| "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... |
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."