Who controls the internet?
My regular Friday column in Spain’s leading business daily Expansión this week (published below), the last until after the summer break, is titled “Information and control”. It charts reactions over the last couple of months to Edward Snowden’s revelations and attempts to gauge the consequences of our new knowledge about the activities of the US National Security Agency.
What are we actually talking about here? In all probability about the most important struggle in history for the general public’s right to know what is being done in our name. We are living through a moment when a management system based on sovereignty has been shown to be incompatible with the ambitions of a series of countries who believe that they have the right to control the entire world’s flow of information, and with the concomitant outcomes: the US government’s demand that US companies unconditionally share information about citizens from other countries has prompted Germany to urge the European Union to defend its inhabitants’ right to privacy, and even to call for the possible suspension of the Safe Harbor agreement, a cornerstone of trade relations. Can we imagine a scenario in which US companies would be banned from selling their products and services in Europe because their government forces them to break EU privacy law and to de facto violate the privacy of its citizens? The latter is happening right now, and Germany wants to talk about it.
The reality here is that for all the diplomatic language, the Safe Harbor treaty is completely incompatible with the Patriot Act that the United States believes will defend itself against its real and imagined enemies around the world, a law that by its very nature contains a significant, unilaterally decided supranational component.
From now on we should see all government involvement with the web (for example British Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent anti-child pornography initiative) as an excuse for monitoring the internet. When PayPal, Visa, or Mastercard say that they will not process payments to virtual private networks (VPN) such as iPredator, all they are doing is helping our governments control the internet. These are all moves in complex game in which freedom of information and control of the internet are at stake. That’s our information; your information.
Information and Control
The control of information flows has been, for a great many years, one of the fundamental features of the management of human societies. The ruling class saw access to information as a way of deciding the fate of the rest of society, thanks to a kind of sensorial expansion, the aspiration to be the Horus of the Ancient Egyptians, the Pharaoh who possessed the all-seeing eye. Control information and you control the world.
Technology has changed everything: before, it was necessary to piece together fragments to build up a picture of somebody; but now it is possible to access everything an individual does. This isn’t just about the internet, there are more and more systems that locate us and reveal what we are doing: telephone conversations, vehicle license plates snapped by CCTV, a cellphone’s GPS, or the swipe of a credit card.
Access to information is the final frontier. Edward Snowden’s recent revelations are the most important in this regard that we have seen in recent years: proof that US companies provide their government with information about Europeans that is then systematically analyzed. This has led to suggestions that the Safe Harbor agreement be suspended: this cornerstone of trade relations is clearly not compatible with the US Patriot Act.
Terrorism, child pornography, and copyright violations are simply excuses. We are not talking here about protecting people, but about who controls information flows. Behind the diplomacy, there is fierce fight underway for control of information. Global information, products and services offered by companies around the world, are supposedly subjected to local rules and norms: a balance that has been shown to be impossible.
