[Chapter-delegates] Lybian Internet Outage

[Sivasubramanian M]

First, @Veni:

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 7:08 AM, Veni Markovski <veni at veni.com> wrote:
> Siva,
> Any government can do it, where there's not enough liberal legal
> framework, or enough private Internet service providers. And they can
> do it as much as they want.

As Patrick pointed out, any Government can control its ISPs.
Governments are dictating policies for Search Engines in the Internet
Space, what are ISPs for them?

But I don't expect something like that to
> happen in majority of countries.

There appears to be a wrong trend towards narrower policies especially
towards the Internet. Some of these policies are triggered by
misplaced concerns over Security, but there are several wrong reasons
why Governments, one after another, want to assert their 'right' to
control the shape of the Internet within  their national space.

There is a wide disconnect between the deliberations at the IGFs and
what is actually happening in Government Quarters, which shows that
Governments have a tremendous capacity to disregard non-Governmental
advice. It appears that more and more Governments are in a mood to
ignore Community opinion. If this trend continues, what happened in
Libya can happen in at least a few more countries on the same scale
and in many other countries in a modified form.

What we need to do is to sit with the Governments, first with the
Governments that are inclined to listen, and then with their help
reach out to other Governments, interact a lot more and reason with
them.

@Joly, some thoughts, below:

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Joly MacFie <joly at punkcast.com> wrote:
>  the hope is to deliver communications in areas where Internet access is scarce,
> but also among populations unable to use communications because of
> government interference.

Any response from the Internet Community, to political territorial
assertions over Internet space,  should be along the lines of
development of technologies such as Satellite technologies to permeate
Internet bandwidth globally for unhindered access by anyone from
anywhere.  I understand radio a little better, so I will attempt to
describe what I have in my mind by talking about radio. A global radio
station may broadcast across borders but if a Government wants, it can
still block the broadcast by jamming the frequency of the broadcast.
What if the Global radio station broadcasts over a dynamic frequency,
constantly changing, to be tuned into by radio receivers with a
matching dynamic tuning mechanism that first scans and tunes into the
'current' frequency of the global station and binds itself to the
station, not the frequency, and it constantly scans for changes in the
radio station's frequency, re-tunes itself to the changed frequency
and stays connected to the station, irrespective of the quick and
continual change in the Global Station's frequency?

In radio, if some one is listening to a song, the latency during
tuning would affect the continuity of the song stream. But if the same
technology is developed for the future for the Internet it would fit
the packet switching method.

Sivasubramanian M