IoT Highlights Need for More Inclusive Internet Governance Debate, Say IGF Stakeholders
The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) should be a catalyst for involving the broader global community in the Internet governance debate, said stakeholders at an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) session Thursday (http://bit.ly/1nh17YM). The Istanbul event was webcast. The spread of IoT is bringing the Internet into every conceivable platform, and Internet users need to be aware of potential issues beforehand, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade said. U.S. government and European Commission (EC) officials affirmed their support of IGF and the multistakeholder model. A separate Thursday session (http://bit.ly/1nh17YM) on the European Court of Justice’s right to be forgotten ruling raised some concerns from NetChoice Executive Director Steve DelBianco.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
IoT makes the challenge of spreading a working knowledge of Internet governance to other communities “critical,” Chehade said. IoT will “imbue” the Internet in “every aspect” of society, and if all communities, whether political, economic or cultural, aren’t engaged with Internet governance, “we'll have a problem,” he said. Chehade said industry will be “very important” in expanding Internet governance expertise to unfamiliar parties. A “permissionless” method of Internet governance, where everyone is free to participate in Internet governance debates, is another challenge facing IGF stakeholders, he said. IPv6 capability will need to be appropriately expanded to accommodate IoT, said Vint Cerf, Google chief Internet evangelist.
The NETmundial Internet governance conference and the transition of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority marked a “pivotal and vital point” in the Internet governance “movement,” said Daniel Sepulveda, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs. NETmundial and the transition validate the “promise” that stakeholders can “unite on equal footing in order to preserve and progress the promise of the Internet,” he said. To keep the Internet open, one shouldn’t take the multistakeholder model for “granted,” said Rafal Trzaskowski, Poland’s minister of digitization and administration. “The multistakeholder approach can never be guaranteed,” he said. Intergovernmental options are “worse.” A critical element of Internet governance is determining how it should “feed in” to the political process, without having the “big guys” or governments co-opting the debate, said Trzaskowski.
The IGF has the EC’s full support and needs to continue to focus on an open Internet as a human rights issue, said EC Vice President Neelie Kroes. The multistakeholder model should include government input, as well as private sector leadership, she said. There needs to be investment across regional, national and global IGFs, said Joseph Alhadeff, Oracle vice president-global public policy.
The statement by Sophie Kwasny, the Council of Europe’s data protection head, that the right to be forgotten ruling should be “adopted everywhere” was worrisome, said NetChoice’s DelBianco by email. He called the ruling, which said search engine companies were responsible for third-party links appearing in search results, a “data suppression regime.” “European courts and lawmakers haven’t yet worked out how to balance the privacy rights with the equally important right to access information,” he said. A European Parliament staff member “criticized Google for talking about the suppression requests they've received,” but “our industry needs to inform Europe’s citizens about the implications of hiding negative news and reviews from search results,” DelBianco said.