Six civil society organisations in India have proposed an open letter to the UN Internet Governance Forum which meets for its third annual meeting between 3^rd and 6th December in Hyderabad.
The letter exhorts urgent global action to ensure that the public-ness and the egalitarian nature of the Internet are preserved as its essential features.
You can read the letter here and endorse it by writing to [email protected]
Interesting in the document is the overview of threats, which we reproduce here.
Threats to the Internet: Examples
“_Corporatisation of the Internet_
Largely unsuspected by most of its users, the Internet is rapidly changing from being a vast ‘public sphere’, with a fully public ownership and a non-proprietary nature, to a set of corporatised privately-owned networks.
On the one hand, telecom companies are carving out the Internet into privately-owned networks — controlling the nature of transactions over these networks. They seek to differentially charge content providers, while also building wholly private networks offering exclusive content relay services. Developments like video/TV over Internet Protocol and the provision of controlled and selective Internet services over mobiles are contributing to increasing network-operators’ control over the Internet, with a corresponding erosion of its public-ness.
On the other hand, the commons of the Internet is also being overwhelmed and squeezed out by a complete domination of a few privately owned mega-applications such as Google, Facebook, Youtube etc.
_Proprietarisation of standards and code that build the Internet_
One of the main ways of appropriating the commons of the Internet is through the increasing use of proprietary and closed standards and code in building the Internet system. Such appropriation allows the extortion of illegitimate rent out of the many new forms of commons-based activities that are being made possible through the Internet.
_Embedding control points in the Internet_
* A growing confluence of corporatist and statist interests has led to the embedding of more and more means of control into the Internet in a manner that greatly compromises citizens’ rights and freedoms. Whether it is the pressure on Internet Service Providers to examine Internet traffic for ‘intellectual property’ violations; or imposition of cultural and political controls on the Internet by states within their boundaries; or ITU’s work on IP trace-back mechanisms; or the tightening of US control over the global Internet infrastructure in the name of securing the root zone file and the domain name system, these new forms of controlling the Internet are being negotiated among dominant interests away from public scrutiny and wider public interest-based engagements.
_Democratic deficit in global Internet governance_
The current global Internet governance regime — a new-age privatized governance system professing allegiance mostly to a single country, the US — has proven to be an active instrument of perpetuation of dominant commercial and geo-political interests. Lately, OECD countries have begun some work on developing public policy principles that, due to the inherently global nature of the Internet, can be expected to become globally applicable. It is quite unacceptable that OECD countries shirk from discussing the same public policy issues at global public policy forums like the IGF that they discuss among themselves at OECD meetings. Apparently, developing countries are expected to focus on finding ways to reach connectivity to their people, and not burden themselves with higher-level Internet governance issues!
People’s and communities’ right to self-determination and participation in governance of issues that impact their lives should underpin global Internet governance.”