State of the Union: Policing the Internet

The Internet is the boldest attempt at anarchism and it has succeeded. It epitomises the vastest ungoverned sphere on the globe.

Never earlier in the human saga has so much influence concurrently resided in so many fingertips around the world.

There is more data that is churned out every two days than since the dawn of civilisation and till the advent of the current century. The new or the social media rides on the back of this incredible marvel.

What has emerged is a tale of two civilisations a physical realm that took millennia to evolve and a virtual domain that is still emergent.

At the junction of both these empires lies the future of humankind, especially when all eight billion people are online, perhaps in less than a decade from now.

That is precisely why there has been a lot of deliberation about the basic personality of the Internet. Is it a global commons like the seas, space and the environment, or an enterprise owned and operated by a diverse array of private entities and governments.

Unlike the former that are bounties of nature, the virtual world is an innovation that represents both, the cutting-edge creativity of the human race and a crystallisation of human wisdom.

Why is this colloquy imperative? Because associated to it is the issue of the governance of the Internet.

This vast expanse provokes the spirit of liberty to prevail in its most majestic manifestation. Here freedom of speech and expression is largely untrammelled.

Here the right to offend is an integral part of the right to articulation. Here the discourse is egalitarian, bottom-up and horizontal rather than top-down and vertical.

Here the agenda of the media owner or the tyranny of editorialites or anchorites do not skew the conversation.

Here new friends are made, old sweethearts found emotions transmitted and business is done. Should this virtual civilisation be left to itself and be allowed to find its own natural equilibrium?

The deployment of this medium for catalysing political change during the Arab Spring has been hailed as one of the finer moments of people’s power harnessed to technology.

It is another matter that the libertine ideal could not strike root in the harsh maelstrom of West Asian politics.

Why would anybody like to impose rules, restrictions or limits on this utopia? The fact that it is even being seriously contemplated, should it not qualify the proponents for an automatic admission to a psychiatrist’s facility?

However, there is the other side of midnight also. The Internet has become a veritable playground for cyber criminals of every shade and hue.

Identity theft, financial scams, political and economic espionage, cyber attacks and child pornography to name but a few.

The spectre of the Deep Web and the hidden people who misuse the privacy that the Net provides to perpetrate their nefarious activity is also a hard reality. The freedom of one person easily translates into the fear of another.

Terrorist organisations and non-state actors exploit the open architecture of the Net not only to push their perverse agendas but also to recruit and radicalise impressionable minds.

It has become a key platform to plan, coordinate and execute strategy for such groups.

However, there is a far graver dilemma that confronts policymakers and administrators. At what point does a cyber attack qualify as an act of war? Cyber warfare is conventionally defined as actions by a nation state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or destruction.

If the attack is perpetrated on physical infrastructure, like disrupting power grids, crashing stock markets or attempting to assert remote dominance over nuclear command and control systems causing humongous casualties, how should then the victim state respond, especially given the fact that the aggressor can more often than not cover his tracks.

What if the attack is the handiwork of non-state actors operating from ungoverned spaces in a sovereign entity?

Should the response be in the cyber or physical domain? Would raw public opinion allow the retaliation to be limited to the virtual domain?

These are precisely the reasons why the governance question becomes germane. How and who should administer the Net? What should be the shape of the governance architecture and what areas should it cover? These posers require urgent answers.

A bewildering array of global institutions with exotic acronyms, from the International Telecommunications Union to consultations such as the Netmundial convened by Brazil in April 2014, are grappling with the issue but without apparent success.

The summitry and torque that nations have brought to bear onto the climate change negotiations or for that matter the World Trade Organisation confabulations on various access, subsidy and tariff barrier related issues is conspicuously absent in the case of the Internet governance dialogue.

The profound peril is that if globally acceptable and uniformly enforceable rules of engagement do not emerge, we may during our lifetime see the demise of the Internet as we know it just as we saw its rise.

The first step would be the Balkanization of the Net along shared cultural alignments, value systems and even hegemonistic spheres of influence.

Just as the great firewall of China has virtually turned the Web into a Chinese intranet, similarly you may find that there is an Anglo Saxon Net or an Islamic Net or for that matter a virtual space that corresponds to the power projection capacity of a Westphalian state.

This would necessarily also mandate that some form of visa requirement would emerge for users wanting to transit from one intranet to the other.

With the underlying hardware the transmission towers, routers and switches that anchor the flora and fauna of the Net, namely the websites and the applications, being still under the control of states, there is no guarantee that they would not abuse their position as the “gatekeeper” to erect barriers under the ubiquitous guise of national interest.

It is millions of newly empowered people around the world who have the greatest stake in preserving the Internet in its current form.

They must wrest the chance they have to aggressively campaign for participatory process in designing the governance architecture of the Net. This task cannot be left to governments, conglomerates or corporate fronts masquerading as think tanks.

The writer is a lawyer and a former Union
minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle
@manishtewari