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It's important to realise that without governance the internet could not function.

avoid two different web sites having the same name

International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann)

governance of the internet is effectively done by multiple stakeholders

WGIG would report on a solution acceptable to all but would move governance to an international body.

US government ultimately "controls" the internet

The internet overseers

UN summit

US refused to relinquish control of the Root Zone file, which is basically the key to governing the internet.

formed the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG).

in 2003 in Geneva

Russians

International Telecommunications Union (ITU), another UN agency, to be given responsibility for internet governanc

A great advantage of the current governance structure is that it supports rapid developments, provided that the US Department of Commerce remains at arm's length

internet governance needs to help the internet evolve rather than dictate how it must develop.

once a request has been deemed valid, Google will notify users when possible.

Google says, "When we receive such a request, our team reviews the request to make sure it satisfies legal requirements and Google's policies.

Google will not provide a user's search-query information or the contents of a user's account (email content, pictures, documents, etc.) without a warrant.

Google has advocated for updating ECPA, "so the same protections that apply to your personal documents that you keep in your home also apply to your email and online documents."

If Google can establish clear practices now that somehow balance the competing needs of law-enforcement agencies and private users, that effort will pay off

No-one imagined that ISPs would one day offer gigabytes of online storage free—as Google, Yahoo!, Hotmail and other e-mail providers do today. The assumption back then was that if someone had not bothered to download and delete online messages within six months, such messages could reasonably be considered to be abandoned—and therefore not in need of strict protection.

wholesale access to the internet, powerful mobile phones and ubiquitous social networking have dramatically increased the amount of private data kept online. In the process, traditional thinking about online security has been rendered obsolete. For instance, more and more people nowadays keep their e-mail messages on third-party servers elsewhere, rather than on their own hard-drives or mobile phones. Many put their personal details, contacts, photographs, locations, likes, dislikes and inner thoughts on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox and a host of other destinations. Bringing online privacy requirements into an age of cloud computing is only fit and proper, and long overdue.

the international telecoms treaty that emerged focused on how telephone traffic flows across borders, the rules governing the quality of service and the means operators could adopt to bill one another for facilitating international calls. As such, the regulations applied strictly to telecoms providers, the majority of which were state owned.

he goal of certain factions is to grant governments the authority to charge content providers like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter for allowing their data to flow over national borders. If enacted, such proposals would most certainly deter investment in network infrastructure, raise costs for consumers, and hinder online access for precisely those people the ITU claims it wants to help.

a proposal sponsored by the United States and Canada to restrict the debate in Dubai strictly t

o conventional telecoms has met with a modicum of success, despite stiff opposition from Russia plus some African and Middle-Eastern countries. Behind closed doors, the conference has agreed not to alter the ITU’s current definition of “telecommunications” and to leave the introductory text concerning the existing treaty’s scope intact.

The sticking point has been what kind of organisations the treaty should apply to. Here, one word can make a huge difference. In ITU jargon, the current treaty relates only to “recognised operating agencies”—in other words, conventional telecoms operators. The ITU wants to change that to simply “operating agencies”. Were that to happen, not only would Google, Facebook and other website operators fall under the ITU’s jurisdiction, but so too would all government and business networks. It seems the stakes really are as high as the ITU’s critics have long maintained

Wikipedia has encountered particular difficulties with censorship in the past in China. The Chinese government periodically blocked the site between 2004 and 2008, when restrictions were lifted to coincide with the Olympics.

What really excites Mr Wales is the idea of many people in the developing world using the internet for the first time.

"Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with."

This could have huge implications for governments which are unused to dealing with a well informed networked public. However, Mr Wales acknowledged one potential pitfall of all the extra users blogging and adding other material.

ATLANTIC

she traveled to Facebook headquarters to see how they dealt with so-called "third party" reports of about inappropriate content.

how long he might spend deciding if a page should stay up or come down.

they "optimize for half a second." Half a second!

Middle- and high-schoolers are all on Facebook and that means all their drama is on Facebook, too.

reports

Facebook's

come up with some remarkable tools for managing conflict on its site.

they claim to have ways of handling problems like this, which serves as a defense to the suggestion that perhaps a government agency should try to regulate them, especially around minors' use of the service.

It costs money

they'll catch most baldly inappropriate content if they give their reviewers half a second to look at each page.

it is no longer reasonable for the big players - the Googles, Facebooks, YouTubes and Twitters - to say: "Nothing to do with us, guv, we only provide the pipes. What goes through them, that's up to the folk who put it there."

To illustrate an example of information misuse, it's worth recounting the alarming experience of a work colleague at the hands of Facebook. Someone he did not know took his name and set up a Facebook page purporting to be his, along with a photo and several intimate details, some true, some false.

Citing "freedom of expression", which like motherhood and apple pie is impossible to attack, they will host their anonymous contributors' bullying, lies, smears, breathtaking invasions of privacy

An entirely new information world is rising in which each of us can be readers and editors, contributors and subscribers, and maybe even proprietors, at the same time.