[andyjohnson0]

"Government control of the internet, by any government, will inevitably lead to censorship."

You may be right about that specific point. So what's the alternative? Corporate control? UN?

If the net is governed by some form of institution, then that institution will need widespread legitimacy. I'm not saying that the current controllers have that, but a transfer of governance won't happen without it.

[Shivetya]

The UN is the last organization on earth to be given control or dominion over the net just based on the results of the Human Rights Council.

Its fine where it is, at least the US leadership can be picked on with near impunity if not vilified by the press to get a reaction, other countries less so

[davidnu2]

The UN in even worse, Russia, China, and Brazil are lobbying to get control over the Internet via ITU.

Current multi-stakeholder model has functioned diligently since the beginning, all these attempts to control the Internet by governments are politically motivated and with the aim of protecting legacy businesses and business models.

[andyjohnson0]

I agree with you on the UN in this instance. But if the current system of governance is so great, how did the net come to be so massively infiltrated by NSA/GCHQ?

The problem is that the internet has come to be seen as a political problem by an increasing number of governments, and the current institutions that provide governance (ICANN, ISOC, IANA, IETF, etc) have no political power with which to push back.

[davidnu3]

NSA/GCHQ 'infiltrations' had little to do with TLDs and IP block allocations.

Spy agencies did what they did with the help of over-broad court orders and legal justifications, non of the institutions you've listed had anything to do with it, either technically nor administratively (prove me wrong!).

These are just red-herring arguments by parties who want to take advantage of this moral panic and claim the they should control more of the Internet so as to protect it, it's opportunism and grandstanding, it has nothing to do with NSA.

[andyjohnson0]

"non of the institutions you've listed had anything to do with it". I agree, and I didn't say they did. What I did say is that they failed to stop it.

Look, the net has become a platform for large-scale trade, creation of news and social movements, dissent (e.g. occupy, arab spring), jihad (war on terror). These are all things that are of great interest to politicians, because they are either opportunities or threats to their power. Thats why so many of them (US/UK/FR/RU/TC/CN) have been attacking the net with censorship and surveillance. The Snowden revelations have brought this into the open and forced the issue of what to do. It seems to me that thats the context for this EU announcement.

Yes, the EU proposal is almost certainly an attempt at a power-grab, partly because thats what politicians do, but also because they fear some other group grabbing it first.

And the net has little power to resist any of this - because its governing institutions were not designed/evolved with that in mind. SOPA etc was only defeated because corporations with financial power [1] opposed it, not because the net somehow "defended itself". I worry that we might have reached a tipping-point where there net can't stay the same because the political pressure is too great, and all the feasible alternatives (such as UN control or full-on commercial control) are terrible.

In case its not totally clear, I'm not in favour of governments/EU/UN running the internet. I'd like to see a highly decentralised net, but I can't see how we get there from here.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act#Companie...

[Zancarius]

> What I did say is that they failed to stop it.

Isn't that kind of a strawman, though? I'm fairly convinced that of the organizations you listed, very few people (if any) were aware of the breadth of the NSA's information gathering.

I fail to see how placing control of IP and TLD assignments under the EU or UN would have done anything to stop the NSA/GCHQ, which was the crux of your initial argument. If anything, it might have made it worse, because lawmakers could have been frightened into far more material support of extensive surveillance under the guise of "we don't control that."

[marcosdumay]

You are right on the specifics, SOAP and similar actions (lots of what really go on, under the US supervision) are what is related to TLDs.

Nobody managed to create a problem with IP block allocations yet, mainly because IPv4 is about dead, and IPv6 is plenty enough. There is no way that can change in the UN hands.

Anyway, the US has almost total control of the UN, what are you really complaining about?