The irony couldn't be more obvious. After staging a piece of political theater called the E-G8, which French President Nicolas Sarkozy used as a platform to champion the notion of much tougher government control over the Internet, the president today will welcome to the analog G8 meeting in Deauville, representatives from the interim governments of Tunisia and Egypt.
Without the Internet, and social media in particular, the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt would simply have never occurred.
Sarkozy's problem is that, like other political leaders, he doesn't like a medium over which the government does not have final authority. With the Internet's arrival, lofty concepts such as freedom of speech and freedom of thought are actually gaining traction. Prior to this, freedom of speech was meaningful only to those who powerful people who could use the printing presses and broadcast media.
Earlier this week in the UK, for example, football star Ryan Giggs filed a lawsuit against Twitter and thousands of Twitter users who ignored a court-ordered injunction that prohibited the media from identifying the celebrities involved in an extramarital affair case in which Giggs is a central figure. The so-called super injunction is truly odious, and prohibits newspapers and other media from even saying the injunction exists. In the old model of centralized, one-to-many mass media, the hiding of inconvenient truths was easily achieved. No longer.
This alarms politicians such as Sarkozy. In his opening address at the E-G8, he told his audience of digital luminaries from around the world that, "The universe you represent is not a parallel universe. Nobody should forget that governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people in our democracies. To forget this is to risk democratic chaos and anarchy."
Sarkozy sounds like a music recording industry executive arguing that MP3s and file-sharing have already created chaos and anarchy in the music world. The music industry has responded to the democratization of music distribution with intransigence and lawsuits. They sought a legal solution to a business model disruption and are now paying the price. For his part, Sarkozy has enshrined in French law that anyone caught downloading copyright-protected music from the Internet without permission more than three times should have their Internet access cut off. I'm not the only one to view this approach as truly asinine. Last week the U.N.'s independent expert on freedom of speech, Frank La Rue, said that politicians promoting this response don't understand that access to the Internet has become a basic human right.
Given his views on the Internet and music, it is not surprising that most Internet-industry delegates at the E-G8 shivered when Sarkozy said that, "We need to hear your aspirations, your needs," but that "You need to hear our limits, our red lines."
During one of the E-G8 panel discussions, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt responded to Sarkozy's attitude by saying, "You want to tread lightly on regulating brand new, innovative industries... Clearly you need some level of regulation for the evil stuff. But I would be careful about overregulating the Internet."
"I cannot imagine any delegate in this conference [who] would want Internet growth to be significantly slowed by a government that slows it down because of some stupid rule that they put in place," he said.
Schmidt has the proper perspective. The appropriate debate is not between Sarkozy's oppressive approach as opposed to no regulation whatsoever. Obviously the rule of rule should prevail in cyberspace just as it does in the bricks-and-mortar world.
But the Internet is changing every institution in society. It enables new approaches to innovation, requiring new thinking about patents and copyright. It renders old institutions naked, requiring more transparency on the part of governments and corporations. It disrupts old models of learning and pedagogy demanding a change a relationship between students and teachers in the learning process. It offers new models of democracy based on a culture of public discourse, in turn compelling old style politicians to engage their citizens. It turns intellectual property into bits, that don't know the old rules that governed atoms of how to behave. It drops the transaction costs of dissent, subjecting dictators and tyrants to the power of mass participation. It breaks down national boundaries and requiring a rethinking of how peoples everywhere can cooperate to solve global problems. And for the first time in history children are an authority on the most important innovation changing every institution in society.
Predictably, old style political leaders comfortable with the industrial age are dazed and confused, and many feel threatened. A new communications medium is causing disruption, dislocation and uncertainty. And leaders of old paradigms with vested interests fear what they do not understand, and react with coolness or even hostility. Rather than innovating and opening up they often hunker down, trying to strengthen old outdated rules and approaches.
Let's hope the representatives from Tunisia and Egypt talk sense into Sarkozy and the other leaders when they meet today. Yes, the Internet should be on the G8 agenda, but not from the perspective that this technology poses some menace to the world's democracies. Rather, G8 leaders should discuss how to champion and promote the growth of the Internet within their own countries and around the world.
Rather than discussing the constraints that should be put on Internet users in democratic countries, they should focus their energies on how to unconstrain users in non-democracies such as China.
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Sarkozy's stance against a free internet, as well as his positions in other domains, is all about increasing the power of the executive and removing checks and balances.
Revealing comment from frog-one (not being racist, just Sarkozy reminds me of the villain in the French connection), The people themselves, of course are not "legitimate" when they express their will, it must be done through the medium of government millionairedom.
When will he be dismantling the news channels and newspapers, one wonders?
I look forward to Seeing Mister Sarkozy
It was one of our founders who said that true democracy is impossible without an informed public.
All hail the Bankers. They push the levers that fund the State.
All hail the Politicians. Their laws legitimize the Bankers..
Where do the people fit in in this scheme of things?
Tick, tick, tick, ...........
Time's up: We are the SERFS!!!!
Even after the WikiLeaks saga you would still cling to the notion of "free speech". Now, since Guantanamo and the Patriot Act, can anyone truly define what are "inalienable rights"...because the US Supreme Court can't. The innocent and the guilty may be denied justice at the 'discretion' of the state.
Many things will have to be redefined in the coming years; no longer are democracy and freedom synonymous. The capitalists and the communists have both shown themselves to be extremists in prosecution of their ideologies.
The internet has expanded freedom, and enhanced it in such a way as to connect people and lighting the spark of freedom throughout the world...so is there any wonder that the instrument should be percieved suspiciously by both sides.
Oh...and grow up!
Right now in HuffPo we have discussions in threads that are on the order (or maybe better than) the discussions going on in budget talks in Congress and in the administration.
While Government speaks of "integration" of social media, the ultimate integration is further and more detailed control over the processes by individuals participating in electronic fora.
I propose criminal penalties. Obviously, they can't lock all these people up, but they can give them a criminal record which would show up whenever they apply for a job or credit. That would provide, IMO, a strong incentive to stop.
http://www.software4students.co.uk/Can_You_Protest_Against_Job_Cuts_While_Downloading_Illegally-blog.aspx
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/rhiannon-harries-the-next-generation-will-end-up-paying-for-our-freebie-culture-1771502.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/07/no_defence_for_stealing_music.html
"UPDATE: A few people have questioned my use of the word stealing. Arguing that it is copyright infringement and not stealing. There may be a point here but to my mind this is semantics. It's a bit like breaking into a car, driving it around and then abandoning it. I believe it's called Taking Without Consent in legal parlance. Stealing to everybody else."
http://www.rockaaa.com/news/8-million-illegal-downloaders-in-uk-1571
http://wwwÂ.brandinteÂlligence.cÂom/live/arÂticles/manÂ_convictedÂ_in_onlineÂ_copyrightÂ_infringemÂent_cas.asÂp
Providers like Google and telecoms companies want there to be zero penalties for copyright infringemeÂnt, because their business models rely on the benefits (traffic, subscriberÂs, advertisinÂg). There have been hundreds of civil cases against ISPs - some successful - in the US and elsewhere. Even when successfulÂly prosecutedÂ, operators use national shield laws (i.e. PirateBay) and "freedom of speech" as a defence, and they have the resources to drag cases out in the courts. They have done their risk/benefÂit analyses and they make more money from turning a blind eye to rampant copyright infringemeÂnt than they pay out in settlementÂs and legal fees.
The crux of the problem is that internet and telecoms providers do nothing to enforce their own terms of service when it comes to the distributiÂon of copyrighteÂd content. If they were genuinely self-policÂing, then IP owners and the countries to whom they contribute to in the form of jobs, tax revenues and culture, would not need to resort to desparate measures.
For instance - take a photo of the Eifel tower at night and put it up on your blog - chances are you will get a take-down notice or request for money from agents of the tower itself as the nighttime lighting setup is COPYRIGHTED.
Likewise with so much of public life - which woud be impossible if copyright trolls had their way. Imagine if Sir Issac Newton had copyrighted his laws of motion, or if Einsteins relatives insisted on collecting from every GPS owner for the mathematics of general relativity which keep their devices accurate?
Whats needed is a clear, fair and reasonable approach to IP that takes into account the public good. People dont generate IP in a vacuum, it is almost always iteration on previous ideas and concepts.
What an ironic statement. If governments are the will of the people, why do governments always want to take freedom and power away from its people? When Obama renewed the Patriot Act, he was taking freedoms given to the people of the United States by our constitution, which puts him in the same league as W
People like you think everybody should be able to download whatever they want to watch and listen to for free, so who is going to invest in making music or movies? You?
Go on, then, invest a few million of your own money in some advances to songwriters and musicians, invest a few million more in hiring engineers and producers and studio time, in mixing and masterig, then digitalize it, catalogue it, put it on the web and watch while a billion people download it without paying you a penny. Oh, wait - you expect the songwriters and musicians and producers and engineers and studios and everybody else who put their blood, sweat, tears, talent and time into this to do it for FREE?
So then, when nobody who makes the music or the audiovisual content that people actually want to listen to or watch, what are YOU going to listen to or watch? Chinese music and Russian television?
Get real...
"(exaggerated figures regarding the cost of recording music, followed my exaggerated statistics regarding the potential audience of pirates)"
Let's pretend that a billion people worldwide are downloading anything -- statistically speaking, the only way that would happen is if the thing were so over-marketed that roughly one trillion people had already paid to see it. That's where your argument falls apart; piracy has been repeatedly proven to have little to no impact on the bottom line.
Beyond that, though, piracy is a smokescreen here. Even if piracy were as valid a concern as you pretend it is, it doesn't make it a good idea for any federal government to have unilateral power to block access to web domains.