[governance] SOPA or no SOPA

[parminder]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/antipiracy-laws-congress-sopa-269625?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+thr/news+%28The+Hollywood+Reporter+-+Top+Stories%29

Hi All

See the story at the above link about how whether SOPA is enacted or not 
(or enacted in a slightly diluted form) the US establishment is already 
using the kind of devices SOPA puts at its services for very strict 
SOPA-like IP enforcement over the Internet. And such control and 
enforcement also gets done in both extra-territorial and extra legal 
manners (for instance, in the case of wikileaks).

With the major Internet nodes of power all in the US - ICANN (DNS and 
IANA), major registries, online payment services, online advertisement 
companies, major international ISPs, biggest web hosting services, 
monopoly search engines and social media companies, etc,   - it was 
always obvious that such hugely dis-proportionate US control of the 
Internet system will be a problem for the global nature of the Internet. 
However, most people in the IG civil society still like to turn a blind 
eye to this problem - hoping it will somehow go away. No, it certainly 
wont go away. It will keep becoming more and more vicious till there is 
just no other way than to take the right steps toward developing global 
principles and institution for global Internet governance that are 
genuinely democratic and participatory. And by then, considerable damage 
will already have been done to the techno-social architecture of the 
global Internet.

BTW, the use of these multiple nodes and devices of power, as mentioned 
earlier -- ICANN (DNS and IANA), major registries, online payment 
services, online advertisement companies, major international ISPs, 
biggest web hosting services, monopoly search engines and social media 
companies, etc,   - in various combinations, to do legal, extra legal 
and extra territorial enforcement of rule and power is a fine example of 
private networked governance. This model typically awards power with 
more power, and that is the problem with it; something which will fit 
very well with Castellsians theories of power distribution in and 
through an automated and politically unchecked network .

We need countervailing systems of political and democratic power for the 
global Internet.

Parminder




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20111210/5eb7a1c7/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t