Internet Governance, Internet Freedom and Economic Freedom

Speakers: Laura DeNardis John Knubley Nii Quaynor John Ibbitson

Series: Human After All: Innovation | Disruption | Society

April 10, 2014

Internet Governance, Internet Freedom and Economic Freedom

Is Internet governance best left to multi-stakeholder private sector organizations with a formal and regular process for input from governments? Or is this best given over to some international body of nation states? The argument against increasing public oversight is that governments will tend toward conflicting regulation, ‡filtering, and censorship, whereas private sector technical innovation and business development is what has led to the Internet freedom of expression and online commerce that most of the developed world enjoys today. At the same time, the people whose job it is to report the news responsibly are getting kicked out of work, downsized, reduced to half time, having their pay slashed, by this bloodsucking monster squid of the Internet. All blogs need information. But where is the information coming from? Who is paying for the information? How is one able to distinguish meaningful information from sheer falsehood? How absolute is the freedom offered by the Internet?

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