[governance] China's next-generation internet is a world-beater - tech - 10 March 2013 - New Scientist

Wed Mar 13 02:42:09 EDT 2013

China's creating a national Internet model based on the requirements of 
its authoritarian  political system is in my view at least partly a 
failure of enough and appropriate  global governance of the Internet. 
Well, I dont necessarily mean that China could have been deterred from 
this path, but its acts could have certainly been made less politically 
justifiable if we have sat together early to develop common global 
principles for the global Internet, a task that the dominant global 
players have constantly shirked from (with a fear of losing their 
dominance).

Further, a bigger danger now is that a lot of other countries, 
importantly, also the non authoritarian ones, can be expected to cosy up 
to China and try to replicate its Internet model, which while being 
authoritarian does have other positive aspects over the dominate global 
Internet (as the referred article suggests). The wholesale rebuff given 
to the developing countries at WCIT in developed country's refusal to 
sign a 'harmless' and 'toothless' new ITRs and thus signalling perhaps a 
withdrawal from multilateral governance systems in the IG realm would 
have long term impacts. When those who dominate the current global 
Internet governance realms (US unilateralism, and various kinds of rich 
county plurilateralisms) are increasingly clear that they have no 
intentions to include developing countries, expect at their own terms 
(like seeking accession to treaties after they have been negotiated 
among the rich nations) what do you expect the developing countries to 
do? this is a question that those in the civil society who have 
consistently sided with the undemocratic dominant global IG realms must 
respond to.

Is not their perhaps unthinkingly partisan stand considerably 
responsible for the path that we may see these other developing 
countries (non China, Iran etc)  go, possibly towards, what may appear 
to be, the rather attractive Chinese model of Internet.

Would it not have been better to listen to and accommodate the genuine 
concerns that developing countries may have had on issues like broadband 
models, security, spam etc at WCIT and/ or other at democratic global 
forums? So many of the supporters of the current dominant global IG 
models seem to think that they can keep actors from developing countries 
'selectively incentivised' or perhaps even confused and fooled forever, 
which is really not a sustainable model. It will fail much sooner than 
its promoters think it will.

Instead, lets recognise people's and countries' democratic aspirations 
and real governance needs, and come with good faith to the global IG 
table. Lets start with trying to agree on some highest principles for 
the global governance of the Internet in public interest, and also get 
down to trying to work out agreements on areas like net neutrality, 
freedom of expression and association, regulation of global Internet 
business, tax on global e-commerce, security, spam, IPv6 implementation 
and so on. If we refuse to float together we will sink separately; I 
mean all others than the most powerful 1 percent (although I think the 
number is closer to 8-15 percent, I will go with the currently in vogue 
percentage. :) )

The forthcoming meetings of the UN Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation 
is a good opportunity to pull our head out of the sand and make some 
positive contributions.  A lot depends on what position civil society 
will take, becuase it is the civil society that is supposed to come up 
with higher value based positions in favour of larger public interest; 
something which is very much needed in the current stalemate arising 
from dominant actors on all sides sticking to narrow partisan interest 
based positions.

parminder

On Tuesday 12 March 2013 08:45 PM, Peter H. Hellmonds wrote:
> Mike,
>
> you post a link to an article without making a commentary as to 
> whether you endorse the views expressed or not. What are your opinions 
> on this?
>
> Here are some of my preliminary observations and remarks, based on a 
> quick reading of the article but not on a comprehensive study of the 
> underlying paper.
>
> Key in this article, and perhaps one of the reasons why the West is 
> hesitant about some of these advances would be this part sentence from 
> the article:
>
> "It is the basis for a system that monitors and controls traffic flow 
> over the internet [...]."
>
> While I know that telco operators need to monitor and control traffic 
> in order to assure that there is no traffic congestion (especially on 
> mobile networks), they do this without regard for the specific content 
> (instead rather based on content classes or protocols), whereas if you 
> combine monitoring and control with content filtering (as the article 
> claims "to block malicious traffic as a whole"), then there is a not 
> just remote possibility that this could be abused in a way contrary to 
> the open and free Internet.
>
> Add to this the notion of "China's advances in creating a 
> next-generation internet 
> <http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1987/20120387> that is 
> on a national level", then you also add a certain level of 
> fragmentation to the net that counters the end-to-end principle of the 
> net.
>
> Finally, Source Address Validation Architecture (SAVA) could be abused 
> by tracing and tracking of users which would make anonymous access to 
> information or anonymous sharing and expression of information 
> impossible. Right now, proxies and VPNs allow for such things but if a 
> network of trusted computers maintains a database of computers and 
> their IP addresses, then masking one's identity might become 
> impossible, with all its consequences.
>
> Just my 2 cents on this.
>
> Peter
>
> On 12.03.2013, at 15:48, "michael gurstein" <gurstein at gmail.com 
> <mailto:gurstein at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729075.800-chinas-nextgeneration-internet-is-a-worldbeater.html
>
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