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industryterm:internet governance

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  • @hlc
    Articles repérés par Hervé Le Crosnier CC BY
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    @02myseenthis01
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    The Geopolitical Economy of the Global Internet Infrastructure on JSTOR
    ▻https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.7.2017.0228

    Article très intéressant qui repositionne les Etats dans la gestion de l’infrastructure globale de l’internet. En fait, une infrastructure globale pour le déploiement du capital (une autre approche de la géopolitique, issue de David Harvey).

    According to many observers, economic globalization and the liberalization of telecoms/internet policy have remade the world in the image of the United States. The dominant roles of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have also led to charges of US internet imperialism. This article, however, argues that while these internet giants dominate some of the most popular internet services, the ownership and control of core elements of the internet infrastructure—submarine cables, internet exchange points, autonomous system numbers, datacenters, and so on—are tilting increasingly toward the EU and BRICS (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries and the rest of the world, complicating views of hegemonic US control of the internet and what Susan Strange calls the knowledge structure.

    This article takes a different tack. It argues that while US-based internet giants do dominate some of the middle and top layers of the internet—for example, operating systems (iOS, Windows, Android), search engines (Google), social networks (Facebook), online retailing (Amazon), over-the-top TV (Netflix), browsers (Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Explorer), and domain names (ICANN)—they do not rule the hardware, or material infrastructure, upon which the internet and daily life, business, governments, society, and war increasingly depend. In fact, as the article shows, ownership and control of many core elements of the global internet infrastructure—for example, fiber optic submarine cables, content delivery networks (CDNs), autonomous system numbers (ASN), and internet exchange points (IXPs)—are tilting toward the rest of the world, especially Europe and the BRICS (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). This reflects the fact that the United States’ standing in the world is slipping while an ever more multipolar world is arising.

    International internet backbone providers, internet content companies, and CDNs interconnect with local ISPs and at one or more of the nearly 2000 IXPs around the world. The largest IXPs are in New York, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Seattle, Chicago, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. They are core elements of the internet that switch traffic between all the various networks that comprise the internet system, and help to establish accessible, affordable, fast, and secure internet service.

    In developed markets, internet companies such as Google, Baidu, Facebook, Netflix, Youku, and Yandex use IXPs to interconnect with local ISPs such as Deutsche Telecoms in Germany, BT or Virgin Media in Britain, or Comcast in the United States to gain last-mile access to their customers—and vice versa, back up the chain. Indeed, 99 percent of internet traffic handled by peering arrangements among such parties occurs without any money changing hands or a formal contract.50 Where IXPs do not exist or are rare, as in Africa, or run poorly, as in India, the cost of bandwidth is far more expensive. This is a key factor that helps to explain why internet service is so expensive in areas of the world that can least afford it. It is also why the OECD and EU encourage developing countries to make IXPs a cornerstone of economic development and telecoms policy work.

    The network of networks that make up the internet constitute a sprawling, general purpose platform upon which financial markets, business, and trade, as well as diplomacy, spying, national security, and war depend. The world’s largest electronic payments system operator, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications’ (SWIFT) secure messaging network carries over 25 million messages a day involving payments that are believed to be worth over $7 trillion USD.59 Likewise, the world’s biggest foreign currency settlement system, the CLS Bank, executes upward of a million trades a day worth between $1.5 and $2.5 trillion over the global cable systems—although that is down by half from its high point in 2008.60 As Stephen Malphrus, former chief of staff to the US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, observed, when “communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt, rather it snaps to a halt.”61

    Governments and militaries also account for a significant portion of internet traffic. Indeed, 90 to 95 percent of US government traffic, including sensitive diplomatic and military orders, travels over privately owned cables to reach officials in the field.62 “A major portion of DoD data traveling on undersea cables is unmanned aerial vehicle video,” notes a study done for the Department of Homeland Security by MIT scholar Michael Sechrist.63 Indeed, the Department of Defense’s entire Global Information Grid shares space in these cables with the general public internet.64

    The 3.6 billion people as of early 2016 who use the internet to communicate, share music, ideas and knowledge, browse, upload videos, tweet, blog, organize social events and political protests, watch pornography, read sacred texts, and sell stuff are having the greatest influence on the current phase of internet infrastructure development. Video currently makes up an estimated two-thirds of all internet traffic, and is expected to grow to 80 percent in the next five years,69 with US firms leading the way. Netflix single-handedly accounts for a third of all internet traffic. YouTube is the second largest source of internet traffic on fixed and mobile networks alike the world over. Altogether, the big five internet giants account for roughly half of all “prime-time” internet traffic, a phrasing that deliberately reflects the fact that internet usage swells and peaks at the same time as the classic prime-time television period, that is, 7 p.m. to 11 p.m.

    Importance des investissements des compagnies de l’internet dans les projets de câbles.

    Several things stand out from this analysis. First, in less than a decade, Google has carved out a very large place for itself through its ownership role in four of the six projects (the SJC, Faster, Unity, and Pacific Cable Light initiatives), while Facebook has stakes in two of them (APG and PLCN) and Microsoft in the PLCN project. This is a relatively new trend and one that should be watched in the years ahead.

    A preliminary view based on the publicly available information is that the US internet companies are important but subordinate players in consortia dominated by state-owned national carriers and a few relatively new competitors. Keen to wrest control of core elements of the internet infrastructure that they perceive to have been excessively dominated by United States interests in the past, Asian governments and private investors have joined forces to change things in their favor. In terms of the geopolitical economy of the internet, there is both a shift toward the Asia-Pacific region and an increased role for national governments.

    Return of the State as Regulator of Concentrated Markets

    In addition to the expanded role of the state as market builder, regulator, and information infrastructure policy maker, many regulators have also rediscovered the reality of significant market concentration in the telecom-internet and media industries. Indeed, the US government has rejected several high-profile telecoms mergers in recent years, such as AT&T’s proposal to take over T-Mobile in 2011, T-Mobile’s bid for Sprint in 2014, and Comcast’s attempt to acquire Time Warner Cable last year. Even the approval of Comcast’s blockbuster takeover of NBC Universal in 2011, and Charter Communications acquisition of Time Warner Cable last year, respectively, came with important strings attached and ongoing conduct regulation designed to constrain the companies’ ability to abuse their dominant market power.87 The FCC’s landmark 2016 ruling to reclassify broadband internet access as a common carrier further indicated that US regulators have been alert to the realities of market concentration and telecoms-internet access providers’ capacity to abuse that power, and the need to maintain a vigilant eye to ensure that their practices do not swamp people’s rights to freely express themselves, maintain control over the collection, retention, use, and disclosure of their personal information, and to access a diverse range of services over the internet.88 The 28 members of the European Union, along with Norway, India, and Chile, have adopted similar “common carriage/network neutrality/open network”89 rules to offset the reality that concentration in core elements of these industries is “astonishingly high”90 on the basis of commonly used indicators (e.g., concentration ratios and the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index).

    These developments indicate a new phase in internet governance and control. In the first phase, circa the 1990s, technical experts and organizations such as the Internet Engineers Task Force played a large role, while the state sat relatively passively on the sidelines. In the second phase, circa the early to mid-2000s, commercial forces surged to the fore, while internet governance revolved around the ICANN and the multi-stakeholder model. Finally, the revelations of mass internet surveillance by many states and ongoing disputes over the multi-stakeholder, “internet freedom” agenda on the one side, versus the national sovereignty, multilateral model where the ITU and UN system would play a larger role in internet governance all indicate that significant moves are afoot where the relationship between states and markets is now in a heightened state of flux.

    Such claims, however, are overdrawn. They rely too heavily on the same old “realist,” “struggle for control” model where conflict between nation-states has loomed large and business interests and communication technologies served mainly as “weapons of politics” and the handmaidens of national interests from the telegraph in the nineteenth century to the internet today. Yet, nation-states and private business interests, then and now, not only compete with one another but also cooperate extensively to cultivate a common global space of economic accumulation. Communication technologies and business interests, moreover, often act independent of the nation-state and via “private structures of cooperation,” that is, cartels and consortia, as the history and contemporary state of the undersea cable networks illustrate. In fact, the internet infrastructure of the twenty-first century, much like that of the industrial information infrastructure of the past 150 years, is still primarily financed, owned, and operated by many multinational consortia, although more than a few submarine communications cables are now owned by a relatively new roster of competitive players, such as Tata, Level 3, Global Cloud Xchange, and so forth. They have arisen mostly in the last 20 years and from new quarters, such as India in the case of Tata, for example.

    #Economie_numérique #Géopolitique #Câbles_sous_marins

    Articles repérés par Hervé Le Crosnier CC BY
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  • @mhoungbo
    mhoungbo CC BY-SA

    Fellowship Report - #ICANN52 Singapore
    ▻http://mathias.houngbo.net/node/50

    First time I heard about ICANN was in 2006 during a web development training and about the Fellowship program in 2012 at AFRINIC-16 meeting. I was newbie in Internet Governance and I had no a clear idea about multi stakeholder model, I was selected as fellowship for ICANN52 meeting in Singapore and my objective was to understand as much as possible the whole Internet Governance process and implement it in my country as fast as possible...Attached: My report ICANN52.pdf

    mhoungbo CC BY-SA
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  • @afnic
    AFNIC
    AFNIC
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  • @fil
    Fil
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    @reka
    @geneghys
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    Impact of FB Real Name policy (survey)
    ▻https://www.apc.org/limesurvey/index.php/551371/lang-en

    this survey is intended to collect stories from sexual rights and LGBTQI* activists that have been affected by Facebook’s policy of real name authentication.

    The stories collected from this survey will be kept anonymous and brought to the table in a meeting with Facebook representatives at the 2015 Internet Governance Forum, happening in November in Brazil.

    #realname #facebook #femmes #lgbt #anonymat via @spideralex

    une autre enquête :

    Call for blogs: We want to know how young feminists from around the world are raising awareness about gender-based violence - Young Feminist Wire
    ▻http://yfa.awid.org/2015/04/call-for-blogs-we-want-to-know-how-young-feminists-from-around-the-world-a

    http://yfa.awid.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/end-gender-based-violence-1024x772.jpg

    Fil
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  • @simplicissimus
    Simplicissimus

    Data breaches may cost less than the security to prevent them - TechRepublic
    ▻http://www.techrepublic.com/article/data-breaches-may-cost-less-than-the-security-to-prevent-them

    When it comes to data breaches, 2014 was a banner year. However, if Benjamin Dean, Fellow for Internet Governance and Cyber-security, School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, did his math right, 2015 will be more of the same.

    In a March 2015 column on The Conversation, Dean provided a hard to disagree with defense of why things security-wise “ain’t gonna change” soon. “When we examine the evidence, though, the actual expenses from the recent breaches at Sony, Target and Home Depot amount to less than 1% of each company’s annual revenues,” wrote Dean. “After reimbursement from insurance and minus tax deductions, the losses are even less.”

    Dean then administered the knockout punch: “This indicates that the financial incentives for companies to invest in greater information security are low and suggests that government intervention might be needed.”

    Benjamin Dean évalue le coût du vol de données à moins de 0,1% du chiffre d’affaires pour Target et encore 10 fois moins pour Home Depot.

    D’où son invocation de l’#aléa_moral #moral_hazard.

    Et que propose-t-il ? Ben, eueueuh… on fait un groupe de travail…

    What is the answer?
    Removing the moral hazard seems to be the logical answer. But how would that come about — government intervention? “It’s important to make sure the intervention doesn’t make the problem of moral hazard worse,” cautioned Dean. “This is a huge problem because as we plough billions of dollars into intelligence agencies, supposedly to keep us all safe from ’cyber-attacks’, it has the effect of further weakening the already low incentives for companies to invest in information security themselves.”

    “Unintended consequences of policies, even in instances where the case for government intervention is strong, can be worse than the consequences of doing nothing at all,” further cautions Dean. “I’m not saying that we do nothing at all — just that we need verifiable and reliable data on which to begin making these complex policy decisions.”

    Simplicissimus
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  • @afnic
    AFNIC

    http://www.afnic.fr/medias/images/blog/gouvernance-internet.jpg

    Aujourd’hui sur le blog Afnic Pierre Bonis, Directeur général adjoint de l’Afnic revient sur le Forum sur la Gouvernance de I’Internet qui s’est déroulé la semaine dernière à Istanbul et pose la question “Et maintenant, que faire ?” ▻http://www.afnic.fr/fr/ressources/blog/forum-sur-la-gouvernance-de-i-internet-que-faire.html

    Today on Afnic blog, Pierre Bonis, Afnic Deputy CEO, goes over the Internet Governance Forum that took place last week in Istanbul and asks the question “And now what is to be done?” ▻http://www.afnic.fr/en/resources/blog/internet-governance-forum-what-is-to-be-done.html

    #IFG2014 #IGF #Governance #AFNIC

    AFNIC
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  • @jean_pierre
    Jean-Pierre Séréni
    2
    @orientxxi
    @fil
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    ‘U.S. monopoly over Internet must go’ - The Hindu
    ▻http://www.thehindu.com

    Most of Pouzin’s career has been devoted to the design and implementation of computer systems, most notably the CYCLADES computer network.

    Interview with Louis Pouzin, a pioneer of the Internet and recipient of the Chevalier of Légion d’Honneur, the highest civilian decoration of the French government

    Louis Pouzin is recognised for his contributions to the protocols that make up the fundamental architecture of the Internet. Most of his career has been devoted to the design and implementation of computer systems, most notably the CYCLADES computer network and its datagram-based packet-switching network, a model later adopted by the Internet as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/Internet Protocol (IP). Apart from the Chevalier of Légion d’Honneur, Mr. Pouzin, 83, was the lone Frenchman among American awardees of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, given to the inventors of Internet technology in its inaugural year, 2013.

    Ahead of the ninth annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) from September 2-5 in Istanbul, Mr. Pouzin shared his concerns regarding the monopoly enjoyed by the U.S. government and American corporations over the Internet and the need for democratising what is essentially a global commons. Excerpts from an interview, over Skype, with Vidya Venkat.

    What are the key concerns you would be discussing at the IGF ?

    As of today, the Internet is controlled predominantly by the U.S. Their technological and military concerns heavily influence Internet governance policy. Unfortunately, the Brazil Netmundial convened in April, 2014, with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), following objections raised by [Brazilian] President Dilma Rousseff to the National Security Agency (NSA) spying on her government, only handed us a non-binding agreement on surveillance and privacy-related concerns. So the demand for an Internet bill of rights is growing loud. This will have to lay out what Internet can and cannot do. Key government actors must sign the agreement making it binding on them. The main issue pertaining to technological dominance and thereby control of the network itself has to be challenged and a bill of rights must aim to address these concerns.

    What is the way forward if the U.S. dominance has to be challenged?

    Today, China and Russia are capable of challenging U.S. dominance. Despite being a strong commercial power, China has not deployed Internet technology across the world. The Chinese have good infrastructure but they use U.S. Domain Naming System, which is a basic component of the functioning of the Internet. One good thing is because they use the Chinese language for domain registration, it limits access to outsiders in some way.

    India too is a big country. It helps that it is not an authoritarian country and has many languages. It should make the most of its regional languages, but with regard to technology itself, India has to tread more carefully in developing independent capabilities in this area.

    As far as European countries are concerned, they are mostly allies of the U.S. and may not have a strong inclination to develop independent capabilities in this area. Africa again has potential; it can establish its own independent Internet network which will be patronised by its burgeoning middle classes.

    So you are saying that countries should have their own independent Internet networks rather than be part of one mega global network ?

    Developing independent networks will take time, but to address the issue of dominance in the immediate future we must first address the monopoly enjoyed by ICANN, which functions more or less as a proxy of the U.S. government. The ICANN Domain Naming System (DNS) is operated by VeriSign, a U.S. government contractor. Thus, traffic is monitored by the NSA, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) can seize user sites or domains anywhere in the world if they are hosted by U.S. companies or subsidiaries.
    ICANN needs to have an independent oversight body. The process for creating a new body could be primed by a coalition of states and other organisations placing one or several calls for proposals. Evaluation, shortlist, and hopefully selection, would follow. If a selection for the independent body could be worked out by September 2015, it would be well in time for the contract termination of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) with the U.S. government.

    The most crucial question is should governments allow citizens to end up as guinea pigs for global internet corporations ?

    Breaking that monopoly does not require any agreement with the U.S. government, because it is certainly contrary to the World Trade Organization’s principles. In other words, multiple roots [DNS Top Level Domains (TLD)] are not only technically feasible; they have been introduced in the Internet back in 1995, even before ICANN was created. This avenue is open to entrepreneurs and institutions for innovative services tailored to user needs, specially those users unable to afford the extravagant fees raked in by ICANN. The deployment of independent roots creates competition and contributes to reining in devious practices in the domain name market.
    The U.S. government is adamant on controlling the ICANN DNS. Thus, copies (mirrors) should be made available in other countries out of reach from the FBI. A German organisation Open Root Server Network is, at present, operating such a service. To make use of it, users have to modify the DNS addresses in their Internet access device. That is all, usage is free.

    But would this process not result in the fragmentation of the Internet ?

    Fragmentation of the Internet is not such a bad thing as it is often made out to be. The bone of contention here is the DNS monopoly. On August 28, nearly 12 millions Internet users subscribing to Time Warner’s cable broadband lost connectivity due to a sudden outage in one day. In a world of fragmented Internet networks, such mass outages become potentially impossible. The need of the hour is to work out of the current trap to use a more interoperable system.
    In this context, a usual scarecrow brandished by the U.S. government is fragmentation, or Balkanisation, of the Internet. All monopolies resort to similar arguments whenever their turf is threatened by a looming competition. Furthermore, the proprietary naming and unstable service definitions specific to the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and more, have already divided the Internet in as many closed and incompatible internets of captive users.

    Recently, the Indian External Affairs Minister had objected to U.S. spying on the Bharatiya Janata Party. Can governments like India use a forum like IGF to raise concerns relating to surveillance ?

    Even if governments do attend IGF, they do not come with a mandate. A major problem with the Internet governance space today is that they are under the dominance of corporate lobbies. So it is a bit hard to say what could be achieved by government participation in the IGF. This is a problem of the IGF : it has no budget or secretary general, it is designed to have no influence and to maintain the status quo. That is why you have a parallel Internet Ungovernance Forum which is not allying with the existing structure and putting forth all the issues they want to change. Indian citizens could participate in this forum to raise privacy and surveillance-related concerns.

    Do you feel Internet governance is still a very alien subject for most governments and people to engage with ?

    Unfortunately, the phrase “Internet governance” is too abstract for most people and governments to be interested in. The most crucial question is what kind of society do you want to live in? Should governments allow citizens to end up as guinea pigs for global Internet corporations? The revelations by NSA contractor Edward Snowden have proved beyond doubt that user data held by Internet companies today are subject to pervasive surveillance. Conducting these intrusive activities by controlling the core infrastructure of the Internet without obtaining the consent of citizen users is a big concern and should be debated in public. Therefore, debates about Internet governance are no longer alien; they involve all of us who are part of the network.❞

    Jean-Pierre Séréni
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  • @afnic
    AFNIC

    Merci aux plus de 50 personnes qui ont participé hier à notre premier Comité de concertation ouvert à tous sur la Gouvernance Internet ! Un compte-rendu sera publié prochainement !

    Thank you to the more than 50 persons that attended our first open consultative committee on Internet Governance yesterday ! A summary will be published shortly !

    AFNIC
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  • @afnic
    AFNIC

    http://www.afnic.fr/uploads/profile/9292f17d0adc9795e6e09d8577d5f400a782d459.jpg

    Aujourd’hui sur le blog Afnic, Sebastien Bachollet revient sur le FGI de Bali et la gouvernance Internet !

    A lire sur ▻http://www.afnic.fr/fr/ressources/blog/gouvernance-de-l-internet-au-travail.html

    Today on Afnic blog, Sébastien Bachollet goes over the FGI meeting in Bali and Internet Governance

    Read it on ▻http://www.afnic.fr/en/resources/blog/internet-governance-let-s-get-to-work.html

    #AFNIC #Gouvernance #GouvernanceInternet

    AFNIC
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