And the second issue that we have is, what are the rules that govern warfare? Do the existing international laws apply to it? For instance, we have the international humanitarian law which is used in terms of armed conflict. Now does that apply to the Internet? And if it does, what does it mean?
And if an attack is coming from China, is it really the Chinese sitting in China launching the attack or somebody else, or is somebody else misdirecting the attack? And there's the question of spillover of cyber attacks. What is a spillover of cyber attack? A spillover is that in case an attack is launched and somebody else launches a retaliatory attack without really knowing where the origin was, that can cause a problem. Let's take the instance of the North Korean attack, where the perception is that North Korea attacked or did the Sony hack. Now nobody knows for sure. We don't have credible evidence which is public yet. So that's the issue I'm talking about in attribution of the attacks. Now people can launch attacks, misdirect attacks, and the attribution is not clear. There was a report which came out recently that someone had done linguistic analysis which points to the attacks being launched by Russia. But again, there is no convincing evidence of that. So given this difficulty, it is very, very hard to really understand where the attacks are coming from, what laws apply to it, and there is no evidence in case of whether we want to retaliatory attack. And there are other issues associated with cyber attacks. The one is the issue of intellectual property.
And if you look at the intellectual property, the Internet has allowed media to be distributed across the globe. There are websites world over which basically contain information or media content, and the question is which jurisdiction do they lie on?
The World Trade Organization TRIPS, the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, defined a common set of international rules for members to respect intellectual property rights amongst members. In the modern era, the Internet has allowed for these rights of intellectual property holders to be violated at quite literally the speed of light. Piracy of software and other intellectual works has existed on the Internet since the early days of the Usenet, a series of news groups that can considered the modern precursor to the modern web forums.
ICANN and other multi-stakeholder entities have resisted, in the large part, the demands of state actors to grant greater control over Internet infrastructure for the purposes of mitigating intellectual property violations.
But this has not stopped state actors from passing a variety of laws. These can vary from country to country to combat the theft and sharing of intellectual properties such as music, movies, books, and software.
And there's a patchwork of laws relating to intellectual property that have led to several things.
The first is balkanization. One of the main issues in balkanization is that countries are trying to create their own Internet to protect their own national interests. For instance, a lot of countries feel that the openness of the Internet is not conducive to the societal values or to the norms in the society. If you look at what is happening in China, China has basically created a censorship regime on the Internet.
And by using technical means and laws, they're basically able to control content on their own Internet. Several other countries want to do exactly the same thing. And there are countries which want access to all of the communication that is going on the Internet to be able to fight terrorism better. So given that there is a lot of discord on how the Internet should be run, how much freedom there should be on the Internet, there's a great fear of balkanization where everybody creates their own personal Internet and the global Internet breaks up. That's from the basic challenges we face.
Especially in the light of the Edward Snowden revelation regarding mass surveillance of the Internet by the NSA, several countries, notably Brazil and Germany, they are proposing creating nationalized services as alternative to multinational products such as electronic mail. That would be routed only through their countries instead of going through the global Internet. And obviously China has had this long-standing weird firewall that is monitored by the Chinese government in order to restrict access to information on issues and historical events such as the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Many G-77 nations, the Group of 77 nations, tend to desire greater control over the Internet in their country, either as a reaction to the so-called social media revolutions like the Arab Spring, which are probably be seen as having used online social networks to organize, or due to protectionist tendencies with the state-run or public-sector telecommunications networks. There are legal and jurisdictional issues, and one of the most important emerging issues in Internet governance is the application of law to actions carried out on the Internet. Which is the governing authority? Can we bring them to international court? Given the competing patchwork of jurisdiction and legal authority, and the vast geographical distances, along with evidence which can rapidly evaporate, it is very hard to question people on the Internet. Who should prosecute the crimes on the Internet and differing national standards for speech are raised here. Consider the issue of an American citizen in the US posting comments on a British website about a public figure. US and UK law have very different levels of protection for certain types of speech, and China has even more different values. Whose law has supremacy in this situation? Consider, for example, where a criminal enterprise involving a small conspiracy of individuals in Russia uses malicious software to attack computers in the US and make them send spam email around the world. So cooperation is required between US and Russian authorities to prosecute this individual, but often the officials are corrupt and police block any sort of joint venture. And these processes have typically been very slow due to mutual distrust through years and years of Cold War. So the future of the Internet and the globalization of the ICANN and the resolve of the state actors to have more control, that has put ICANN in a difficult situation. ICANN is linked to the desires of the US government and in the wake of the Snowden revelations, ICANN issued a Montevideo statement that outlines four major points. The important global coherence in Internet operations, effort to address Internet governance challenges, globalizing ICANN and functions, and the transition to IPv6. It remains to be seen what model a truly globalized ICANN will follow. Will it be beholden to state actors in a multilateral top-down model where ICANN is ultimately accountable to the states? Or will it be a bottom-up transformation where the institution answers to Internet users and suppliers through direct accountability? So the challenges are great. We have a long road ahead of us. 
The Internet has become a major economic hub. And the more important it becomes, the more concerned that countries get and the more they're striving to get control. Cyber warfare is a reality today. We have seen what happened in the Russia-Georgia conflict, the Russia-Estonia conflict. We have seen what happened with the Stuxnet and Flame viruses, when cyber physical systems were attacked. This is just the beginning, and there are more and more conflicts to come on the Internet. And Internet governance can go a long way in building trust. We just need to find the right model. Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment