Monday 20 September 2010

meme

As thousands of Germans are choosing to opt out of Google’s roving eye, though it does not seem as dystopic as some mad, fascist Orwellian world-view, there are some concomitant actions in Germany and the European Union that are taking a circumspect and long view at the virtual frontier.
Ahead of a summit on data protection and consumer rights, politicians are calling for means, no self-regulated and left to the industry, to cover one’s internet tracks, especially those footprints left unintentionally and exploited by marketers or in digital photographs that record one’s location and that has a persistence of memory on the web. Surely, such government safeguards cannot satisfy everyone, and some argue that governmental efforts would be better spent on protecting consumers from disreputable internet service providers and other underwriters of fraud, but it is an excellent example of government predicting and adapting to technology, rather than reacting to it within an insufficient legal framework. Furthermore, the crowning achievement, at least in prospective circulation, comes from a working group in Strasbourg in the form of an “internet treaty,” similar to the line in the sand drawn with international cooperation over the ownership of the Antarctic or outer space.

This proposal aims to keep the internet globally open and neutral, curbing government influence over content or allowing deals that would make the internet two-tiered, given speed and preference to paid, premium content. This seems especially important as US, Canadian and other governments seek to assert regulatory control, censor and spoon-feed back to the world public what it already has created, sometimes out of desperation to cut deals in favour of big business or to realize and retain more tax revenues from internet activities.