Internet Governance

Freedom of Expression Part 3: Child Pornography, Manga, Anime, Obscene Publication

At the 44th Session of the Human Rights Council, we heard how 1 billion children in 2019 who were subjected to various forms of violence and the need for more action to protect children according to the Special Rapporteur. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child released Guidelines on the implementation of the international treaty that bans child pornography, proposing to expand its interpretation to include bans on drawings and stories that sexually depict minors. more

Freedom of Expression Part 2: Blocking, Filtering and Removing Online Content

The Internet is a catalyst for what has revolutionised and transformed human societies in giving extraordinary access to information that has catapulted development and economic growth. It also comes with threats of exploitation by those who wish to do harm. In Part 1 of these series, we looked at how Twitter banned Graham Linehan for his tweet where we saw that to an extent, it was justifiable under Californian law but that a Judge in the Fiji courts would disagree with. more

ICANN Registrar Stakeholder Group Leadership Handover

The ICANN Registrar Stakeholder Group (RrSG) is one of several stakeholder groups within the ICANN community and is the representative body of ICANN accredited domain name registrars. It is a diverse and active group that works to ensure the interests of registrars and their customers are effectively advanced. The leadership team (ExCom) consists of five officers who manage the Registrar Stakeholder Group. more

Trump Admin Ramping Up Attacks on GDPR – Says It Helps Cybercrime, Threatens Public Health

While the EU is boasting about the success of its flagship privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the U.S. administration is ramping up attacks on the system, saying it provides cover to cybercriminals and threatens public health. more

Meta 2020: Talking Internet on the Internet

As with other meetings and conferences, the IGF-USA decided to move our annual event to a virtual format held on 22-23 July. We will discuss important matters of the Internet, using the Internet from our secure Internet access points. This format allows us to continue critical dialogue safe from viruses, murder hornets and whatever else is thrown at us this year. more

Building a New Era of Trust on the Internet

Since Tim Berners-Lee first introduced us to the world wide web, we have seen several major phases of its growth. From the early years -- where researchers and open Internet pioneers led the way; to the dot-com boom; to the era of social media domination; the web has come a long way. While the pandemic circling the globe has undermined many critical systems and institutions of our society, I believe it also has the potential to strengthen is the resolve of the Internet community... more

Once Again, Why Internet Voting Doesn’t Work

An acquaintance said, "We trust our electronic systems to transfer millions of dollars of value; I suspect we will eventually develop schemes we will trust to record and count votes." Unfortunately, this is one of the chronic fallacies that make voting security experts tear their remaining hair out. The security models are entirely different, so what banks do is completely irrelevant to voting. more

Privacy in the Age of COVID-19

The Washington Post reports that a recent poll conducted shows that 3 out of 5 Americans are unable or unwilling to use an infection-alerting app developed by Google and Apple. About 1 in 6 adults can't use the app because they don't own a smartphone -- with the lowest ownership levels for those 65 and older. People with smartphones evenly split between those willing versus unwilling to use such an app. more

Unintended Benefits of Trump’s Twitter Tantrum

Four years ago, progressive intergovernmental organizations like the European Union became increasingly concerned about the proliferation of hate speech on social media. They adopted legal mechanisms for removing Twitter accounts like Donald Trump's. The provisions were directed at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In June of 2016, a "deconstruction" of these mechanisms was presented to one of the principal global industry standards bodies with a proposal to develop new protocols to rapidly remove such accounts. more

CircleID Launches the First in a Series of Community Dialogues on COVID-19 and the Internet

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the rapid migration of the world's workforce and consumer services to virtual spaces, has amplified the Internet governance and policy issues including infrastructure, access, exponential instances of fraud and abuse, global cooperation and data privacy, to name but a few. The need for practical, scalable and efficient solutions has risen dramatically. more

International Pandemic Contact Tracing Standards Group Formed

The formation of an international pandemic contact tracing standards group was announced yesterday. Designated E4P, it is being established as an open public-private initiative under ETSI to "develop a framework and consistent set of specifications for proximity tracing systems, to enable the development of applications and platforms, and to facilitate international interoperability" that also provide for privacy protection. more

Internet Governance and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Part 5: Article 15-17

Internet Governance, like all governance, needs to be founded in guiding principles from which all policy making is derived. There are no more fundamental principles to guide our policy making than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (UDHR). This article as Part 5 of the series of articles (published in installments), and we are revisiting Article 15 to look at empowered Digital Citizenship and Internet Governance, to move on to the rights to a family and property more

The Price of Lack of Clarity

As anyone reading this blog, assuredly knows, the world is in the grip of a deadly pandemic. One way to contain it is contact-tracing: finding those who have been near infected people and getting them to self-quarantine. Some experts think that because of how rapidly newly infected individuals themselves become contagious, we need some sort of automated scheme. That is, traditional contact tracing is labor-intensive and time-consuming - a time we don't have. more

Your Data or Your Life? Towards the Acceptance of Digital Technologies and Data in Medicine

There is currently a heated discussion going on in Europe, and particularly here in Germany, about the use of COVID-19 digital tracing apps, a discussion that shows us how much the Internet has become a matter of life and death. The uses for such apps are undeniable, but the idea of deployment still meets with popular resistance. Sensitized by countless leaks and hacks, and chafing under restrictions in their freedom of movement, people are concerned that even the last zones of privacy are to be monitored, and that the personal data collected could be misused. more

Cross-Pollination in Cyberspace and the Internet Governance “Spaghetti-Ball”

In mid-May 2020, UN-Secretary General Antonio Guterres will present a "Roadmap for Digital Cooperation". This will be another milestone in the discussion on the future of cyberspace, pushed further forward by the UN High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation (HLP), co-chaired by Jack Ma (AliBaba) und Melinda Gates (Microsoft Foundation) The HLP Final Report presented five groups of recommendations. Discussion started during the 14th IGF in Berlin... more