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Home , Internet governance, Louis Pouzin, Paul Baran, Vint Cerf

is our shared responsibility - by

This article is published as part of the series "Digital Minds for a New Europe" - check this link for a new article each day.

Below Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at and co-architect of the Internet, sets out his vision for how the internet should be governed.

2014 marks 40 years since and I published the design of TCP in the IEEE Transactions on Communications. TCP eventually was split into TCP/IP. Those two complementary protocols define how computers and computer networks communicate with one another in the Internet, and they therefore remain at the core of the Internet‘s architecture today.

Both TCP/IP and the ARPANET--the Internet’s immediate predecessor--owe their origins to research carried out for the US Department of Defense, but European contributions should not be overlooked. There were the contributions of and other Britons to the creation of the first electronic computers and to the foundations of computer science. Early research in the use of for computer communication was pursued in the US by Larry Roberts, then at Lincoln Laboratory and at MIT, by at RAND, by Donald W. Davies and this team at the UK National Physical Laboratory and by and his colleagues at IRIA [now INRIA] in France and Peter Kirstein and his team at University College London.

We should also recognise the work of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, two Belgians whose Mundaneum may well have been the most ambitious attempt to catalogue the world’s knowledge between the ancient library at Alexandria and the explosion of information assembled on the Internet when it gained significant usage. Of course the , one of the most popular aspects of the Internet, was itself a European creation, having been developed by Tim Berners-Lee while he was at CERN. Europe continues to have a fundamental share in both the future of the network and in securing the benefits it offers for itself and its citizens.

When we began developing what would become the Internet, we strongly felt that its adoption and use depended on making its design freely and openly available to any interested party. Over four decades, by working together with a variety of stakeholders, an informal coalition has built and maintained the governance systems and standards that support a free and open Internet. We are approaching an unprecedented moment in human history: an era in which all the knowledge we possess as a society and as a species could become accessible to everyone. Already, some three billion people are online, and I hope that in the decades to come we will see advances in access that will allow the whole of humanity to tap into, and contribute to, the content accessible through the Internet and the World Wide Web.

But we must not take these advances for granted. If our global society is to fully enjoy the opportunities offered by the Internet, we must continue to work towards two interconnected goals. On the one hand, we must keep the Internet free and open. On the other, we must ensure that it offers the security protections essential to maintaining the trust people place in the network and its applications.

Keeping the Internet free and open requires that we build and maintain a credible and robust multi-stakeholder model for the Internet’s global governance. The openness of the Internet has been the key to its growth and value. “Permissionless innovation” is the mainspring of the Internet’s economic power. By giving anyone connected the ability to communicate with anyone else on the network, the Internet has decreased barriers to entry and democratised access to opportunities once reserved for a privileged few: opportunities to speak and be heard, but also opportunities to turn a good idea into a business, to compete for customers, or to help build a better tomorrow.

As Internet policy discussions become more global in nature, stakeholders should continue to rely on the evolving structures that have allowed us to develop global policies that benefit all users. New institutions have been created as the need has arisen, demonstrating the adaptive power of the existing distributed and multi-stakeholder governance system. Intergovernmental treaties may be needed when state cooperation is required to improve the safety and security of the Internet, but we need to guard against the imposition of inflexible and brittle rules on a dynamic technological and social environment. The Internet governance model was designed to allow all stakeholders to participate on equal footing, but the current model needs to be improved if it is to ensure that all stakeholders, particularly those from developing economies, are able to meaningfully participate in the governance process. It is incumbent on participants within the current governance model to bring in new stakeholders whose voices may not be effectively heard in the current conversation.

We need a general framework for a global, multi-stakeholder Internet governance that preserves the free and open Internet and provides transnational protections for the rights of its users. The framework has to enable the evolution of the Internet and be able to adapt to it.

We need therefore an adaptive or layered approach to Internet Governance:

• The first level is enhanced communication, which proposes that “all stakeholders have the possibility to make their arguments to all other stakeholders.”

• The second level, enhanced coordination, would involve partners engaging more closely, “stakeholders seek to divide challenges into ‘thematic work packages’ which are assigned to the appropriate institution.

• The third level of cooperation, enhanced collaboration, would involve a set of stakeholders developing a joint solution and new practices (and possibly a new institution) supported by the cooperative group in question.

Among the mechanisms that should be reinforced and supported, I would single out the Internet Governance Forum, which has illuminated our understanding of the opportunities and challenges arising from the global growth of the Internet. It needs financial support and a properly staffed secretariat, and it deserves a permanent mandate from the . The digital future will be built, in part, on , rapidly dropping costs of Internet-connected equipment, and boundless development of new applications. The global Internet Governance Forum and its regional and national counterparts can, with an appropriate mandate, become an ever more helpful mechanism for highlighting issues, tracking their resolution in appropriate forums and driving forward new governance approaches when necessary. Preserving effective multi-stakeholder governance also requires that all Internet institutions embrace transparency, so that stakeholders can understand both the substance of decisions and the process by which they were made. Failing to do so effectively prevents new constituencies from participating in the decision-making process in a meaningful way. For example, when the US government ends its contractual relationship with ICANN, assuring ICANN’s adherence to principles that have made Internet infrastructure robust, global, and beneficial can be accomplished most directly by reinforcing and improving its existing accountability and transparency mechanisms.

In addition to keeping the Internet free and open, though, we need to preserve trust in the network if it is to continue to drive the digital economy. Cybercrime and other safety hazards are serious threats to both individual and national security, as well as the open Internet and the free flow of information online. As more people get access to the Internet, criminal activity will inevitably increase on the network. Governments and companies need to work together to ensure and harmonise the rule of law online to make the Internet safer and more secure.

To combat cybercrime, we need existing laws to be effectively enforced and new rules to carefully define and police crimes that only exist online and crimes that have counterparts in the offline world. Laws should be technology neutral so that crimes, definitions and penalties are not fragmented as technology evolves over time. For example, fraud online should not be prosecuted any differently than fraud by mail catalog, , SMS or other channels. That said, new technologies may create new categories of crimes, like computer intrusion. In those cases, it is important to take into account the nature of the action (for example, whether engineers are hacking with the intention to steal information or to discover and patch vulnerabilities) and the proportionality of any proposed penalties.

Since cybercrime has no physical boundaries, governments should ensure that they are able to offer each other expedient assistance in investigations through mechanisms that respect the laws of both countries and outline the solemn promise of governments to follow the law when seeking user information.

In the same vein, laws around the world that allow governments to access to private information need to be stronger, to protect Internet users’ privacy and security. The number of government requests Google receives for user data has increased by more than 70% since we launched our Transparency Report in 2010. While law enforcement agencies must be able to investigate and prosecute illegal activity to keep the public safe, it’s also important that laws protect citizens against overly broad requests for their personal information. Much of the public debate has been focused on the in recent years, but its powers and activities do not differ substantially from other western democracies, including those in the EU.

Looking back on the decades since the emergence of the Internet, I am gratified that it has become an increasingly universal space that people expect to remain open, free, and borderless. Unlike many other human creations, the Internet is both a technology and a socioeconomic space. The Internet is not like a traditional commons with limited resources because its capacity is capable of growing at the will of those who use it and the entities that invest in its expansion. As a shared environment, the decisions made on a sovereign basis in one geography may affect Internet users in other geographies—users in the rest of the world’s Internet ecosystem. The complex challenges of governing the internet as well as the aspiration to maximise the Internet’s utility for all humankind allows only one conclusion: the Internet and its governance is our shared responsibility.

Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, co-architect of the Internet

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