Apathy continues to overwhelm effort to create an internet ungoverned by America The effort to create a new global internet governance body has been dealt another blow after just 30 people responded to a critical month-long comment period, a third of which were hostile to the program. In total, there were 72 comments to the NetMundial Initiative's proposed "terms of reference" with one third (24) openly …
Is it any surprise? For most people the depths of management of the internet is a random construction of vague titles for which most have no understanding or care. No-one understands the roles of the variously acronym'd bodies, their roles or relationships. Take the current row over ICANN / IANA. Who of the great Joe Public understands that or cares? Or worries about the link between the argument there and the discussion here? No-one. Or at least no-one outside the bickering internal strife ridden self-elected elite who pretend to rule the internet benevolently for all, but in reality have nothing but an eye for the personal main chance.
The average member of the public doesn't even understand the debate over net neutrality, so expecting anyone to comment on the self-indulgent shite proposals discussed in the article is an absurdity.
In reality the whole internet management structure needs nuking and replacing with a new set of bodies and officials, and if they have to be USA government appointed because thats the only way to keep them straight, legal and legit (morally as well as legally) then so be it. Better that than it rolls over into another financial quagmire of vanishing money-pit sink holes like the UN or European Union.
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What on earth makes them believe that wrestling control of the net away from the US would stop the NSA doing what it does best? They must be completely deluded. For the sake of stability I'm quite happy for the US to run it rather than Brazil. Echoing comments above, Joe Public couldn't care less either.
The NSA and GCHQ (and the various other state and commercial interests that are also amassing databases of personal information) are able to do what they are doing because of the physical and technical structure of the internet, not because of any nation's governance of it.
Yes, much of that technical design comes from US sources, and a lot of it allows for or is vulnerable to snooping, but that owes more to the origin rather than the current running of the internet. For the majority of the internet's existence, security was a secondary concern if it was considered at all, and many systems, from core routers to social websites, are still designed for efficiency or prettiness first, with security added as an afterthought.
Take over the governance of the internet, please. It's a massive headache which will ensure that everyone hates you no matter which decisions you make. But don't expect it to give you any capability to affect real change in security. Whatever authority you think you'd have to affect snooping would require nation-states to surrender sovereignty to your body and/or fess up to what they have been doing, and that ain't gonna happen.
But the only way politicians know to solve problems is to try to snatch whatever they perceive as power and clutch it to their breasts like jealous magpies.
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Most of you do not get it. This is an attempt to take control out of your hands and put it into the hands of governments and/or corporations.
Today, if you want to say something negative about Islam, you can do so, but if this were to happen, then you could be banned or at the very least censored, and nobody would see your words. Your freedom of speach would be moot.
I'm not sure what "speach" is, but I fail to see how NMI imperils my freedom of speech, or my freedom of expression in general. They're going to stop me from saying things? That's rather outside their remit, don't you think?
Even if NMI tried to censor objectionable expression on the Internet (for some values of censor, objectionable, expression, and Internet), what makes you believe they'd be at all effective? And that's assuming they get everything they're trying for.
Personally, I think NMI is a dumb idea with no significant probability of any success. But my guess is that if it did achieve its goals, we'd just have much the same sort of opacity, cronyism, and corruption that we see in ICANN today. New boss same as the old boss.
Many people are working very hard to Create the Internet 3. (Internet 2 has existed for a couple of decades but it limited to Universities and government).
Internet 3 is to be a mesh network, with NO dependency on DNS or any Internet addresses, or DHCP, or any entity that can be under the control of a entity or corporation.
But we all need lots of help if this is to become a reality.
What you can do to help is to develop a system that does this, or spread the word, and constantly build and research mesh networks.
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