Dear representatives and citizens of the 8 biggest industrialized countries,
On the 24th and 25th of May 2011 the President of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, will ask you, representatives, to help him build a “sane Internet” for the “common good”. I ask you to strongly refuse this request and remind him of the basis of the “western world” : free speech, free beliefs, free movement.
It is odd, that, few months after two peacefull revolution in Tunisia and Egypt in which Internet has played a key role, someone dare to stand before us to ask for limitations of the Internet.
Internet has been around us for more than 30 years now, and it has changed our daily lifes, work, companies and countries in a major way. What we have seen in the last 10 years is the evolution of human civilization : we have seen citizens develop a better understanding of their own place in their lifes, country and world. The last 10 years has seen a tremendous increase in communication and creation between citizens. Music, movies, photos, texts, essays are now created at such a rate that we won’t be able to access and see all of it in a single life time. This must remind you of several historic examples : greeks philosophers debating in public spaces, european philosophers such as Diderot, Descartes brought new, democratic, humanist ideas, but also beings such as Jaures, and Hugo who brought greatness into politics in France.
We have to remember and understand this simple fact : they were not bound in any way, and in some cases they refused to be in order to bring what they brought.
I’m not saying that Internet is turning each one of us into Diderot or Hugo, what I am saying is for a new Diderot or Hugo to appear we need to make sure there is no limits to our freedom of speech, communication, creation.
Of course, preaching for such things, is, in a way, preaching for evolution, and maybe, revolution. Internet being a catalyst in many ways, what we are seing happening in and around us is an evolution. The ones who see this evolution coming might be afraid of it, examples in history are not rare about terrible bloody evolution of countries, or communities. Yet we are in the 21st century, we are not our forefathers : we are more educated than them, more connected than them, ence, let’s hope we are wiser than them.
I believe that what ever is coming, will come no matter what we think about it, and whatever we put in its path to stop it. Change has come to Tunisia and Egypt : we have seen the people of these countries rise and say “no more” pushing away the old governments and ways no matter what levees were put in place in the real world or on Internet. Everytime they found a way to overcome or go around those levees.
What the President of the French Republic is asking you to support is things that can prevent website like Wikileaks, or massive communication tools such as twitter or the email to operate freely without limits. What he is asking you is to support ways to filter and check the content of what’s going in and out of your computer.
This is not acceptable : we don’t want Big Brother to look over our shoulder, listen to our every move, and say “yeah” or “neh” about each.
Reasons such as pedophilia and terrorists will be raised, but such things exist on Internet because they exist in the physical world, the fight against them must be done there with the tools that the Law and Justice give us. Making such tools and filters on Internet will just create dangerous precedents that could be used for other reasons.
Child protection associations and agencies keep saying that such things as Loppsi (fr) will not fix the pedophilia problem on Internet, and that it will rather move it behind the smoke screen of encryption and make it harder to find and catch the big culprits.
Agencies such as the NSA are also saying that a move toward filters and “deep packet inspection”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection as already, and will, encourage the use of heavy encryption technologies among citizens, making it more difficult for their services to analyse and find suspects use of the Internet by terrorist groups.
Furthermore, the last 5 years in countries such as France, United Kingdom, Australia (and others) have proven the high cost and lack of result of laws intended to fight again “piracy” and pedophilia on Internet. Those same years have shown us repeatedly the fact that being brought and built by politics and economics these tools were not able to sustain real usage since they were not realistic or simply not made in accordance with how the network is made and working.
Reasons such as “network”, costs and limits will be raised also, for those we need to remind everyone that Internet was built bit by bit, and what is slowing it down and creating limits is the lack of investment by ISP and Telecom companies. Remember that a country such as France is deep down in the list of Internet infrastructure investments (http://www.ftthcouncil.eu). In the same way, limits or gold tickets for 1st class Internet will only split the network and create huge rifts and waves around. These borders will fail with time, be innefective quickly with rogue gateways being put in place, or accelerate change toward decentralized and citizen based architecture.
To conclude : we have seen, and are seeing the rise of a global community through the widest communication tool in human history, what this community of knowledge, communication and creation will bring we don’t know for sure, but we do know that trying to limit it will probably fail (in both implementation and effect), create heavy reactions among the citizens, and accelerate change. If it doesn’t fail it will bring a new dark era in history because few people decided to pull the plug on this universal encyclopedia and communication board because they didn’t want to take the risk to leave it wide open for anything to appear in it.
To open : this is no mere skirmish or child play. This is real, deep, huge, important time in this planet history. Internet has changed the way we communicate and exchange, by doing so it has empowered each citizen of the world : it has brought responsabilities and conscience of them (or it will). Remember that, in the 90s when Internet was starting to arrive massively into our lifes it was far different to what it is know. Our world was far different too. Remember how Internet’s openness was the reason and substrate for so many changes and innovations. Remember that Internet has been around for more than 30 years based on the work of engineers, not politics. Remember what the last 5 years have shown about politics trying to interfere with Internet. Remember that you have elected representatives that are accountable to you. Remember, stand up, talk and keep it open !
