Latest in internet governance
The internet is global, but the laws that govern it are not; designing digital platform regulations around shared modules can help relieve this tension.
Democracies in South Asia, including India, are benefitting from increasingly splintered micro-internets, formulated through regulatory mechanisms purportedly enacted to battle fake news and the spread of sexual abuse imagery.
The Turkish government is trying to outsource censorship to social media companies. Silicon Valley should not play along.
The Russian government has been trying to remove more and more content from online platforms in recent years. Companies have largely complied with the demands.
Lawfare readers can now view a video series featuring expert commentary on what the law stands for, how it’s been interpreted and what the internet will look like with or without it.
Starlink is a space-based internet service provider that seeks to provide high-speed (40 mbps upload, 100 mbps download ), near-global coverage of the populated world by 2021—bringing this service to locations where access previously has been unreliable, expensive or completely unavailable.
If the first round of debates over internet governance focused on whether the internet can be governed, today’s debates are about which states will regulate the internet, how and where. China famously manages a walled garden; Europe has built an extremely robust privacy regime (read: mandated data localization) and seeks to apply its laws extraterritorially; the U.S. has a self-professed “open internet” policy but a series of outdated rules encumber different aspects of U.S. internet firm operations.
Suppose you were the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)—a unit of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Suppose further that in March 2014 you had announced your intention to offload your management of certain functions of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and to hand that competence over to a broader, mulitnational group. How would you go about doing so?
As is well known, NTIA has mulled the question for roughly a year and a half, and all the while sought input from a diverse group of stakeholders and experts.