There's a battle going on, and it's raging for the future of the Internet. From net neutrality, to the so-called right to be forgotten, to the multi-stakeholder or multilateral approach to Internet Governance, several bodies and institutions are busy at forging the future of what is probably the greatest human invention of recent times.
Right now, there are a few organisms which play an important role in defining and managing the architecture of the Net. This governance is called "multistakeholder" and involves coordinating functions performed by the private sector, policies enacted by governments and functions performed by relatively new global institutions like the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the W3C.
This is completely decentralized with the exception of some coordinating functions over domain names and numbers that require some degree of centralized oversight because each name and number has to be globally unique.
"The US government has, because of the history of the Internet arising in the US, unique oversight of some of this but has announced that it is transitioning this oversight to a global, multi-stakeholder entity. The US and Brazil (and other countries) have made clear that the transition has to be to multi-stakeholder rather than multilateral oversight," says Laura DeNardis, director of research of the Global Commission on Internet Governance, (GCIG) an international think-tank which includes Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt; the former head of British intelligence service GCHQ, Sir David Omand; former secretary of the US homeland security department Michael Chertoff, and others.
Others feel that a multilateral organization like the UN should have more jurisdiction over the Internet, something which would change the way the Internet is governed from a relative balance of powers among stakeholders to greater government control. "I am personally an advocate of the multistakeholder approach - DeNardis says." The Net Mundial conference held last April in Brazil ended with a declaration supporting the multistakeholderism; the fight, however, is still open.
The choice between the multistakeholder and the multilateral approach it's not the only factor to take into consideration when dealing with future scenarios. A menace to the preservation of the online world as we know it could also come from the so-called "balkanization of the Internet". Revelations about the widespread surveillance of electronic communications made by former NSA's analyst Edward Snowden have pushed some States (like Germany) to promote the idea of building up a European communication network to avoid emails and other data passing through the United States.
"There is a risk of balkanization of the Internet, but not for this reason," Philippe Aigrain, co-founder of the website La Quadrature du Net and member of the French Parliamentary Committee on Law and Rights in the Digital Age, tells me. "The real risk, is that to protect authoritarian regimes or for purposes of copyright enforcement, censorship or the protection of some local economic interests, a growing number of states would try to control data flows entering or exiting them."
"A legal obligation to relocalize data may also entail risks when it is applied in authoritarian States," he adds. "But actually in the case of Germany, the (yet to be seen) national storage of data is one way to impose respect of the National law, in particular for what concerns data protection." Aigrain, however, does not believe that this is the best way to reach the goal. "One can impose respect of European law simply by stating that services that process European residents data are submitted to this law and by suspending agreements such as the Safe Harbor that circumvent the respect of European law," he says.
Regardless of who's going to win the battle, one thing is for certain: the Internet of the future should be designed around the needs and the rights (and obligations) of the users, not of States and corporations; but for this to be possible, there's the need first to reach a consensus on what these rights are. Around the world a number of commissions and committees are exploring the issue.
From the GCIG, launched in January, which will work for two years to develop a strategic vision for the future of Internet governance that can inform policymakers, technologists, and others about shared international concerns and policies for a free and open Internet; to the draft declaration on Internet Rights prepared by the Study Committee on Internet Rights and Duties of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies; to the work of the Bundestag's committee on the Digital Agenda in Germany.
It's still early to tell if their work will bear lasting fruits; to reach an agreement on such complex issues will take time, and diplomacy. But it's something we can no longer postpone, if we want to keep the Internet as the great engine of discovery and innovation that we've known so far.
