
European Commission proposes a reform to the way the Internet is managed and run - Hagelin
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-142_en.htm
======
forgotAgain
Like the governance in England where the government decides what you should be
watching? Perhaps they'll uses the French model and make it illegal to say
anything critical about the French government. Or perhaps they'll adopt the
Turkish attitude of jail time for those who speak the truth (if Turkey gets
into the EU). How are they better than the American model of Uncle Sam lurking
in the background of everyone's lives waiting for the wrong words to be
written so the entrapment teams can be sent.

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

Edit: to address comments

From:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Unit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom)

There is an ongoing program to introduce a broad system of default blocking of
certain types of content to all Internet users in the UK. New customers have
their Internet access filtered at the ISP level so that certain web sites are
blocked

~~~
louhike
As a french, I'm quite surprised about what you are saying for France. We have
a lot of satirical newspapers, TV shows, etc. Where have you seen that?

~~~
davidnu
What about that French comedian that has your government exploring ways to ban
his act? his material maybe reprehensible but in the US he'd have first
amendment protection. Your country also has draconian and stringent liable
laws, and I don't want it to have anything to do with Internet governance.

~~~
mercurial
> What about that French comedian that has your government exploring ways to
> ban his act?

Well, what about him? France is not the US, you have hate laws here. Nobody is
trying to ban him because he is criticizing the government.

That's not parent is saying anyway: _Perhaps they 'll uses the French model
and make it illegal to say anything critical about the French government._
Last time I checked, the Figaro and le Point (conservative newspapers) were
alive and well.

~~~
davidnu2
Exactly right, the problem is that you're not the US.

"Hate laws" are censorship. "Hateful" speech is equally protected under the US
constitution, and any political movements it might inspire will not be
infringed upon by the government.

The fundamental problem with "hate laws" in the context of speech is the
definition of "hate", totalitarian governments tend to widen that definitions
in order to suppress adversaries, this might be theoretical in your case but
it's still an attack victor.

The Internet must be built on the example of the "freest" framework available
and that is the US's.

~~~
mercurial
> Exactly right, the problem is that you're not the US.

Exactly right about what? The original claim is that the French government is
trying to muzzle criticism. You then bring up the case of a humorist condemned
for his antisemitic views as a supporting example. This doesn't make any
sense, unless you're going for some weird conspiracy theory - in which case,
I'll believe any conspiracy theory as long as comes with convincing evidence,
of which there doesn't seem to be any.

> The fundamental problem with "hate laws" in the context of speech is the
> definition of "hate", totalitarian governments tend to widen that
> definitions in order to suppress adversaries, this might be theoretical in
> your case but it's still an attack victor.

> The Internet must be built on the example of the "freest" framework
> available and that is the US's.

I'm on the fence about it. Besides, even in the US there are limits on freedom
of speech.

------
sdfjkl
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I
come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you
of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no
sovereignty where we gather."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Declaration_of_the_Independen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Declaration_of_the_Independence_of_Cyberspace)

------
rtpg
no matter what the intentions, this sort of notion that we have to formalize
the governance of the internet seems like just the sort of thing to bring
about a "death by committee" when it comes to internet freedom.

Personally, I don't understand how the current governance of the internet is
an issue. The only thing that enables stuff like all the NSA spying is that
American companies are by and large the major providers of services. No amount
of governance will fix that problem.

On the other hand, many European countries do have some pretty heavy-handed
approaches to information regulation, which I definitely would not want to
affect the status quo.

------
morkbot
Some here are quick to dismiss it as another attempt at "evil government
seizing the control over oh-so-free Internet", whereas if you actually read
what's there it's more about taking the governance over Internet out of
American hands (basically what ICANN wants anyway) + doing something (not sure
what exactly) to ensure the freedom in the Internet.

Not bad ideas in themselves, dunno about the execution. Personally I think it
wouldn't be that bad to have _some_ governmental control over _some_ of the
Internet functions.

Prefer this instead of leaving it at hands of corporations that only care
about money (even if I agree that it's all a muddy area that can lead to some
bad stuff too).

------
alkonaut
Let's face it, the internet is centralized (hierarchical), not distributed.
ICANN has taken giant steps to being a "global" organization, but in the end
it's still a californian non-profit.

These reforms seem to just aim to make ICANN a more globally managed
organization, and increase transparency in top-level decisionmaking. I can't
see anywhere where it says it wants to increase governments' ability to block
cat videos.

------
higherpurpose
Shame Neelie Kroes will be gone soon. She's been pushing some pretty good
digital agendas with her position in the EU Commission. Hopefully her work
won't be undone by whoever replaces her after the EU elections.

~~~
waps
Let's hope that at least this part of her work referenced in this article dies
the quick death it deserves.

She basically wants the global ability to impose EU laws, like worse copyright
than the US, outlawing certain political views, and so on. And she wants to do
this through technical means.

This can not be allowed to happen.

------
oleganza
"globalise key decision-making (for example the coordination of domain names
and IP addresses) to safeguard the stability, security and resilience of the
Internet"

Sounds like they want to make the internet a more centrally-controlled thing
"to protect you better". Internet does not need any central oversight and
regulation. People just need freedom to move their bytes around as cheap as
possible. We are capable to figure out how to build secure schemes, encrypted
channels etc on our own, completely voluntarily. Everyone is able to choose
tools and protocols that suit them best.

~~~
marcosdumay
Sorry to break your bubble, but the Internet has a centralized oversight and
regulation already.

~~~
oleganza
Not so much. China may put up their own firewall, yet people outside
communicate just fine.

Also, mesh networks are pretty interesting:
[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/mesh-internet-
pr...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/mesh-internet-privacy-nsa-
isp)

------
powertower
Isn't the "management" of the internet already kind of off-hands by the US gov
and somewhat open (I'm not talking about the spying stuff). Especially with
regards to the draconian ways other countries treat it (China, Iran, etc).

So what the EU really is saying is that they want to lock things down a bit
further.

The want more domain-name control, more gov level blocking and filtering, more
surveillance, more data retention, and all kinds of new laws.

The sad part of all this is the naive crowd here is probably thinking -
finally, let them stick it to the US!

~~~
lmm
Or they don't want the domain root in the hands of a private company that
keeps selling ever-crappier TLDs to make money, making the net worse for
everyone? Just a thought.

------
cLeEOGPw
I don't know whether to agree with this or not. On one hand, a control point
can easily be exploited by governments to censor and control users. On other,
uncontrolled internet tends to form around where money is. And money is again
in the governments that have enough to turn internet to their advantage. EC
would be better after all, because that way we have to fight not with
multibillion dollars of investments from large governments, but with votes
while electing commission members.

~~~
polymatter
"while electing commission members". Minor point, but EU Commissioners are not
elected. They are appointed by national governments, 1 per state. MEPs are
elected, but have significantly less power than EU Commissioners.

------
gadders
Based on the European Commission's current record for incompetence, corruption
and inefficiency, I wouldn't trust them to run me a bath.

------
rikkus
Governments have some control over the 'managing' and 'running' of the
Internet, via TLD control, blocking, filtering, surveillance and legislation
(e.g. the cookie law in EU), but even with all these in place, they're not
really 'running' the Internet. If they did, there'd be no newsgroups, no
torrents and no porn. They're seizing more control as time goes on, however:
See the death of Net Neutrality in the US.

I'd like to see governments pledge to back off from the Internet.
Unfortunately I can't see that ever happening. Forever pushing for more
governance means that the non-government-approved portion will get bigger and
erect more walls around it. If governments want to govern, they need to be
more accepting of the 'net in its natural state and deal with it on those
terms, rather than forcing citizens to choose to be on the 'light side' or
'dark side' (choose for yourself which term applies to which).

~~~
acheron
"Net neutrality" _is_ the government "seizing more control". And not in some
abstract way either, that is literally the goal. If it had actually "died"
then that would have been a good thing, for those opposed to government
control.

~~~
crazy1van
> "Net neutrality" is the government "seizing more control"

Good point. Telling infrastructure providers they must treat all traffic the
same and telling them they must prioritize certain traffic is the same thing
from a government power perspective.

Being for "net neutrality" is one thing. However, being for net neutrality and
being for less government control of the internet makes no sense.

------
fidotron
These noises are inevitable and will grow.

The root problem is the load of nonsense that was peddled about the net being
resilient to nuclear war etc. When really it's too centralized. The killer
transition that needs to occur is to move DNS from being authoritative to
being a matter of opinion. (Rather like having multiple got repos instead of a
central SVN server). This would solve a lot of problems, but prevent the US
from projecting a lot of soft power around.

~~~
psykovsky
You realize you kind of described Namecoin? The future is now?

~~~
fidotron
Yeah, I think namecoin is likely to be closer to the future, however, I still
think the whole system would be more robust if it acknowledged that, for
example, China and the US could run conflicting DNS systems and that this is
perfectly OK, largely because this way we'd be forced to accept the reality of
the situation instead of living in the silly illusion we have today.

The whole PKI setup needs to be rebooted as well, and I really can't believe
anyone that understands how that works considers it to be a good idea.

~~~
marcosdumay
> The whole PKI setup needs to be rebooted as well, and I really can't believe
> anyone that understands how that works considers it to be a good idea.

I still never met a PKI alternative that was a good idea. Of course, I didn't
look at all candidates, but one'd expect that if something was ready to
replace it, everybody would be talking about it.

------
mattmanser
Wonder what they'll do it the US just says no.

~~~
higherpurpose
They'll put more and harsher regulations on American companies until they say
yes. So I'm fine with whatever decision US makes, because I wouldn't mind if
US companies (and the US government by proxy) wouldn't have a monopoly on EU
users's data anymore.

~~~
davidnu
You want governments to decide market winners and losers?! the fact that US
companies are successful in Europe and Europeans are less so is partly due to
the fact that they don't suffer from the backwards economic views you're
currently displaying.

~~~
atmosx
> the fact that US companies are successful in Europe and Europeans are less
> so is partly due to the fact that they don't suffer from the backwards
> economic views you're currently displaying.

That's kinda harsh, there might be other reasons too[1].

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage)

~~~
davidnu2
You're grasping at straws, so is the EU with its recent deluge of
grandstanding gestures.

------
mcv
Neelie Kroes is pretty much the only notable politician I'd trust to get this
right. She's generally on the side of openness, transparency, competition,
etc. You might have heard of her before in the base of the EU vs. Microsoft at
the height of their monopoly.

~~~
Paradigma11
/agree
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neelie_Kroes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neelie_Kroes)

------
atmosx
I'd like to see a system based on the bitcoin protocol handling the TLD
(namecoin?): You can't block it, you have public access to the registration
data and with US, China, Russia and the EU involved, it's hard to achieve a
51%-attack.

~~~
yxhuvud
You mean like peercoin?

~~~
atmosx
[http://dot-bit.org/FAQ](http://dot-bit.org/FAQ)

------
anuraj
The biggest threat to internet is from governments. Time to think of an
independent, autonomous internet that is dynamically formed and cannot be
controlled or monitored by design

~~~
morkbot
...and in that new, great Internet you will get the natural monopolies, same
as we have them today (Google, Facebook), only this time they won't be under
supervision of any democratic government.

------
veganarchocap
And here marks the end of what the Internet was supposed to be.

~~~
jpadkins
and then a new internet will rise up for the free minds. The old one will
become a government controlled 'walled garden' mirroring meatspace.

------
walshemj
What could possibly go wrong that cookie laws was so successful:-)

------
akie
That's really awesome, and I hope it succeeds.

------
davidnu
No governments please! Internet governance is fine as is. European opportunism
and grandstanding is of no use to anyone.

------
cwaniak
News Ycombinator regular Marxist folk is very excited to hear about internet
regulation!

