexed specific issue. This concept lies at the core of the debate
on whether telecoms companies can charge differing rates to content providers.
A number of European
governments are considering laws to preserve net neutrality but the telecoms
industry says that these could clash with the need to support the internet’s
physical infrastructure financially.
“Net neutrality is one
size fits all. And guess what? One size doesn’t fit all,” insists Ben
Verwaayen, chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent. He says the telecoms groups are
the missing link in the value chain between the content providers and device
makers.
The telecoms
infrastructure needs more investment to meet demands for online data that is
doubling even in advanced western countries such as the UK and US every year.
As more parts of Africa and Asia come online, there are worries that the
infrastructure will not be able to cope.
In what will appear tacit
support for the cause of the larger telecoms groups, Dr Touré stresses the need
to guarantee future investment. “Who is going to build the network? Will it
grow without investment? No.”
Etno, the lobbying body
for the large European telecoms operators, has proposed that the UN recognise
their ability to charge content providers for prioritising traffic. Luigi
Gambardella, board chairman of Etno, says operators’ revenues need to be
connected to the investment needs caused by growth in internet traffic.
Stéphane Richard, chief
executive of France Telecom, dismisses the suggestion that this is a “tax” on
the internet. “I think that we are not in a business position that really gives
us the possibility to obtain this from Google or any big traffic producer.”
However, critics say this
could mean those who do not pay may be put in a “slow lane”. There are also
complaints that its proposals would need a form of internet oversight that
could be misused.
Even so, Etno believes it
has the backing of countries in Asia and the Middle East, and is confident it
can win support in North America and Europe in spite of initial misgivings
among authorities.
The European Commission is
still considering its position on such commercial arrangements. Neelie Kroes,
the EU telecoms commissioner, told the FT that there was “scope for commercial
negotiations to underpin investments that will allow all players in the value
chain to benefit from the massive growth potential of the online economy”.
But Mr Cerf says that
pricing structures are antithetical to the internet as they could stifle
innovation. “When Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google, they didn’t have
to go and cut a deal with every ISP in the world. It’s a gun-to-the-head model
to say: ‘You’re making a lot of money, give us some.’ An alternative would be
to compete – improve your own value-added services.”
Many experts believe the
meeting in Dubai could prove inconclusive.
Each member country has a
vote in the ITU, with complicated pacts led by influential states already
forming, but Dr Touré insists that there will never be an opposed vote during
his tenure.
“No proposal will be
passed without consensus,” he says.
But many observers believe
this to be impossible given the extent of the debate as proposals stand, with
talk among lobbyists now that controversial governance proposals, at least,
could be postponed until next year.
The EU is firmly opposed
to giving greater powers to the ITU to regulate the internet as a whole.
This will bring it into
line with the US. Initial proposals published on August 3 say Washington will
oppose any effort to increase the power of the ITU over internet governance or
content. Robert McDowell, a commissioner at the Federal Communications
Commission, said in June that any expansion of regulation to the internet
needed to be stopped. “With the potential to grow larger quite rapidly,
proposed ITR amendments that appear tiny today can be the most insidious and
lethal to the spread of prosperity and freedom tomorrow,” he says.
Freedoms curbed by
increasing controls
The internet is not as
free as many people in western countries might think, write Daniel Thomas and
Kathrin Hille. More and more states are keeping a close eye on domestic web use
– and it is not just authoritian regimes that are taking an active approach to
monitoring the internet.
Restrictions are most
evident in countries in Asia and the Middle East. Internet users in China, for
example, have seen the blocking of foreign sites and the censorship of domestic
ones increase over the past three years.
China uses keyword
filtering to block what it considers politically harmful foreign content.
Circumvention is possible but domestic controls are more pervasive, with
censors at an administrative level and across internet services, such as blogs,
scanning search engines and chat rooms. Online identities rarely remain hidden
for long.
Almost daily, new and
different taboo terms are added to a list for which no results will emerge when
searching for them or that will trigger microblog posts to be encrypted or
erased.
Iran is going a step
further with plans to block all access to the World Wide Web in favour of an
internal domestic “intranet”. Iranian officials say this will stop foreign
cyberattacks and spying, but others argue that it will also facilitate online
surveillance of regime critics. Tehran is already accused of filtering and
monitoring web traffic by human rights campaigners.
Other Middle Eastern
countries filter content and block unauthorised sites, in particular those
linked to protests in the region around last year’s Arab uprisings.
Monitoring is far from
unheard of in the developed world, with proposals for example by the Australian
government for a filtering system that could blacklist certain domain names web
addresses and sites.
At a commercial level,
European telecoms groups have been accused of “throttling” – restricting the
speed of access – to instant messenging applications such as Skype that
threaten the carriers’ core voice traffic business.
Big technology companies
are also not exempt from creating walls around their own applications and
devices. One example is Apple, which most recently said that it would cut
Google’s rival mapping and YouTube video-sharing services from the list of apps
preloaded on to its devices.
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