G8 agenda calls for "civilized Internet": monitored, governed, controlled, taxed

by keane • 15 years ago

309 98 15 years ago

rawsyntax• 15 years ago

It's my understanding that the Internet is structured in such a way that this kind of thing is impossible unless there is a massive buy in of all involved countries.

I very much prefer the Internet raw and unfiltered. I know enough to know which sites I like and which I don't.

Furthermore, the Internet is an expression of the human condition, and as such it is itself art, and should not be censored for this reason as well.

We already have enough trouble with ICE seizing domains

yid• 15 years ago

Funny how these thoughts don't come up with phone networks, when the Internet could theoretically run via modems over phone networks. It's pretty clear that the unbridled, egalitarian power the Internet offers ordinary people is a scary concept to hierarchical power structures.

Btw nice thought with the Internet being art, but it might be a bit of a stretch in realpolitik terms.

etherael• 15 years ago

Hello unstoppable force, meet immovable object. Or should that be rapidly shifting, dynamically self decentralizing, variably invisible object?

Time to grab the popcorn.

knieveltech2• 15 years ago

<kneejerk> Keep your cowardly, sniveling, risk-averse, myopic, GREEDY fucking agenda OFF OF MY INTERNET! You've already done quite enough, thanks. </kneejerk>

I was going to come up with a more level-headed and well reasoned response here, but I guess the first bit really sums it up.

There are days where I wonder if Academia didn't have the right idea with Internet 2.0. Whatever happened with that anyway?

lallysingh• 15 years ago

Agreed. The truth is that us nerds won't like governments taking over the 'Net, but they're far more representative of its user base than we are.

We're pretty dependent on the results of this 'civilizing' process in most every other aspect of life, why's it so surprising when it's applied here?

billswift• 15 years ago

Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breath slowly. You tame.

- - Frank Herbert, Dune series

knieveltech2• 15 years ago

This doesn't come as a surprise. I knew this was coming the first time I logged onto the network in 1995 and was blown away by the fact that there where no enforced rules to contend with.

Halcyon days to be sure. Pre-spam, largely pre-ecommerce and you'd have to hunt to find an ad. Even when you did, it was kinda cool. Novel, like.

16 entirely too short years later the many too many (as Nietzsche would say) are fully entrenched on the network, bringing with them all of the social ills that are the hallmarks of their culture, a world I willfully turned my back on 16 years ago in favor of a dwelling place of the mind, inhabited by kindred spirits, which is not to say the likeminded.

No, this comes as no surprise, I just miss the network I grew up with.

elehack2• 15 years ago

So far as I know, it's alive, well, and providing blazingly-fast access to Linux ISOs hosted at other member universities.

yason• 15 years ago

This in accord with the emerging counterforce of various anonymous networking projects that are reaching the state of being usable. These networks are likely to evolve to the point where, instead of using proxies and non-standard protocols, the users actually access a regular IPv6 subnet that simply uses the onion-routed private network such as Phantom or I2P as the carrier.

I say IPv6 because nearly all operating systems do support IPv6 even if it's barely used these days; the address space is big so the addresses can probably be used to store some routing or clustering hints that make the onion network more efficient; and if all you have is an anonymous IPv6 address that isn't directly related to any physical connection then monitoring, governing, controlling and taxing becomes pretty difficult.

In a few years maybe, if Linux distributions shipped with such a client by default and you could download such a "network driver" for Windows to enable you to communicate and share with your friends in a private manner, the userbase will suddenly consist of so many nodes that the lack of performance and content-scarcity of the current anonymous networks will likely become history.

mahrain• 15 years ago

I agree that even the Great Firewall of China can easily be beaten by simply using Tor, however, it is now our democratic duty to prevent this from becoming a necessity in the western world.

maguay• 15 years ago

Also, if every country had the Great Firewall, there wouldn't be a Tor to get out of any of them, period.

olalonde2• 15 years ago

Democracy is highly overrated. What we need is a strong constitution that guarantees individual freedom. 51% of the population imposing their beliefs on the other 49% can lead to highly undesirable outcomes. Censorship, racism, systematic discrimination based on sexual orientation or religion come to mind. Democracy is fine as long as the role of the elected government is essentially limited to the protection of individual freedom.

Anyways, I'm getting carried away here. I simply wanted to point out that we shouldn't use the word democracy so liberally as it is often the thing we should be fighting. Let's talk about constitution instead :)

vabole3• 15 years ago

I am writing this from China and unfortunately it is the other way round. Tor is beaten by the Great Firewall of China. Since the list of nodes is available to anyone who connects to the Tor network, blocking them is trivial. So most of the time it is not possible to connect. And when you do manage to connect the speed will make 14.4 kbit/s modem feel fast.

plainOldText• 15 years ago

I really don't understand people who come with such propositions. When life is so short, yet the possibilities of freedom limitless, why would you choose to be anything else other than free?

tintin• 15 years ago

Greed

potatolicious• 15 years ago

Don't forget fear. A small number of people are driven by greed - just about everyone else falls in line out of fear.

Fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of other races, fear of the stranger at the playground, fear of the poor, fear of being poor, fear of losing their job, fear of a bad school district, fear of the police, fear of judgment by their peers, fear of standing out, fear of individualism, fear of crime both real and imagined... These are the defining attributes of modern life for many.

FlowerPower• 15 years ago

They are free, they just dont want you to have that freedom, and also some people enjoy having power over others. They think that power gives them more freedom.

mycroftiv• 15 years ago

This is a clear case where we see the idea that governments should represent the will of their citizens break down completely. Every power structure serves its own needs first. In areas where the interest of governmental systems and the citizens are in alignment, democracy can work - but when there is a conflict between the will of a power structure to extend its power and influence and the desires of the citizens, governments almost invariably choose to serve their own systemic interests.

Internet censorship is a dramatic example of this. Even in democratic societies with large majorities in favor of free communication over the internet, the internal imperatives of governments to monitor and control trump the will of the people, no matter who is in power. In the matter of desiring to be able to read everyone's email, the governments of the world are in nearly unanimous alliance against their own citizens.

mahmud4• 15 years ago

Counter argument: why do you want to allow gay-married Muslim homosexual commies to sneak into our country and piss on our burning flag after taking our jobs and blowing up our kindergartens? Is that what you want? puppy-AIDS and Sharia law?

xorglorb2• 15 years ago

That is not an argument, that is a propaganda tool used against the easily-persuaded.

gizzlon• 15 years ago

While I agree with most of what you say, I'm not so sure "large majorities in favour of free communication over the internet"

Do you have any data to back this up?

My guess is that if you frame it the right way, most people would vote for censoring the Internet

Joakal2• 15 years ago

Wiki article on Internet Censorship in Australia: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Internet_cens...

nitrogen• 15 years ago

To interested readers: there is an interesting auto-killed response from oelewapperke that can only be read if you turn on showdead in your HN account settings. I suggest enabling showdead and reading the comment.

marknutter• 15 years ago

If by favoring free communication over the internet you mean "my email will be private", I think you can safely assume large majorities will be in favor of it.

uast23• 15 years ago

Every time such thoughts come up, I am reminded of how difficult it is to bring the world to a consensus. Easier said than done, it's pretty comfortable putting a regulation on paper but bringing it to practice can take a toll. Internet regulation does not stop at content policing and stopping malicious activities, it rather extends to creating difficulties in doing online business globally and taking a toll on innovation. China is regulated; how many websites coming to China from outside do a successful business there (enlighten me)! I really doubt if all the members would agree for such pact at the cost of business and innovation; unless there is a pressure from corporates (anon attack on master and visa).

c1sc0• 15 years ago

"how many websites coming to China from outside do a successful business there (enlighten me)!" : and that's exactly the purpose. They don't want no pesky foreigners owning communication businesses. Remove the 'from outside' & you're talking about something totally different though: massive inernal internet stories do exist.

chopsueyar6• 15 years ago

The Chinese intranet.

haberman• 15 years ago

This article is a sensationalist piece with very little content, the HN headline is misleading (the words "tax" and "monitor" do not appear anywhere on the target webpage), and the comments are impassioned soapbox generalizations.

This is HN at its worst.

rivd• 15 years ago

i must agree about the content. it could be more balanced.

two more articles about the event:

http://www.businessinsider.com/eg8-france

http://www.novaspivack.com/technology/the-e-g8-forum-unveile...

but i share the concerns of mr. spivack in the 2nd link. At first sight the conference seems a perfectly valid event about the internet at this moment. But Sarkozy is not a person who takes privacy very seriously.

keane2• 15 years ago

haberman, you say the article is a sensationalist piece with very little content but I'd like to point out that the site linked to is more than a single blog post. Included are links to Boing Boing comments and discussion as well as links to pieces in newspapers in France and Italy.

This article, posted to g8internet.com, from the Italian newspaper la Republicca, by internet reporter Arturo Di Corinto, provides more detailed arguments and a generous use of footnotes and citations - http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2011/05/01/news/sarkozy_...

Hopefully more pieces like that will be found and added to the growing repository at the site.

As far as headline, I took that from an article by Dominic Basulto which I submitted separately here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2581175 - apologies for any confusion.

natchexz• 15 years ago

Fuck. Them.

rizumu• 15 years ago

The corporations, rich and powerful want (at least the illusion) of full control over the communication channels so they can prevent honest people from organizing en masse and rising up. What is happening here in Madrid is a first for this country: http://www.tvspain.tv/blog/?p=3026

gaius3• 15 years ago

I don't know what you're smoking if you think "the corporations" have even 0.1% of the power of your own democratically elected government. Who has all the guns in your country? I bet it's not the phone company...

Natsu• 15 years ago

The line between who is and is not government gets a little bit blurry when the politicians end up owing so many favors in getting elected and there are whole industries who hire lobbyists to influence them.

Certainly, the government has all the power, but the people who help get them elected have a lot of the influence.

ryanisinallofus• 15 years ago

I know who has all the guns in Iraq by the end of the year. Military contractors.

jrockway• 15 years ago

Cyberterrorism is a bullshit argument. If you don't want your machines to be attacked from the Internet, don't connect them to the Internet. In fact, governments and big companies already do this!

At work, we have an IP network called BARONET. It's like the Internet except it's not. There is a bridge on one machine that proxies HTTP requests from this network to the Internet. There are no routes to the Internet.

This significantly reduces the possibility of "cyberattacks", since you'll have to go through that proxy box. (Which probably runs Windows, but hey... if you actually cared about security, you wouldn't do that. The rest of the idea is good.)

gaius3• 15 years ago

Many years ago I worked on a secure system that comprised a Sun running the webserver, connected over a 9-pin RS232 serial cable to another box running Windows 95, on which the secure part of the system ran, which was in turn connected via an ISDN line to some mainframe somewhere. I've never heard of a case of Windows being compromised via the serial port!

zwp• 15 years ago

> I've never heard of Windows being compromised via the serial port!

As a point of order: serial port exploits exist for other OSes (Linux, Juniper, Cisco, APC...) and also for windows virtual com ports so whilst probably not trivial it's not entirely infeasible either.

jwr• 15 years ago

I implemented a secure logging system once, where we really wanted to be sure we have the logs and that they cannot be erased via an online attack.

What we did was use a serial port, but with no protocol (just plain ascii) and with the return wire physically cut. There was hardware flow control (RTS and CTS were there), but you could only send data one way. The logging machine at the other end wasn't connected to any other network.

You want security, you have to deal with physical security.

GHFigs3• 15 years ago

The trouble with this kind of thing from the perspective of government is that not everybody who runs important things does it. Those that do may not always do it well, and if they don't, there generally isn't anyone in government with the expertise or responsibility to tell them things like "if you actually cared about security, you wouldn't do that".

The other problem with it is anthropomorphic Stuxnet, which giggles like a schoolgirl when anyone says there's no route to the Internet.

chopsueyar6• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism

dexen2• 15 years ago

They can't make country's networks secure by covering them with an `one-size-fits-all' global firewall either. Once they cover up all existing holes, new ones have to be `punched through' to achieve useful functionality -- opening new attack surfaces. Cat and mouse at best, countless hacks more realistically. Never mind inside jobs -- and also remember the Google hack springboarded from within via vulnerable IE.

Could you explain what does that `anthropomorphic Stuxnet' stand for?

seabee• 15 years ago

To be more precise, there are routes from the internet but not always back to it; not that I expect anthropomorphic Stuxnet to understand, it wasn't programmed with a brain.

loup-vaillant• 15 years ago

"The printing press allowed the people to read. The Internet will allow them to write." Benjamin Bayart, acting president of French Data Network (non-profit French ISP).

There was a time where a reading populace was the bane of the powerful. Now we are beginning to have a writing populace. This means the doom of current power structures, should they let it happen. The fact they try hard not to doesn't surprise me at all. (Though I am ashamed of my government right now.)

vikingux• 15 years ago

Stop listening to Bob Marley. Listen to Eben Molgen. Youtube: "Eben Moglen - Freedom in The Cloud": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA

Stop going to Starbucks. Send money to The Freedom Box Foundation. http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

Otherwise they may prove Richard Stallman correct.

seymores• 15 years ago

Pisses me off no end to think that they are doing this for the greater good of their citizen.

DrJokepu• 15 years ago

Here we go again. It's 2011 and our governments still don't understand the Internet. They don't understand that it's way bigger than them. They don't understand that it's not possible to monitor, govern, control, tax it, simply because it's so cheap and simple to circumvent any of these measures and there's plenty of motivation to do so.

vabole3• 15 years ago

Tell Chinese government how impossible it is to control the internet. The Great Firewall of China (GFC) is advancing very fast. Just a few years ago even an unencrypted proxy abroad would do the trick, and yet most people did not know how to set it up and did not care enough to find out. Nowadays even VPNs and SSH tunnels are commonly blocked. It is not trivial to bypass the GFC and it is only getting harder by the time.

chopsueyar6• 15 years ago

That isn't really the internet, just a web proxy.

anamax• 15 years ago

> They don't understand that it's not possible to monitor, govern, control, tax it, simply because it's so cheap and simple to circumvent any of these measures and there's plenty of motivation to do so.

Actually, it is trivial to do all those things. You forget that govt controls access to bit transport.

The hard part is allowing extensive "appropriate" access and denying those things, but with limited appropriate access.....

If govt has a choice between doing what it wants and allowing you extensive access, what do you think will win?

GHFigs3• 15 years ago

The link doesn't actually provide any information. It's only waving it's hands in my face and telling me that I should be angry, telling me that a lot of different things are connected, and telling me that certain people are so inherently bad that anything they do or say is bad. That's not information, that's indoctrination.

Of course, some jackhole will tell me that I must be horribly uninformed if my knee doesn't jerk like theirs. I don't think any answer to that will suffice for someone who feels that way (Q:"How can you not be driven into a frothing rage about the 'kill switch bill'?" A:"I actually read it.") but at least consider that I was actively seeking information when I clicked on the link and was disappointed to find instead a glittering call to action based on interpretations I don't share, punching at emotional triggers that I don't have.

chopsueyar6• 15 years ago

More succinctly, "Where's the beef?"

keane2• 15 years ago

Hi GHFigs. I'm sorry you feel that way about the link I submitted to g8internet.com . I agree the "call" itself at http://g8internet.com/call-for-creative-action/ issued by FAT Lab, Free Culture Forum, Chaos Computer Club, Boing Boing and others provides little information. One reason there is little information is that the G8 is not the most transparent institution and much of their discussions and decisions are behind closed doors (not say, streamed live on the web).

However, the point of the link was not just to be to the call for action. The site itself, as you'll see if you scroll down, is meant as a collection of information. Links posted so far and found on the site include the following: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/17/fight-back-against-s.ht... (English) http://alt1040.com/2011/05/e-g8-la-balcanizacion-del-interne... (Spanish) http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2011/05/01/news/sarkozy_... (Italian) http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2011/05/16/manife... (French)

In the future, more links will likely be posted so if this is an issue that concerns you, you might consider bookmarking the site (which I am unaffiliated with).

Like I said, the G8 is not extremely forthcoming with what they plan to do and it is unclear to what extent the information they do release should be trusted. And so we have opinion pieces where people watching the general anti-democratic trend of certain G8 decisions express caution at allowing them to control the internet.

If you prefer to read euphemisms discussing what will take place during the talks ("the promotion of human rights and democratic freedoms"), consider the official site - http://www.g20-g8.com/g8-g20/g8/english/priorities-for-franc...

patrickg• 15 years ago

How is the "G8 internet" related to the internet governance forum? Why fighting on so many frontiers?

hoggle• 15 years ago

It is so painful to witness elected stupidity in action.

My sympathies to all the Royal & Mitterrand voters - seems like Sarkozy is rapidly becoming the new G.W. Bush.

CWuestefeld2• 15 years ago

seems like Sarkozy is rapidly becoming the new G.W. Bush.

Nah. Barack Obama is already the new GWBush. So Sarkozy must be the new Obama. Or something like that.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. [1]

[1] http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/csimiami/wontgetfooledagain.h...

rbanffy• 15 years ago

They want to civilize the internet the way Europe civilized the rest of the world...

shareme• 15 years ago

I think I speak for many when I say:

When the G8 can let protesters have a peaceful protest during their session than we will believe their intentions in governing the internet as being for the common world good..

Until that proof shows up STFU..

jwecker• 15 years ago

s/G8 agenda/Nicolas Sarkozy/

natmaster• 15 years ago

Downvote me all you want...

Why is everyone suddenly up in arms about the internet losing its freedom and being regulated? How is this any different from every other service that exists?

The internet is the shining last example of true liberty - it CAN work - and yet everyone seems to think that the world would go into chaos if everything wasn't heavily regulated. Where does this assumption come from? The internet is super prosperous because of this freedom. Why do people assume regulation is the best answer, when evidence indicates otherwise?

I'm seriously at a loss here.

cyrus_• 15 years ago

How is it that we, who have built the free internet, are letting them, who stood in its path on every turn, take control? Why aren't hackers in positions of power?

G8 agenda calls for "civilized Internet": monitored, governed, controlled, taxed

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