May 23, 2011THE e-G8 AND INTERNET GOVERNANCE
As a part of France’s presidency of the G8 meeting this year, President Nicolas Sarkozy will be launching a two-day e-G8 forum two days ahead of the G8 Deauville summit. Attendance has been confirmed by heads of leading firms of the industry: Cheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Eric Schmidt of Google, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and heads of News Corp, Vivendi, and eBay.
The topic guiding the forum is “Accelerating Growth,” with Maurice Levy of the group responsible for organizing the event, Publicis, stating that purpose of the forum would be to discuss how the Internet could be used to fuel economic growth. It is understood that the talks will revolve around net regulation, the economic impact of the Internet, fostering innovation and protecting intellectual property.
The event is expected to bridge US and European differences on issues such as online privacy, net neutrality and antitrust protections, as well as to bridge the gap of understanding of technologies between industry and policy makers.
However, a number of groups have expressed opposition to the forum. AccessNow.org has launched a “Protect the Net” campaign, whose signatories include 35 organizations including the Association for Progressive Communications, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Sans Frontieres, the Citizen Lab , May First/People Link, the Open Source Initiative, and Instituto Nupef.
In their statement, the collective called for a commitment to expanding Internet access for all, combating online censorship and surveillance, limiting online intermediary liability, and upholding principles of net neutrality. They also expressed concern over the corporate agenda at the G8, arguing that it is likely that corporate interests will likely take primacy over citizen-centered policies.
Within this, the group also expressed concern over the ongoing complicity of Western companies to censorship and surveillance by selling filtering and surveillance technologies both at home and abroad (see the OpenNet Initiative report entitled West Censoring East: The Use of Western Technologies by Middle East Censors, 2010-2011. Indeed, just this week, a federal lawsuit launched on Cisco by Human Rights Law Foundation on behalf of the Falun Gong accused the company of helping to design the Golden Shield in China.
Finally, signatories expressed concern over the increase of restrictive policies in both the developed and developing countries. These groups have pointed out that restrictive policies in the developed world would essentially legitimize restrictive online policies abroad in more repressive regimes (see Deibert’s brief).
Similarly, a collective of individuals and organizations (including the Free Culture Forum, La Quadrature du Net, and Boing Boing have called for creative action to protect a free Internet on their G8 vs. InternetWeb site.
The collective have released a statement over their concern of the eight richest nations coming together to unite and control and censor the Internet—pointing to Sarkozy’s enabling of online censorship in France, the US government’s reactions to Wikileaks, the implementation of blocking mechanisms in Europe, and plans for Internet kill switches.
They also point to the censorship of the Web in the name of intellectual property put forth by corporations and governments, for instance, the US Protect IP Act; the US government’s seizure of hundreds of domain names; copyright enforcement initiatives under the European directive IPRED; and the multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement which ties signatories to enforce anti-file sharing policies.
The e-G8 forum will begin tomorrow in Paris.
