[Chapter-delegates] The Future of the Internet Governance Forum

Sat Dec 11 23:41:08 PST 2010

On Dec 11, 2010, at 10:06 AM, Grigori Saghyan wrote:

> Dear All,
> 
> my impression is that they do not know what to do. During OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe ) Cyber -security related conference in Yerevan 8-9 December 2010 Russian representative suggest to create a group of specialists for INFORMATION RESISTANCE. These group will define what we can read or watch in the Internet. Also I was informed that there are persons, (may be it is Wikileaks command) who are "propagandizes of Internet terrorism". But most interesting was that according to OSCE other representative "access to information is not an absolute right", and in some cases it is possible and necessary to limit this access. In this situation ISOC have to help governments, because government is a group of government officials with very narrow views. For this it is necessary to make real suggestions - how to provide free access to the information and at the same time prevent crime in cyberspace. How to help and what kind of strategy and appropriate tactics it is possible to suggest - this is a question. Any kind of suggestion from NGO can be modified by government officials, necessary to be very careful.

I agree that this is a knotty problem. From my perspective, there are two issues.

One issue is with abusive content - content that can infect a computer with malware, or which is used in a botnet to attack other computers. I don't know of anyone that really wants to receive this stuff. The problem that many legal jurisdictions has had is in defining the crime; is it the creation of the attack or the software that implements it, the use of a script kiddie package to use the attack on someone, or is it being the owner of the compromised computer that is forwarding it? The owner of the compromised computer is relatively easy to find, but their only real crime is likely to be naivete. 

The other is access to content that is prohibited for other reasons. This might include anything from kiddie porn to political speech. On the "kiddie porn" end, I am very much of the opinion that it can't really be made impossible to access. One can also argue that at least some kinds of content that is prohibited in various places *shouldn't* be. That is of course a question that each country, by which I mean both its citizens and its government, needs to ponder and comment on, and I won't be so presumptuous as to tell you what you should think, although you can likely guess what I think.

Permit me, if you will, to quote myself on a similar thread on nanog at nanog.org regarding the efforts *my* government appears to be going through to limit access to content.

On Dec 9, 2010, at 11:22 AM, Fred Baker wrote:
> In my ever-so-humble opinion, this is not primarily about copyrighted material; it is primarily about content control. Go to any country in the world; they have something they wish wasn't available on the net. It might be child pornography, pornography in general by some definition of that term or lack thereof, journalist reports regarding their country or certain events in their country, paparazzi photos of their leaders or their consorts, or comments or comics featuring important religious figures or violating local social norms. The UN Al Qua'da Task Force would like to block all files that originate from Al Qua'da. During the US 2004 presidential elections, one of the candidates suggested using CleanFeed to suppress information about dog racing. It might be COICA, HADOPI, or some municipal court judge who has no idea what he is asking but makes a decree that <something> should go away. They are all, at the end of the say, talking about the same thing: "we don't care what other countries or other people think; in our country, <something> should not be available on the Internet."
> 
> Which is to say that they think that they should be in control of some bit of content. Content control, which they might well decry when others do it and respond very poorly when you point out their own actions. 
> 
> I would note that in many cases similar laws already exist in the various countries' legal systems. For some reason, rather than enforcing the existing law of the land, they feel compelled to make a new law that is specific to the Internet. I asked a lawyer advocating yet another such a law about this once, trying to find out why she thought that was necessary. Her response was that the existing law of the land had been found in court after court and jurisdiction over jurisdiction to be unimplementable and unenforceable; a certain famous statement about the definition of obscenity comes to mind, and very appropriately. "If I have the law, it gives me one more chance to argue the case in court". A case she freely admitted that she would very likely lose.
> 
> If your boss comes to you and asks you to be part of it, my suggestion (I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice) would be to first ask him whether he has a court order. If you are obligated to comply, you are obligated to comply. But in any event, I would suggest that he read http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/08/AR2010120804038.html. I suspect we will be reading similar articles about some 70 sites that have been taken down recently, and in some cases they may take whoever-did-it to court and win a judgement. The Internet routes around failure, and people who think they can control content are notorious for failing.
> 
> That's not a political viewpoint; some of those things that folks would like to go away probably should. From a very pragmatic and practical perspective, any technical mechanism that has been proposed is trivially defeated. The first implementers of DKIM were the spammers. What does CleanFeed do with https or encrypted BitTorrent? DNS Blocking is very interesting in a DNSSEC world, and is trivially overcome by purchasing a name in another TLD - or a thousand of them. Null routes block access to specific addresses; move the content, and the null route is a waste of bits. Look at how successful we have been in erasing botnets from our memory, or viruses, or spam. 
> 
> The way to address these things is not to childishly wish there was a magic silver bullet that would make the problem go away. If it's against the law, and in most cases the content that folks want to control is, go arrest the guy.
> 
> That's not to say that you couldn't use technologies like CleanFeed or Lawful Intercept, if you use them lawfully, to gather forensic evidence. But that's a far cry from pretending to make the content go away.

So from my perspective, I would not look for technical solutions to political issues. If some content is illegal, the solution is not to try to make it disappear, because it is excruciatingly difficult to make content disappear. The solution is to track the people that are in violation of the law, and arrest and prosecute them. I do think that some laws prohibiting content are themselves ill-advised, and would recommend that the countries in question nullify those laws. But that is a whole different topic.

> Grigori Saghyan
> ISOC.AM
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> and some other such strange definitions.
> 
> On 10.12.2010 16:22, Jon McNerney wrote:
>> 
>> Dear Colleagues,
>> 
>> In an extraordinary meeting on 6 December the United Nation's Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) decided to create a Working Group on Improvements to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) (http://www.intgovforum.org/) with a membership made up only of governments.
>> 
>> We believe this decision sets back the model of multistakeholder cooperation under which the IGF was established, and contradicts the instructions given to the CSTD for the establishment of the Working Group
>> 
>> The Internet Society has joined the International Chamber of Commerce - Business Action to Support the Information Society, the Internet Governance Caucus, and many other Internet, business, and civil society organizations in sending a letter to the CSTD, asking them to retract their previous decision and to establish an appropriately constituted Working Group that ensures the full and active participation of governments, the private sector and civil society from both developing and developed countries, involving relevant intergovernmental and international organizations and forums.
>> 
>> Like the Internet, a multistakeholder approach has been at the core of the Internet Governance Forum's formation and success. We hope that Internet Society Chapters and Members, as well as other organizations, will join us in signing the letter.
>> 
>> You may read the full letter, and see the growing list of signatories, and indicated your own support here:
>> 
>> http://isoc.org/wp/newsletter/?p=2710
>> 
>> 
>> Sincerely,
>> 
>> Jon McNerney
>> Chief Operating Officer
>> Internet Society
>> www.isoc.org
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> 
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