AW: [governance] People's Daily of China: US must hand over Internet control to the world

Tue Aug 21 05:36:43 EDT 2012

Thanks, Rebecca .. certainly illuminating. What's really interesting is that most calls for "internationalization" of Internet Governance issues are actually calls for a re-nationalization via the United Nations. It's a new type of 'bluewashing'<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluewash> national censorship policies. I've written an entry in my International Law and the Internet blog on some of the dangers of this trend<http://internationallawandtheinternet.blogspot.co.at/>.

Kind regards
Matthias

--
Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann, LL.M. (Harvard)
Institute of International Law | University of Graz (Austria)
Mail<mailto:matthias.kettemann at uni-graz.at> | Blog<http://internationallawandtheinternet.blogspot.com> | Twitter<http://twitter.com/#%21/MCKettemann> | Facebook<http://www.facebook.com/matthias.kettemann> | Google+<https://plus.google.com/u/0/116310540881122884114/posts>

Von: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [mailto:governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] Im Auftrag von Rebecca MacKinnon
Gesendet: Dienstag, 21. August 2012 04:53
An: governance at lists.igcaucus.org
Betreff: [governance] People's Daily of China: US must hand over Internet control to the world

A shot across the bow from China's government mouthpiece...

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90777/7915248.html
(People's Daily Online<http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/>
)
11:10, August 18, 2012 [http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/img/2011english/images/icon16.gif]  [http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/img/2011english/images/icon17.gif] <http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90777/7915248.html>
 [http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/img/2011english/images/icon18.gif] <http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90777/7915248.html>

The Internet has become one of the most important resources in the world in just a fewdecades, but the governance mechanism for such an important international resourceis still dominated by a private sector organization and a single country.

The U.S. government said in a statement on July 1, 2005 that its CommerceDepartment would continue to support the work of Internet Corporation for AssignedNames and Numbers (ICANN), and indefinitely retain oversight of the Internet's 13 rootservers.

This indicated the U.S. decision to retain ultimate control over the global Internet,which enabled it to unilaterally close the Internet of another country. A suddenlyparalyzed Internet would definitely cause huge social and economic losses to thecountry.

More and more countries are beginning to question the U.S. control over the world's Internet as the international resource should be managed and supervised by all countries together. However, the United States has conducted a pre-emptive strike,and refused to give up control over the Internet in the name of protecting the resource.The refusal reflects its hegemonic mentality and double standards.

The United States controls and owns all cyberspaces in the world, and other countries can only lease Internet addresses and domain names from the United States, leadingto the U.S. hegemonic monopoly over the world's Internet.

During the Iraq War, the U.S. government in 2003 asked ICANN to terminate services relating to Iraq's top-level domain name ".iq" and then all websites with the domainname ".iq" disappeared overnight. The United States has taken advantage of its control over the Internet to launch an invisible war against disobedient countries and to intimidate and threaten other countries.

The United States have repeatedly called for "protecting Internet freedom."In fact, it is  only protecting its own "Internet freedom" even at the expense of other countries. Ten of the global Internet's 13 root servers are located in the United States, and the U.S.government can supervise the Internet for national security reasons according to the U.S. law. By doing so, the United States actually gains access to all information transmitted online, while other countries can do nothing about it.

Ultimate control over the Internet has been an important tool for the United States to promote its power politics and hegemony worldwide, and any other country may fallvictim to this. As a big country on the Internet, China opposes the U.S. unreasonable and unilateral management of the Internet, and seeks to work with the international community to build a new international Internet governance system.

--
Rebecca MacKinnon
Author, Consent of the Networked<http://consentofthenetworked.com/>
Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation<http://newamerica.net/user/303>
Co-founder, Global Voices<http://globalvoicesonline.org/>
Twitter: @rmack<http://twitter.com/rmack>
Office: +1-202-596-3343

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