[Chapter-delegates] Fwd: [governance] CNAS Commentary: "The Internet Yalta"

[Imran Anwar]

Good observations about WCIT conference and Yalta; and not a bad analogy. 

Though, to me personally, it is quite disappointing that in 2012-13 we, as a planet and as mankind (through the actions of various governments), continue to treat freedom and security as somehow mutually exclusive!

In the cold war the greatest suffering was felt by the ones living, and dying, behind the Iron Curtain, in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. 

Tomorrow's war on net freedom will impact everyone --- imprisoning truth, open communications and thoughtful understanding behind a Censorship Curtain, under an Authoritarian Firewall. 

May we all yet be proven wrong... Amen.

Regards

Imran Anwar
Founder Internet Email Pakistan
http://imran.com

On Feb 12, 2013, at 11:46 AM, Sivasubramanian M <isolatedn at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> This is from the Governance list.
> 
> The cnas article cited here is interesting because rightly or wrongly it finds the WCIT to be a conference of comparable significance to Yalta.
> 
> What is more interesting is the warning related to ambiguous definitions.
> 
> Comments?
> 
> Sivasubramanian M
> 
> --------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Philipp Mirtl" <Philipp.Mirtl at oiip.ac.at>
> Date: Feb 11, 2013 6:07 PM
> Subject: [governance] CNAS Commentary: "The Internet Yalta"
> To: <governance at lists.igcaucus.org>
> 
> Dear list members,
> 
>  
> For those who are interested, I forward you the link to a recently published commentary on WCIT-12: http://www.cnas.org/theinternetyalta.
> 
>  
> The abstract reads as follows:
> 
>  
> “The December 2012 meeting of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) may be the digital equivalent of the February 1945 meeting of the Allied powers in Yalta: the beginning of a long Internet Cold War between authoritarian and liberal-democratic countries. The battles over Internet governance that surfaced at WCIT are not just about competing visions of the Internet, with one side favoring openness and the other security. They are also about two different visions of political power – one in which that power is increasingly distributed and includes non-state actors, and one in which state power is dominant. At the Yalta Conference, Western democracies made two fundamental mistakes: first, they allowed naive statements of wishful thinking to supplant actual realities on the ground. Second, they overlooked the risk inherent in permitting ambiguous definitions. Both of these mistakes may have been repeated at WCIT.”
> 
>  
> Best regards,
> 
>  
>  
> Philipp Mirtl
> 
>  
> Fellow / Adviser
> 
> Österreichisches Institut für Internationale Politik (oiip)
> 
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