And the internet is growing at a very, very rapid pace. And this rapid expansion and the growth of the internet is causing major concerns about internet governance, because countries want more control of that, they don't want somebody else to take the lead on that. All right, now let's try to see why there is so much interest in internet governance and what is at stake. So the most important thing is that people don't want other countries controlling their internet, because they fear that in the case of a conflict, somebody else can basically control their internet. And some of the recent conflicts have actually demonstrated how Internet can be used, or can be disrupted in other countries in addition to the kinetic warfare.
So several attacks happened on the Internet, which were pretty high profile, between the US, between the conflict between Russia and Estonia and then Russia and Georgia. In the Middle East, there was conflicts been the Palestinians and the Hamas folks, and the Israelis. So all of that have happened.
But in 2013, the game changed quite a bit. And that followed Edward Snowden's revelation about widespread and pervasive monitoring of internet traffic by the US National Security Agency. And this touched off a global response that continues to reshape the debate over who should control the internet policy.
And since 2003 there have been roughly three major groupings of actors with stakes in Internet governance and politics.
These groups are the national sovereignty group, a civil society group, and a private sector group.
A national sovereignty group oriented approach favored by both developing countries, and the BRIC, which is Brazil, Russia, India, and China group minus India. These actors are generally members of the group of 77, whose roots spring from the non aligned political actors in the Cold War. They are generally critical of the US global hegemony and believe that the current institutions are US government puppets. And this group would rather prefer that Internet governance be under the purview of intergovernmental agencies, such as the United Nations.
They feel that putting it under the United Nations will give more control, or at least more security to these organizations. And some are heavily authoritarian, and favor restriction on Internet usage. A lot of countries, for instance, don't want a free Internet. They want to censor Internet.
And many of them are also characterized by a strong state run telecom monopolies who would like more control than a multi stakeholder model approach. Which is the current model of Internet governance, is favored by the civil society and private sectors in general. The private sector group contains the current affairs governance institutions, and multinational Internet and telecommunication companies, such as Google and AT&T. Some governments are also on board with these private sector companies, such as the US, Japan, and most of the European countries.
The civil society group includes organizations that promote Internet freedom, privacy, and users' rights. And this can also include ideologically motivated technical groups inside the nations that might otherwise make a national sovereignty approach.
These people appeal to their nation for a more liberal outlook on Internet governance issues.
These two approaches were contrasted during the initial formation of ICANN. Contextually in the mid 1990s, there was little legitimate policy making authority regarding the coordination of the Internet. When the U.S. government began to assert itself,
by virtue of its historical genesis of the internet through ARPANET, the Department of Commerce issued a white paper suggesting a private sector organization step forward to assume responsibilities for DNS.
And participants in the process can mean global meetings in order to debate and design an institution that would meet this criteria. But it failed to achieve consensus and was supplanted by a private deal between Jon Postel, from Network Solutions, which is the operator of the authoritative root zone server, and the dotcom dome server, and the Department of Commerce.
And the early designs of ICANN excluded governments from serving or participating in decision making, to the chagrin of non US governments, because they wanted to be a part of the United States. In the early 2000s, the US and the ICANN were directly challenged by developing nations along with the European Union and the World Summit on Internet information society.
In contrast, civil society groups embraced the multi stake holder model, seeking an opportunity to advance their policy without constraints of governmental treaties and agendas.
While ICANN and the multi stake holder model merged into one piece from this conference, the voice of state actors became even louder in the organization.
And generally the conflict between the state and non-state actors in ICANN, can be distilled to issue with these two groups having difficulty participating in the forum, where both have a relatively equal footing. The standards for accountability inclusion representation are very different between a state and non-state actor.
What that conference led to was the Internet Governance Forum, which is a multi task holder meeting which happens around the world, which discusses issues related to governance, and that are non binding in fashion.
The Internet governance forum, or the IGF, which has no power to implement changes based on discussion. It is merely an anchor for various groups who have interest in the current system and the preemption against other groups, which are claiming to represent the Internet and governance over the Internet.
And due to the lack of power in the IGF, many regional or state run organizations have created forums to discuss and implement Internet policy.
Intergovernmental agencies, such as the United Nations, failed to buy in to the IGF. Due to fear that it would erode their relevance in the international system.
Now, in 2010 these alternative forums have become more popular and spying even more alternative challenge. Such as freedom online, normative cyberspace, WCID, WSIS, and the ITU. Or state and non-state actors to discuss Internet governance.
The proliferation of these events points to an insecurity of state actors who feel that they lack control over Internet policy.
And this has been worsened since the revelations which came from Edward Snowden. The current issues of Internet governance are multi fold. First of all is cyber warfare. Now what's happening is a lot of the countries have cyber warfare as a strategic leverage in terms in armed conflict. And they have doctrines in their armed forces which are declaring cyber warfare to be a major element in their warfare. Apart from the land, sea, air, and space, cyber warfare comes next for them.
And what cyber warfare is, basically, ability of a country to attack another country.
And these attacks may be leveraged against physical infrastructure, like electricity, water, power, military or civil, are main structures. A typical goal of one country is to inflict how much damage as possible into another country. And in the case of cyber warfare, that is exactly the same as the idea. We have so much dependence on the Internet
that we will be able to inflict a lot of damage by disrupting supply. We can disrupt communication in air traffic control, governmental private institutions, or other targets in the military. Their attacks may not be carried out directly by a state, but affiliated proxy groups. And typically most of the states that don't directly attack, but they have cultivated these groups which are basically individual hacker groups which are doing a lot of this work.
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