Silberschatz on Internet Governance
Free2Innovate.net, 12/22/2005

The Jewish Ledger publishes a very interesting Q&A with Avi Silberschatz, a professor and chair of the computer science department of Yale University. Here's an excerpt:

Q: You and Mark Shiffrin, former Connecticut State Consumer Protection Commissioner, have recently written several articles about the Internet. What is happening in the world of Internet “ownership and regulation?”

A: Mark and I had recent pieces in the New York Times and in the International Herald Tribune. We have written about the movement afoot in the United States and the European Union to get the U.S. to give up control of the Internet, which is a medium the U.S. created and on which it critically relies.

The Internet has become an integral part of the global economy, in large part because the United States has also provided the genius of its technology to other societies that use it to benefit themselves, including in doing business and competing with the U.S. So it was only a matter of time before foreign powers began asking who should control the electronic superhighway on which they now rely for their national well-being, something that America has built, paid for and maintained.

Internationalizing control of a medium now regulated with a loose hand by a nation committed to maximizing freedom would inevitably create more of an opening for countries like China (a strong proponent of imposing some international supervision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - the California-based nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Commerce Department in 1998) to exert more pressure on Internet service providers. More broadly, international regulation could enable like-minded governments to work in concert to deem certain thoughts impermissible online.

The Internet is an attractive commercial infrastructure for all societies, even oppressive ones. But the string attached to its creation by America is that it must be used within a context of freedom, both economic and political. This is a democratic value that America should not be shy about exporting. Accepting that commitment to online freedom should be the price that foreign governments must pay for the blessing of the Internet in their national economic lives.