The big elephant in the Internet
Internet governance will remain a vacuous word if snooping is not limited
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Illustration: Jayachandran/Mint
It is the snooping, stupid. That thought springs to mind
on the conclusion of NETmundial, the much-hyped recent global conference
on Internet governance in Brazil. Through all the technical babble and
the meaninglessness of seeking a consensus on the larger goal of
Internet-related public policies and Internet governance arrangements,
it is what the conference failed to do—find a way to stop governments
from tapping private conversations and mail of ordinary and some
not-so-ordinary citizens that marks the event. While the key issue of
Net neutrality was effectively pushed under the carpet “to be further
discussed in appropriate forums”, the monster of global surveillance was
dealt with kid gloves.
Given that the meeting came about against the backdrop of the
disclosures by former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor
Edward Snowden last June of large-scale surveillance of the Internet by
NSA, including spying on foreign leaders, (notably the event’s convener,
Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff), by tip-toeing around it, the
conference admitted to its toothlessness.
The fact is PRISM, as the clandestine mass electronic
surveillance data mining programme was called, didn’t happen because of
regulatory oversight or the current structure of Web governance. The
covert collaboration between NSA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation
and well-known technology firms occurred because forces inimical to the
kind of libertarianism the Web stood for, perverted the very foundations
of human rights, to snoop on individuals.
That it was going on six years before the disclosures
came and that governments including the one in India initially cited
them as routine exercises is of a piece with the aphorism Linus Law,
inspired by Linus Torvalds and coined by open source advocate Eric
Raymond: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Sadly, with the
conference failing to do any more than issue pious pronouncements, the
bugs that allow agencies such as NSA to snoop on private citizens will
continue.
Similar confusion surrounds the transfer of the Web’s
organizational structure. The US National Telecommunications and
Information Administration, which contracts Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to handle the Internet’s global
domain name system, said it would transfer its responsibilities to
global stakeholders when its contract expires on 30 September 2015.
Just who will these global stakeholders be? ICANN will
work with bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force, the
Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet Society, the Regional
Internet Registries, top-level domain name operators and VeriSign, in
its bid to “support and enhance the multistakeholder model...and
maintain the openness of the Internet”.
The Internet Society was formed in 1992 by Vint Cerf and
Bob Kahn, two of the so-called fathers of the Internet. Similarly, the
origins of IAB lie in the Internet Configuration Control Board, which
was created in 1979 by Cerf though in 1984, it was disbanded and
replaced by the Internet Advisory Board, a change initiated by Dave
Clarkand Barry Leiner, another of the set of pioneers of the worldwide
Web. Cerf, who was at the conference, demolished the myth that the US
controls the Internet any more.
In fact, while the goal to replace multilateralism with
multistakeism may appear to be laudable, it isn’t necessarily going to
open up some brave new world, in particular if the stakeholders are
nations represented by their governments.
After all, among the invitees was Turkey, whose Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had already spelt out what he thought of
freedom of the Web with his battle against Twitter, and India, whose
infamous Centralized Monitoring System gives government agencies the
power to access, in real-time, emails as well as Internet search data
and social media activity. India’s justification is almost the same as
that of the US, couched in terms such as safety and security.
The digital space wasn’t meant to be controlled and
circumscribed. Rousseff, speaking perhaps from her own painful
experience spoke about the very nature of the Internet being open,
pluralistic and free. But for that freedom to be maintained the key
issue to be addressed has to be that of the unbridled power of
governments to intercept and monitor the private spaces of individuals.
No matter who the new stakeholders are in terms of
Internet governance, and you can bet your last dollar a Google or a
Facebook will be perched on that high table, governments all over the
world, will continue to ride roughshod over limitations that are drawn
up. So on to the next conference organized by the Internet Governance
Forum and the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, where the
same set of participants will assemble again. The challenge too, will
remain the same.
Can countries ever give up the temptation of spying on Internet traffic? Tell us at views@livemint.com
