I recently attended the 2nd Global Conference of the Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network in Ottawa. On the order of two hundred, people from many countries attended. The conference focused on Internet data, content and the Domain Name System (DNS) especially in transborder settings. The discussions sought to catalogue the problems arising and possible responses to them, and to map any processes leading to a third convening in Berlin by June 2019.
It is time to make progress defining a way forward towards an increasingly beneficial Internet in anticipation of the billions who will gain access to it as this decade ends. At its origin, I hoped that the Internet would be a platform through which all of its’ users would be free to share and access information and computing power of all kinds. As it became apparent that it was a commercially supportable service, it seemed that barriers to its access and use would fall and, indeed, half the planet’s population is now online. The arrival of the World Wide Web and subsequent search engines vastly simplified the creation, discovery, and sharing of content.
We live in an age in which we face lots of different forces seeking to pull the future of the Internet in different directions. In several cases these stakeholders each advocate for a side that on face value represents a good and necessary attribute for the health of a long-term open, vibrant, global Internet.
At the same time, any one position alone, without other positions that might at times be in different counter to the original position, might over-simplify the Internet to the point of being ‘unhealthy’ as well. A metaphor for this, from human biology, is that iron in your diet is good and necessary to support the production of hemoglobin (the protein molecule in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body’s tissues and returns carbon dioxide from the tissues back to the lungs in our blood) – yet too much iron will result in constipation and other kidney-related issues. As with several things in life, the balance between different needs for long-term health also apply to the future of an open Internet as well.
Neutrality is still a key part of the Internet’s success: Internet packets still don’t know how they are carried, or what they carry. But it is apparent that the freedom of expression the Internet invites has some social downsides. Mixed into the vast useful, or at least innocuous content of the Internet is harmful, wrong, abusive and misleading material, injected by intent or ignorance and which disrupts societal norms. Moreover, the system is an avenue for a wide range of cyberattacks including malware, identity theft and denial of service to name three. Perhaps just as bad, the social media have become channels through which fake news and misinformation flow freely.
How did we get here? We collaborated on a global scale to build the Internet. We cooperated to create technical standards. We found business models to help the Internet flourish and access to it to increase. And we discovered what Shakespeare knew when he wrote his plays: People are imperfect and some have motivations that lead to harm to others.
We must employ the same tools and methods that built the Internet to improve its’ safety, security, privacy and utility. We must apply these tools at the appropriate layers in the Internet’s architecture to avoid damage to the essential openness that makes the Internet work and allows it to evolve. We must seek social norms to guide further evolution of the system. We must improve digital literacy to deepen the general public’s awareness of and defense against online risks. We must protect the public core of the Internet from deliberate damage. We must apply multi-national and multi-stakeholder deliberation to identify new goals and cooperate to achieve them. The global nature of the Internet demands transnational cooperation and collaboration to diminish the effects of harmful behaviour, but we must find ways to protect human rights, and protect ourselves from those who violate them.
National sovereignty is sometimes cited as a reason to close borders and refuse cooperation. And yet, we have learned that it is in national interests to cooperate for the benefit of trade, social coherence, planetary concerns, and law enforcement.
Ironically, the independence of the networks that make up the Internet has been a key ingredient to its’ growth and resilience. There is no center, but for the necessary cooperation needed to assure uniqueness in the identifier spaces of the Internet.
Technical standards are the means by which independent cooperation among the networks leads to the global Internet. Social and legal norms may be the means by which we achieve collaborative intervention against harmful behaviors on the Internet.
Protocols are a form of cooperation, and perhaps it is now time to invent new diplomatic protocols, aided by technology, to fashion an Internet worthy of persistence and global access.
A version of this article is to appear in April 2018 IEEE Internet Computing.
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