Policy

We develop laws to police our citizens in our free country. Airlines follow procedures and rules when soaring through open skies and Captains and their crews on ships also follow procedures and rules when navigating the open waters. It only seems natural for some to try to develop rules and procedures for maintaining the vast reaches of the Internet. When it comes to controlling an entity such as the Internet, you have to start by implementing agreeable policy. This however is not enough for total control. I’m going to cover the areas where policy plays a part at the government level, the ISP level as well as the user level.

policy alone cannot control something as vast, vibrant and significant as the Internet.

The internet is such a valuable resource that the government has established agencies to Keep Internet Standards open. These agencies are the NTIA (Nation Telecommunications and Information Administration), NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), and the ITA (International Trade Administration). These agencies were created to identify policy that keeps the Internet open to all that can improve on its importance, encourage innovation, and help establish security standards that do not stifle its growth.

Policy is not only exercised by government agencies, but also by high level companies involved with providing Internet services. These companies are the literal backbone of the Internet. They maintain data that make it easy for us to ask, “How do I get to yahoo.com.” In order to provide there services, these companies have policy in place. This policy involves a trust system. For this to work correctly this policy must be observed. If this isn’t observed, it could result in an episode similar to what happened when Pakistan attempted to block local access to YouTube.

The Internet is only as valuable as its reach. Countries across the globe use the Internet to make our connections seem closer. This new interconnectivity has to be governed. Foreign countries implement policy to attempt to control access for its citizens. This policy can be very open or in cases such as Iran, Pakistan and China, very restrictive.

These restrictive polices can not control certain services on the Internet from seeping through the defenses. For example, during the Egyptian revolution in 2011, Catharine Smith wrote an article on huffingtonpost.com where she stated that an activist that was arrested during the revolution, who happened to be a marketing manager for Google, told CNN in an interview that Facebook and the Internet were responsible for the uprising in Egypt.

Tonight, we’ve looked at the a brief history of the Internet, the methods used to impose some control by way of hardware, government agencies, and user control. These methods may cause a disruption, but they can’t stop forward progress. Even government supported policies fail to prohibit the innovation exhibited on the Internet. We have to be careful with our policy decisions because they could set a dangerous precedence.