Governance of the Internet

Much controversy has arisen over internet governance and how uncontrolled it is. The fact that the internet has no physical location makes it hard to govern what is shared online.  Information can be shared from computers all around the world almost instantly, that is the great thing about the internet, and it brings the world together. But if any information can be shared, then good as well as bad information can be distributed. For example, personal information about anyone can fall into the wrong hands because there is no governance and who is there to control the consequences of your personal information being exploited? The answer right now is no one.

                Because there is no physical location for the internet or cyberspace, territorial based governance and control is not applicable with internet cases. In an article by David Post he states, “Cyberspace has no territorially-based boundaries, because the cost and speed of message transmission on the Net is almost entirely independent of physical location: Messages can be transmitted from any physical location to any other location without degradation, decay, or substantial delay, and without any physical cues or barriers that might otherwise keep certain geographically remote places and people separate from one another”. Post is saying that there is no physical address for these computers that are transmitting information across the internet, just IP addresses. This is the problem with controlling what these computers share. Even if you are to find the physical location of the IP address, by the time you get there the person using the computer could have moved anywhere, still online though carrying on with their business. Without being able to completely control and dictate what is shared on the internet governance over it becomes futile.

                One country that has been pretty successful in governing their internet is China. The Chinese government has successfully blocked citizens from numerous user generated websites, according to ABC reporter Emily MacDonald, “When you try to access Facebook in China, an error message appears saying “Network Timeout.” This means that Chinese residents are without Youtube, Twitter, and other sites where content is predominantly user generated”. Even though there are Chinese equivalents to these websites the Chinese have successfully blocked the access in order to stop international criticism. Sites in China such as Google that have not been blocked are still closely monitored by the government. When you search for something via Google that has to with for example the riots in Urumqi, Xinjiang, which is bad publicity for China, the search engine will abruptly stop working for a while. This is all in effort to censor negative Chinese media, and it works.

                The way China deals with their internet would not work for every country in the world though. In the United States this oppression would be considered against our constitutional rights. In many other countries the effort to block international criticism is not nearly as important as it is in China. Though, the issue of governance of cyberspace and the internet remains an issue for everyone. There are so many possibilities with the use of cyberspace and computers, if it is not regulated somehow vital information could fall into the wrong hands. If something like that would happen a so called “fire sale” (as seen in the movie Live Free or Die Hard) could be possible and would be able to destroy the world as we know it today. A “Fire Sale” is an assault against the government, transportation, and economy by computer hackers. This could put the world into chaos in a very short period of time; this is why the internet needs a better governance system and laws before it is too late.