India Wants To Take On 'US Hegemony' Over The Internet... By Renaming It The Equinet
from the smokescreens dept
The battle for countries wishing to take control over internet governance (either to increase control and censorship or to "reward" local state-owned telcos) didn't end with the whole WCIT debacle a year and a half ago. It's an ongoing process. This week is NETmundial, or the Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Governance, and the usual countries are making the usual noise about changing how internet governance works. There will be lots of talk about how meaningful these discussions will be, or if they'll just be a "farce" to enable authoritarian governments more control. Either way, there are some important proposals and discussions happening at the event.And some nutty ones.
Take, for example, India's proposal that we rename the internet as the Equinet as a way to "challenge US hegemony." Because that will do it.
In a major diplomatic initiative, India is all set to challenge the U.S.’ hegemony of the World Wide Web at a global meet on Internet governance in Sao Paulo (Brazil) next week. India has decided to propose renaming of Internet as ‘Equinet’ so that all nations can have equal say in its operations, besides calling for “internationalisation” of core Internet resources.Of course, the naming bit is the smokescreen attention-grabber for the other point. Setting up so that "all nations" (note: not all people) can have a say in the operations of the internet is a specific attack on the so-called "multistakeholder" model that is currently in place, in which it's not government entities making these decisions, but a broad group of folks from different backgrounds and specialties (including, many technical experts). Hand the internet over to "governments" and you have a recipe for disaster. If you want more evidence of how troubling this is, look at who India is "aligning itself" with in this proposal:
India is likely to side with Brazil, Russia, China, South Africa and Iran to make its point.Brazil, which organized this event, has been pushing for stronger internet freedoms lately, but also has a history of going in the other direction. Russia, China and Iran, of course, are very much focused on greater control and censorship of the internet, not greater freedom.
There are lots of important things worth discussing concerning internet governance, but renaming the internet as a challenge to US control (which isn't actually US control) is pretty silly. What's much more concerning is the underlying attempt to give some authoritarian countries with long histories of censorship more direct control over the internet. Equinet sounds ridiculous, but Censornet may be more accurate.
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Filed Under: brazil, equinet, india, internet, internet governance, multistakeholder process, netmundial
Reader Comments
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Cortex
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Re: Cortex
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Re: Re: Cortex
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Re: Re: Re: Cortex
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi8VTeDHjcM
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We cannot let the people keep on managing it, as it may give them the idea that governments are redundant.
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Cannot parse argument
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Re: Cannot parse argument
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Better idea
Or perhaps that wouldn't work because then THEY couldn't control the internet. Don't worry, India. We're on to you.
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Seriously???
God, send a meteorite and wipe out us poor folks!!! Shame on these Politicians. They have sold the country to Dalals and gangsters. Now they want to sale the internet too!!!
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What they really mean is...
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What?
Internet is a Latin prefix with a short name for "network". It is a proper word that accurately describes the idea of Inter Network communucations.
"Equinet" is just a marketing word with no useful Latin base or technical meaning.
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Re: What?
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Hegemony
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Yes, by just renaming things
Put people in a cyclone fence - free speech zone!
Pass a law that allows for private communications to not be private - PATRIOT Act!
This renaming idea can go on - feel free to add your own fellow 'dirters.
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The release of ICANN from the last vestiges of the US government is generally a good thing that has been in the making for a long time.
How we eventually transition is up for some debate as I'm sure many are still upset about governance now, let alone in the future. Take for example the criticism from Prof. A Michael Froomkin in 2000 which outlines some of the problems with the board at ICANN, cronyism and a lack of public discourse. Of course ICANN greatly refutes these claims ;)
As far as I know just about every country has a TLD, and it's own assigned IP Space leased to them, so wouldn't that make them stakeholders as well as say Amazon, Google, FaceBook, etc? So I don't know where you are going with the "Brazil, Russia, China, South Africa" tag-line, other than to say any country that disagrees with your ideals shouldn't participate. (IMHO that's just as bad)
At the end of the day, I don't think much is going to change. This will probably take a follow the money approach like most political discussions. Sadly that's really all this is right now, smaller participants puffing up their chests to have a say even if it's a moot point.
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Re:
The internet was absolutely a US creation. A DARPA creation, specifically, intended for military use. It's availability to the general public of any country was never part of its original design intent.
All that said, the right thing to do is what has been taking place, slowly but surely, since it opened to the public: keep it out of the control of any single nation. The internet has grown into something completely other than what it started as.
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Sure, why not?
Hey, I have an idea, India: Let's rename "Untouchables" as "Those Who Must Not Be Named." Has a certain ring to it, doesn't it? Almost sounds cool, like Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels. That'll fix those poor folks!
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IP Adress and Security Only
Domain name addressing is up to individual countries and any associations or treaties they form, they are after all, nothing more than localised databases with rules set by the hosting country.
Internal traffic is down to individual countries. Country to country traffic is the responsibility of the country exporting the traffic (criminal internet activity, including criminal espionage) and associating costs with the country exporting bad data, your people hack, your country pays.
Break core rules and your countries connections get cut and fiscal trade penalties apply.
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Same people, different list
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