Healthwealthhappinessfreedom: Concern at governments' moves to control web

Concern at governments' moves to control web

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Joseph Menn in San Francisco, 18:12, Tuesday 28 December 2010

WikiLeaks' seemingly unstoppable stream of disclosures has intensified efforts by governments to exert more control over information and the complex technology underpinning its availability on the internet. From the UN to the self-governing body overseeing web addresses, countries are working to assert more authority, with some success.
The developments concern technologists who view the internet as the ultimate democratic, ungovernable force. While China and other authoritarian regimes have long imposed more information controls than western governments, they are finding new support from the US and others enraged by the posting of classified diplomatic cables and unrelated hacking attacks.
"This momentum toward securitisation is helping legitimise and pave the way for greater government involvement in cyberspace," the founders of OpenNet Initiative, a research body, wrote recently in a journal affiliated with the US National Endowment for Democracy.
The motivations and approaches taken by countries vary, and not all would extend across borders. But even in international forums that have historically taken a hands-off approach to internet governance, some states have gained significant ground in the past few weeks.
US politicians publicly railed against companies that provided a variety of services to WikiLeaks, which has not been accused of violating any laws. Some of the companies, including those processing donations and one in charge of steering web surfers to the whistleblower group's flagship site, dropped the outfit as a client.
Obama administration officials say they did not put pressure on such companies to cut ties with WikiLeaks, but the administration's high-profile deliberations about legal action against the group and Julian Assange, its founder, sent a message of its own.
Such rhetoric and responses have alarmed advocates of internet openness, although they are also concerned by Anonymous, the amorphous vigilante group, which orchestrated a series of crude hacking attacks on companies that disowned WikiLeaks.
The Internet Society, home to a central standards-setting body called the Internet Engineering Task Force, wrote that "free expression should not be restricted by governmental or private controls over computer hardware or software, telecommunications infrastructure, or other essential components of the internet".
Official US complaints helped to delay the ex-pected debut of many more web address endings such as .com and .net, known as top-level domains. The Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit organisation that oversees the domain name process, had been expected to approve a plan allowing the sale of names ending in .hotel, .vacation and variants. Big companies were concerned they would have to register scores of new websites to protect their brands from squatters. They complained to the US commerce department, which wrote a public letter to Icann. Icann backed down, saying it would meet a committee made up of more than 100 countries to hear their views.
Last week, a UN body pressed ahead with plans to convene a governmental group to advise it on how to restructure the Internet Governance Forum, a UN panel that has not had any power to set rules for the internet.
The UN action has drawn fire from Icann and Vint Cerf, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG - news) 's chief internet evangelist. "This structure that seems to have been settled upon really takes away the participatory strength of the non-government stakeholders. If they move to the mode that is proposed, that's the first step in trying to create a governance organisation that takes actions - and while I can understand the appeal, especially for some governments, I don't think it bodes well," Mr Cerf said.
Western governments, meanwhile, have learnt from the WikiLeaks episode just how difficult it can be to contain a website. Even when sites are closed, others can spring up to take their place.Additional reporting: Daniel Dombey in Washington