An "Internet Bill of Rights" has been proposed at the inaugural meeting of the Internet Governance Forum. While I can see the rationality behind wanting to ensure some basic rights for Internet users, I just don't see what sort of impact a bill of rights is expected to have. And furthermore, introducing this under the auspices of "Internet governance" underlines how weird (in my opinion) the whole "Internet governance" thing has become.
If my memory serves me right, "Internet governance" became a prominent issue (i.e. if it was around before, not many people were aware of it) around the debate concerning the ICANN's management of top-level domains and a handful of other fairly obscure technical issues. Most of these issues remain unresolved. Meanwhile, the notion of "Internet governance" seems to have taken on the elasticity of a well chewed wad of bubble gum. All of a sudden "governance" is taken to refer to everything from freedom of speech to basic issues concerning access and multilingualism.
These certainly are real issues worthy of attention, but grouping them with the technical issues that "Internet governance" used to refer to is confusing. At least there are real forseeable ways to resolve the old "Internet governance" issues, i.e. management of top-level domains etc., but these new issues seem to require something of the Internet that just isn't there.
For example, let's say that we do draft an Internet Bill of Rights. It's not difficult to imagine what would be in it, basically the same stuff that's in the universal declaration of human rights. Maybe in slightly more techy language, or what? Then, who is going to monitor and/or enforce the protection of those rights? And how?
The thing is that, as yet, Internet societies (that's another problem, there's not just one) are not separate from terrestrial societies. Yes, individuals may be able to distance themselves to some extent from their terrestrial existence by going on the Internet. But, at the end of the day, they remain tethered to their terrestrial roots and are ultimately subject to the rules and regulations set by the relevant territorial authorities. If those authorities are not willing to acknowledge the political supremacy of an "Internet governance" body, an Internet Bill of Rights is likely to be little more than a noteworthy statement on a piece of paper (or a webpage).
Posted by thay0012 at November 1, 2006 04:01 PM | TrackBackMy name is George Felix and I have a website, www.InKarpathos.com. I would like to have some information concerning the “The Internet Bill of Rights”.
My website is housed in Florida, USA and I am being sued in Greece, from a mayor of a small island. He is asking 1,000,000 Euros in compensation from me and my wife; do to some criticisms that were posted by people from the New York – New Jersey area.
The material was not vulgar in any way nor did it use any foul language what’s so ever. It was in the form of traditional poetry which made fun of some of his practices. This was done two months prior an election.
The real reason that he is suing me, is for all the political and economical scandals that I had personally posted on the site, with my documentation. He is trying to close the site down, so I will not reveal any more of his scandals.
I personally believe that the site is protected under the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, since it is housed in the USA and the particular posts were made from the USA.
The California Supreme Court had a similar case three months ago and ruled that the owner of a site can’t be held accountable for posts of Third persons.
Whatever help you can provide me would be appreciated.
Sincerely Your
George Felix
Having lived in Greece for several years I know that I wouldn't want to get tangled up with their legal system.
There's not much that I, or anyone, can do concerning the Internet Bill of Rights simply because there isn't one. It's only been proposed and the difficulties surrounding the whole issue are such that it's unlikely that anything meaningful will come out of these discussions in the near future.
I'm not a legal person and I cannot guarantee the validity of any claims I may make about such stuff, but it sounds like your problem is more a question of whether your web site falls under Greek jurisdiction or not. There have been cases like this all over the world in the past few years. I think that in the majority of cases the outcome has been that jurisdiction is in the country where the web is hosted. I'm not a legal person but I think that in the end it all comes down to precedence (in democratic countries at least). I would be very surprised if there are no known cases similar to this in Greece already. I know that here in Iceland there have been many.
Meanwhile, if you're in the US, you might want to take a look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's web, specifically http://www.eff.org/Censorship/
Tryggvi
Posted by: Tryggvi Thayer at February 26, 2007 03:46 AM